Everyone that wants to get into tech investing should read about Mark Twains misadventures in investing. Current stories about tech investing and investing in general are greatly affected by survivor bias. If you are not a successful investor you do not become famous your story does not get told, so many more people get to make the same mistakes you did.

Mark Twain on the other hand was famous for a completely different reason, and he is a great story teller to top it off. So his stories did get told. And they are very illuminating about how difficult technology investing really is.

He was very lucky in this watch investment story. I am sure he was able to get most of his money back mostly because he was famous and he threatened to expose the watchmakers about their shady dealings. The ordinary person in his place would have suffered more losses.

Another very illuminating story is his investment in automatic type setting machines. Here one would think he had all the advantages. He had worked as a type setter as a kid and as a journalist later on. As a writer he worked with many publishers. He was very familiar with the printing and news paper industries. He knew very well that an automatic type setting machine was sorely needed and would make much money. And he was right, an automatic typesetting machine did make lots of money, but not the one he invested in. The company he invested in failed.

So yeah ... tech investing is not easy.