41–50 of 80 posts
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Sell the stock of its competitors short.
What happens when the entire market segment balloons? APPL might beat out MSFT, but if everyone is more profitable, your short failed.
PG also made this statement in May 2009 (iPad released April 2010): What would be your dream setup? I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. I don't know why Apple won't make something in between the Air and an iPhone... Source: http://paul.graham.usesthis.com
That's what he looks like? I don't know why I imagined PG to look a lot more like a bearded Unix-type ...?
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are humanized forms of indentured servitude legal anymore? for example, could you pay to send someone to the bignerdranch bootcamp to learn iphone dev, but then have some way of mitigating the risk that they don't then go ahead and auction their new skills, acquired at your expense, on the market?
Aren't these called non-competes?
Bad reasoning: Remember the hits, forget the misses.
It's quite easy to detract from/criticize something, but to learn something from it is everything.
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Leverage and buy stock. The only thing that stops you from increasing the size of your bet is the risk of the downside. To some point, this is manageable, but after that point, it becomes pure insanity. YMMV. Shorting the competitors because you think a company is going to do very well is actually a bad idea -- it's entirely possible that Microsoft would have been able to open another very profitable market.
Buy Out of the money call options. lots of leverage for small premiums.
In hindsight if you do enough searching you can always find people who predicted, or appeared to predict, future events.
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_...
(Which isn't phrased as a prediction, but is basically equivalent in that it can only be proven or disproven by future events.)
The funny thing is that the post sounds completely banal today, but at the time there were several hundred comments about how wrong I was and all sorts of industry insiders calling me dumb.
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Something to that effect had been around for a while by then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX Apple has a wealth of fascinating abandoned projects.
When they fail, they fail with style. I'd love to have an A/UX box. Edit: didn't think of it this way when writing the above, but a unix kernel with an actual, Apple designed, Mac GUI on top was actually a failure... Go figure.
Bad reasoning: Remember the hits, forget the misses.
The hits are impressive nonetheless. I think that there is a lesson to take away over here; perhaps pg is good at this because he has the combination of common sense, practical knowledge and experience? It's quite easy to detract from/criticize something, but to learn something from it is everything.