It’s a winner-takes-all economy. More and more labor markets act as lotteries, where a couple of “superstar” workers make extremely outsized returns relative to their peers — who may well have started from the exact same starting line.

In the tech world, two JavaScript engineers can potentially earn billions of dollars in differential compensation by simply choosing different startups to join, and that massive income spectrum extends to professionals from law to finance to research careers to even my friends in journalism.

For Charlie Olson and Eric Lax, that dynamic didn’t make intuitive sense. “We own 100% of our own future. And, you know, once you choose a career, you are locked in to the risk-reward risk preference of that career,” Olson said. Hit the lottery and your earnings skyrocket. For the majority of others though, there is no safety net — no insurance policy — that protects you despite pushing your hardest in the race to superstardom.