Crapshooting
Neat quote from this article in the San Jose Mercury about Guy Kawasaki:
Meanwhile, ideas he dismissed became stock market sensations.
Like Yahoo. In 1995, venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital asked Kawasaki if he’d like to interview to be chief executive of Yahoo. “It was a list of David and Jerry’s (co-founders Filo and Yang) favorite Web sites,” Kawasaki recalled. “It had no business plan.”
Kawasaki said no. Years passed. Two guys from Stanford created yet another search engine. “The 15th search engine – what a dumb idea,” Kawasaki quipped about his reaction. That turned into Google.
“The only thing you can conclude is that it’s a crap shoot,” Kawasaki said in a recent interview at his home office in Atherton. “You have no idea what is going to succeed.”
I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Because I’m not very good at something, it must be impossible.
The other way would be that Moritz and co over at Sequoia predicted both perfectly. And that there are a few VC firms and plenty of angels whose returns also have slaughtered the market over the last decades.
Investment always entails a good bit of risk, and tech companies probably more than most, but it’s most certainly not a crapshoot, and anyone who thinks so is letting their ego override their rational thought.
