I am currently reading the book "Silicon Germany" by Christoph Keese. One "aha experience" follows the other. A little further on in the book, Keese makes the following point: if Germans invested in start-ups instead of the lottery, there would not only be more winners, but the economy would also be helped. He puts it this way:
A comparison to show how much money would be available if people were really serious about startup funding:
Germans spend around 7 billion euros a year on the lottery - even though the returns are extremely poor. The state retains around half of the stakes - from the players' point of view, this half represents a total loss. The lottery makes about 100 people a year millionaires. That sounds a lot, but it's not much. The Facebook IPO alone produced around 1000 millionaires, Israel's 70 or so high-tech IPOs in 2015 each saw around a dozen investors become millionaires, hundreds of people in total!
If Germans stopped playing the lottery tomorrow and put the 7 billion they saved into startups, they'd get many times as much out of it.Israel's investors get around 1.5 times as much out of startups each year as they put in. Germany could get 10 billion a year in returns from 7 billion with a similar success rate. Instead, however, the Germans are fobbed off with around 3.5 billion from the state lottery.
Not only that, most of us do even worse and just take our money to bank. We are very concerned with security and believe we have it with the banks. No mistake is greater.
