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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

> When you work at a startup, you're acting like an investor but investing your time instead of your money.

True, except: (a) An employee can probably only work for one startup at a time, and begins vesting after a year. That's like asking an investor to bet on at most 1 company per year. (b) Employers tend to give substantially less detailed information about their business, financials, etc to prospective employees than they give to investors. We have to make our choice very carefully, but we often have to make it with less information. (c) And after we've chosen, and vested, we do also have to invest money to exercise. If after that point things go downhill, we're out on money, but also years of our careers.

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I forgot (d) "Real" investors in the same startups are often getting preferred shares while we get common shares.

If after that point things go downhill, we're out on money, but also years of our careers.

Maybe if you're thinking about a career in terms of building seniority over a long period of time at a single company. Working at a startup usually involves a good bit of responsibility and a diverse set of technologies compared to working at a larger company. It seems to me that's going to look good to most prospective employers.

Diversification only lowers risk. The expected value doesn't change.

Would you rather have a 1% chance at a billion dollars or a guaranteed million? The former has a 10x higher expected value but I think most people would choose the latter.

I love examples like this. My interpretation of this generally depends on an idea of "Expected Impact", where ex. the difference between $10^6 and $10^9 in terms of lifestyle impact can be smaller than the difference between $10^3 and $10^6. You could assume a logarithmic value function, for example, but each person might have a different function depending on what you would do with the money.

Not that people actually think that way, but you can construct a model where the guaranteed million is the rational choice.

What your talking about is commonly referred to in economics as diminishing marginal returns. The first $1000 is much more useful than the second. Also, your interpretation of "expected impact" is what we call economic utility, which is commonly put in a cobbs douglas utility function (utility = (some_number > 1)^(1 > some_number > 0).

Sir/Madam, that is incorrect. Diversification can easily lower expected value, or raise it. It should maximize your signal to noise ratio, if properly done.

I believe the definition they are using is something like: given a random process X for your percent return, if you invest in n nths of your money into iid copies of X, you will get the same expectation, but with smaller variance compared to putting it all into one copy of X. That's diversification.

You're using a different definition than the one I learned in school. The purpose of diversification, as opposed to simply picking the best asset, is to decrease variance.

Given a choice between two assets, or portfolios, one first maximizes expected value. Between two portfolios of equal expected value, you pick lower variance. That's the rational thing to do if you are managing a fund. The whole risk ratio thing arises only because so many investors are trying to build a well-diversified portfolio and bid up or down the price of assets accordingly. Price in turn affects expected return -- the expected value of the asset.

My point is simply that diversification results in a different expected return of the final portfolio. Before diversifying your expected return was R1 and after it will be R2 where R1 != R2. So, for choosing startup vs big co, or one startup vs another, this is relevant as well.

Given diminishing marginal utility of wealth, diversification increases expected utility, even if not expected wealth.

Everyone has a personal tolerance for risk. If you are diversified, then you decrease the risks that you are exposed to - possibly below your personal risk tolerance. That allows you to use leverage to increase your risk back up to your tolerance, which also increased your expected return.

So yes, diversification (plus leverage) absolutely increases expected value, if you hold risk a constant.

Which matters a lot if you only have one or two shots.

Regarding (b): I think an employee working day to day gets a much better picture than investors. It requires time on the job, but my point is that it's not as one-sided as you make seem.

But the employee has one massive advantage to the investor: the actual ability to influence the success of the company.

Investors have a lot more control over the board than a average employee will.

Startup boards have very little to do with the company's success. Key employees have much more impact.

Employees have more do with success. But if a big investor goes, we want this. Your probably going to do that.

You don't think giving a company money influences their success?

Not beyond the cash.

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