Please share stories of what early Amazon was like. Did you realize you were building a massive company at the time?
Then there was the Segway deal where I amused myself by checking the orders database to see how many they sold (because the numbers were so small)
If you told me back then that the stock was going to $3000 some day, I would have stuck around for longer.
Let's take Uber. Their core product is a social media app with mapping, tracking and billing features. It has burnt through an incredible amount of money trying to kill competitors, employing 20,000 or so people directly and claiming that a self-driving electric fleet will someday make them insanely profitable.
Market cap is up almost 80% in the last year.
Who's the idiot? The investor who believes that Uber will be insanely profitable in N years, or the investor who doesn't want any more exposure to Uber than as part of a whole-market index?
I think hiring top-quality, motivated engineers doesn't just give you good software, it also provides all the idea generation that you're going to need to enter businesses you never thought about before.