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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

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.

No, but he did have the option to buy that lottery ticket.

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.

> No, but he did have the option to buy that lottery ticket.

From Garry's blog [0], it looks the it was more than just buying a lottery ticket. Peter Thiel cut him a great deal, by all accounts, and he still let it go. The equivalent to that, imo, would be to have refused ticket offered to you for free which then won the lottery.

[0] (Peter Thiel said) "Cash this check, quit your job. This is a zero risk opportunity for you." I said, "Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to Level 60 next year."

Quitting your job is not a zero risk opportunity.

Oh for sure. I think the point is, any of these moves is an inherent risk. For every Apple or PayPal there are a thousand startups which fail.

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.

If Peter's company hadn't worked out then your decision would have been correct in hindsight. It is very hard to tell with foresight which startups will succeed or fail. Given the statistics, at the time your decision would have been the most probable one to produce more personal wealth. Even if you had chosen differently, you may not have made the $200 million anyway. If you were given stock options, decided to quit before a liquidation event, then the rational choice would be to not exercise the options because you can get hammered on taxes.

I think your choice was perfectly reasonable and was not a mistake at all.

but everybody at a startup gets offered equity and almost all of it ends up being garbage, so maybe you made a poor assessment of the startup & founder but it seems a silly thing to thinking about and a dangerous one from which to draw lessons or advice.

I think it's great to learn from your previous decisions but this one seems (1) emotionally dangerous, (2) logically faulty and (3) largely selected for the headline.

It might not be too late for the lottery numbers!

I can't find it now, but I remember reading about a guy who was arrested in China for buying winning lottery numbers after they'd already been announced. The semi-surprising thing, to me, was that he did this more than once.

Seems like a clear example of when you should take the win, and then leave in dignified haste.

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...?

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - perhaps they are too sane for their own good :)

You mean the criminals that we catch are the ones who cant help getting too big

This is usually money laundering. A Brazilian politic had won the lottery 7 times.

This isn't a case of an unknown mechanism. The guy noticed that the lottery didn't close for a few minutes after the winning numbers were announced, making it possible to just watch the announcement and then buy the numbers.

As such, there is no reason to believe it's anything more than it appears.

That's amusing, because shortly after that I was converting MSFT ESPP into AAPL shares (started as diversifying, then turned into an appealing strategy).

Still a lottery pick, though; I'm no financial genius. I just really enjoyed the iPods we had recently purchased.

> Not buying Apple Stock in 1999 cost me $200M too.

When I was the TA for my high school physics teacher back in 1994, he couldn't ever stop talking about how terrible Apple stock was and how he wished he never bought it. He kept trying to sell it to me; I didn't have a brokerage account or I probably would have just to get him to shut up about it.

Back then it was less than $1 per share.

Captain hindsight strikes again!

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