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Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

You misunderstand how tech works.

- Normally distributed endeavors: look at averages, ignore outliers.

- Power law distributed endeavors: ignore averages, focus only on outliers.

In tech, a few companies generate all of the returns. And it's fractal all the way down. E.g. there have recently been 900 U.S. unicorns minted in the past few years (IIRC), accounting for roughly $1T in total market cap. Yet 4 out of the 5 companies on this list are worth more than all of these new unicorns combined.

If you take the attitude "I don't have any chance of investing in one of these outliers", you'll only invest in "safe" things and go broke over time.

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> If you take the attitude "I don't have any chance of investing in one of these outliers", you'll only invest in "safe" things and go broke over time.

This is an absurd conclusion from my comment. We still have unicorns and companies that grow 100x and 1000x without being FAANG. Those are great investments. I'd argue that they aren't safe either. I think you're finding a conclusion by looking at the answer. There's also only 4 companies there out of hundreds of thousands. You can't find the signal in the noise. As many others have pointed out here, companies you list also have another common factor: the internet was new. This offsets the industry experience factor that the paper discussed because there was no industry to speak of. This gives younger people an advantage. But there's not really something like that right now.

lol I love the "safe" things cause you to "go broke"

Ask Warren Buffet - he’s never invested in safe things. /s

Though seriously, looking at Buffet - he invested in incredibly safe companies (ones generally valued at below their book value, at least for the first few decades) and used a bunch of leverage on them to make top-10 global wealth.

It bugs me (seems like it does for you, too) to hear the “you need risk for reward”.

Safe !== broke, and risky!== rich. But too many people equate ”safe” and bonds or index funds (which also won’t make you broke, they just won’t generate generational wealth for the most part).

Don't invest in vtsax, you'll lose all your money.

Is your advice to buy stock in all companies founded by young people from 1976 (Apple) to 2004 (Facebook)? I guess not, you need many other factors that may make impossible to recognize these companies.

Is not possible that it gives you better return of investment if you choose less risky companies? It may be better to make good profit in 90% of your investment that incredible gains on 0.00000001 of it.

I think the point is that you still basically don't have a chance of investing in one of these outliers, so instead of going broke over time because you're playing the wrong game, you go broke over time because you just lose.

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