231–235 of 235 posts
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I had 250 shares I bought on a tip and sold for a decent profit then NVDA moon-shotted later that year. That's the story of my stock buying life right there.
I doubled my bitcoin profit and got out at $1,000!
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This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.
Keep in mind how severely the quality of Google search results or e.g. any consumer facing piece of Microsoft software (Windows, Office, OneDrive, etc.) have deteriorated to the point it has far transcended the more nerdy corners of the web, yet both continue to retain a strict grip, thanks to buy in/brand strength.
People use Google search because they have (or rather, need) a Google account. Also, there are no alternatives really, because search is very difficult.
Microsoft has alternatives, but it doesn't matter, because you're artificially restricted from using them. All your friends (MBAs who cut your check) are using Excel, so why don't you just use Excel too?
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Does anyone trust Xitter? If so, they shouldn't.
why?
I mean, even just the name - 'X'. You can tell that's some Elon Musk bullshit because it's the stupidest fucking name I've ever heard in my life and nobody with even a quarter of a brain would ever suggest that as a brand name.
When that's literally the brand of your company, naturally I question if everyone has the screws tightened up there, you know?
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This is one of my arguments that startups are mostly about luck - because smart people who are highly incentivised to pick wimmers, with all the data they need to pick winners, all the people and compute they need to pick winners, can't pick winners.
> can't pick winners. Mayoshi Son isn't playing the VC game like most traditional VC funds. He's operating on a massive scale and his LPs are sovereign wealth funds, who can have other geo-political priorities than pure profit. Some people don't know that the usual VC game is often still be profitable for the VC even if their fund isn't profitable. VCs are investing the money of their LPs (Limited Partners), who are…
I think this model and portfolio investment strategy is the result of the fact that VCs can't pick winners, though. They are forced to take this "high-risk, high-reward" position in the portfolio because they can't predict the result of any of their investments, even over a whole fund's worth of investments.
Imagine a world where startup success had nothing (or very little) to do with luck, where you could plug a bunch of standard metrics into a complex algorithm (probably a spreadsheet) and it would spit out an utterly reliable set of statistics on likely return. Something that an actuary could come up with, as they do for insurance/assurance.
In this world, VC isn't high-risk, high-reward. There would be categories of VC fund, some would be lower-risk, lower-reward, others higher risk, and yet others that would be low-risk, high-reward (but priced accordingly).
The fact that we don't have this, and all VC is high-risk, high-reward (and often no reward at all, even across an entire fund), is testament to the fact that we can't pick winners. And the reason we can't pick winners is that startup success is very non-deterministic, i.e. mostly down to luck.