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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Even if Matt is correct in his statement, that could still be entirely logical and +EV for them.

If you tell me there’s an 89% chance that my experiment with gen-AI will yield nothing, all I need is for the payoff of that experiment to have a net-present-value of 10x my investment in the experiment for it to be an experiment worth considering. (Even less if some of that 89% will inform future experiments, even if there’s no current monetary payback.)

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This only makes sense in a repeatable game or across the industry, not for any individual experiment.

Would you take a 11% chance of a billion dollars vs death?

That is essentially the VC advantage over business founders. They have a cat worth of lives.

> This only makes sense in a repeatable game or across the industry, not for any individual experiment.

No, because in a large corporation there are a large number of investment projects going on. So a corporation can still treat these as "bets" and invest in those with maximal expected IRR

But you're losing investors money not your own

At that point you already succeeded with your business. In the really risky phase it is all credit card, that you need to recoup.

The worst case of maxing out a personal credit card is not generally comparable to individual death. Loads of people with way less earning power than SWEs have that amount of debt. It's a pain in the ass, but it's not terminal. (It's also dischargeable in bankruptcy in the worst 0.1% case.)

Sure but I read it as most of us only get one chance at starting our own business (unless you already are rich).

E.g. I would rather go for 50% chance of 1 million USD than 11% chance of 1 billion USD.

(I’m coming at this as someone who’d way rather an 11% chance at a billion than a 50/50 at a million, which I’m sure colors my thought process.)

The amount of personal investment it takes to get to the point of pitching investors is pretty low (and well lower than “already succeeded at your business” IMO; raising money is not in itself business success).

It was ridiculously low a few years ago; it’s still low and achievable as an investment for most anyone earning a western SWE salary and not living extravagantly.

so it's 11% chance of a billion dollars or death, or it's 11% chance billion dollars 89% chance death?

Essentially you're doing a variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

That’s a big if, but does seem plausible for well-founded use cases.

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