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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most criminals get caught because they can’t stop getting bigger. Same with most diseases
After all, it worked once, why would it not work again...?
I feel a lot of the folks here are focusing on the wrong parts here. The $200M loss was a cheap way of getting user attention, but hey it worked! The core of what he was trying to convey was the sooner you get to understand real user / customer problems the better off you'll be in life as an entrepreneur. He stayed away from this in his early days as he opted for stability and that he seems to regret.
Many Hacker News submissions get flagged to death for such tactics alone.
Not buying Apple Stock in 1999 cost me $200M too. Not to mention what not picking those winning lottery numbers cost me...
Did you get offered 1% of Apple? I mean, getting offered equity at the start of a thing is what I was trying to talk about.
If Apple had gone bust there would have been nothing to write about. By the same measure I can review my life and take every decision I took with hindsight and re-calculate what my net worth would be if I had taken the other fork, I'm pretty sure I could come up with a few hundred million as well but that doesn't matter, you only get one life.
Next time you have to make a decision like that: take the other fork in the road, and likely you'll still end up frustrated because of the road not taken.
Life is a series of 'and' ports, if you miss one it will look like that was the one that did it but in the end random chance had as much to do with it as that one decision did.
So the comparison with a lottery ticket is on the money. Besides all that I think you ended up quite well so 'cost' is probably not the best term anyway.
This is such a weird post. Big fan of Garry, but I don't agree with most of this. 1. Just because it turned out that you would have made $200mm doesn't make it a mistake. If anything, that outsized return proves just how rare this kind of outcome is. If you look at the YC startups graduating every year, maybe 1 will ever generate $20mm for an early employee, let alone $200mm. Joining a new startup for that kind of ou…
I hope that eventually as more and more people realize how much more they could make at big tech (IME a lot of people just straight up don't know, esp. when a lot of the comp comes as equity grants), startups will have to start paying more/offering bigger slices of equity. But seems we're not there yet. I also wonder how much of this is driven by software engineers who couldn't (or, probably more realistically, don't…
His "cost me $200m" is of a $20b company, so by the math he's suggesting he would've had 1% of the company after it went through all the dilutions on its path to $20b. So yeah, if you have a chance to get nearly a cofounder's amount of equity in a company that will end up 20x a unicorn (which got that name because of how rare they are), then definitely go for it.
Not to mention it's 1% of a $20b company that has yet to go public and seems intent on staying private.
Not buying Apple Stock in 1999 cost me $200M too. Not to mention what not picking those winning lottery numbers cost me...
Did you get offered 1% of Apple? I mean, getting offered equity at the start of a thing is what I was trying to talk about.
Knowing which will succeed and which will fail is sort of the whole caveat. You can't know the future when you make these decisions.
Not buying Apple Stock in 1999 cost me $200M too. Not to mention what not picking those winning lottery numbers cost me...
Did you get offered 1% of Apple? I mean, getting offered equity at the start of a thing is what I was trying to talk about.
I think your choice was perfectly reasonable and was not a mistake at all.
Not buying Apple Stock in 1999 cost me $200M too. Not to mention what not picking those winning lottery numbers cost me...
Still a lottery pick, though; I'm no financial genius. I just really enjoyed the iPods we had recently purchased.
This is such a weird post. Big fan of Garry, but I don't agree with most of this. 1. Just because it turned out that you would have made $200mm doesn't make it a mistake. If anything, that outsized return proves just how rare this kind of outcome is. If you look at the YC startups graduating every year, maybe 1 will ever generate $20mm for an early employee, let alone $200mm. Joining a new startup for that kind of ou…
These things are crazy rare. I didn't do a good job of explaining then how weird this experience was. In the moment it felt like any other startup. Peter was great and well known but not outrageously famous the way he is today.
I also didn't do a good job of doing an intro on this idea that tech startups are taking over all of the economy. There are some things that I just take for granted— I guess in abstraction now there are trillions of dollars of market cap in just tech firms, and this fits with my overall view that software is eating every part of GDP. We see this every day, but it's not well explained in my video/post.
I was making a joke about Google eating all of the world's revenue, but it didn't land. Sorry about that.
Really appreciate the feedback here. You're totally right that it's more directly lucrative and lower risk to work at a big tech co. I just still think people should consider making things for themselves though.