Comment by hinkley
9 days ago
My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row.
I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity.
A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band.
I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good" sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
>"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to several revolutions in a row."
Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on things.
In the beginning you didn't really buy BTC. You could mine a few off of your nvidia card in less than a week.
I was focused on doing useless things like cracking md5 hashed passwords and didn't really believe you could pay for things with it.
Regret on a different level.
We used to tests servers before deploying them to customers and for that we ran intensive CPU software for days.
I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home.
This was 2009, months after the official launch.
We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups continuously running. We could have become easily one of the top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the earth.
It could be worse: you could have bought bitcoin when it started and then have sold it for a profit of $40. ;)
There was a website back when I was in college where you'd click through some presentation or tutorial or something about bitcoin and at the end they'd just give you 0.5 bitcoin for free.
I could have retired making early iPhone apps but I was already so burned out on how shitty mobile carriers were behaving that I just sat it out.
Hey at least you didn't aggressively "day trade" it all away with your idiot friends who moved in and tried to start a "fund". Good times.
I have decided that the “start investing early for compound interest” advice is actually a very clever white lie told to young adults everywhere.
The point of starting early is not compound interest. It’s to experience loss when you still have a pittance in the market. The older you get the bigger the chunk of cash you can put in, and if you don’t understand Let it Ride and rebalancing before 20% is a loss of thousands instead of hundreds of dollars, you’re gonna have a bad time.
The only compound interest that really matters is what you get when you have a substantial stake that you also haven’t blown up chasing fads or snake oil. So the advice is technically true but also technically beside the point.
> The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
"Forty quid for a string of hex digits? Nah, I don't think so..."
- me, some time in 2010.
- me, also in 2010, when a junior colleague ("what would he know?") spent his bonus on bitcoin.
But you were lucky. You were in the right places at the right time, just didn't realize it.
This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
Love it. This is all soo very Nelson Bighetti.
Nelson did quite fine in the end.