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Comment by mkmk | Hacker News Reader

"Even if I only had to pay the $4,050 to buy the stock options, I would not do it. I would rather invest this money on myself, and my family. I would even prefer to buy Bitcoins for that amount, than to invest it in GitLab."

Which would have been the better investment?

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Naively: the price of Bitcoin on April 3 2017 when this blog post was published was around $1100, so the author could have bought 3.68 BTC with his $4050. Even if he sold BTC at the all-time peak of $64863 he'd only make a third of what GitLab options would make.

Looks like opened at $1,318 on the day this was written. If you invested $4,050 on that day into 3.07 bitcoins, you'd have $174,819 today, which seems well less than Gitlab stock, which others are saying would be worth near a million.

That said, if you'd invested $4k on a couple winning horses at Golden Gate Downs in 2017, you could also be a millionaire, so this sort of backwards-looking estimate is of limited value. :)

Which would have been the better *risk adjusted* investment. It's easy to say in hindsight that it would have been a good choice, but far harder to know in the moment. Startups fail all the time, including YC ones.

In 2017 Gitlab was already gaining traction, it the very least it would be bought by some private equity firm.

Gitlab hasn't actually gone public yet and he could still hold his shares indefinitely (if he had them) but they are looking to open at $66-69 a share and his price was $0.27. So roughly 250X.

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