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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

If you had perfect future knowledge (which is what this article is really about) you wouldn't want to invent Slack (or Google), which lets face it would have been a ton of work with a very uncertain outcome. You'd want to invest in Slack / Google at some early stage, do no work whatsoever, and enjoy the proceeds.

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I'd probably join Slack early, successfully rail against Electron and kill the whole company.

And leave us with Microsoft Teams?

You monster

HipChat would have lived

Pretty much.

I always find it funny when people say: "I'd invent Google" when they could barely pass their first year Calculus class. As if stating the idea is all it took but not the engineering and well ... the actual difficult work.

But everyone can invest. That much is totally doable.

Yup, by far the hardest bit is working out which 7 star ski resort to go to next. In this alternate reality you'd be cosplaying as a VC, because that would give you the creds to raise money and meet the right founders. But the only work you'd be doing is passing on pets.com, and choosing to invest in thefacebook.

The difficult work is easier to grind through when you know there's a pay off.

I think alot of people aren't passing calculus and doing hard work, not because they're dumb but there's no clear pay off, it's hard to stay motivated

Do those people know what PageRank is? Even if they did, could they implement it? (And would they be able to come up with their own name for it, given they are not Larry Page?)

Yeah, I would say most past life choices for me would be investing in the right things. If you know, then risk is not needed.

It would be a lot faster to buy a lot of lottery tickets, or become a professional gambler. Once you've done that you'd have enough to make meaningful investments for long term returns. Or to short the stock market before certain big events...

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