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Comment by didgetmaster | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't find anywhere in the article where it gave an amount of the short position. Did this guy bet the farm on it? If so, he deserves praise (and the returns) for his insight. If, on the other hand, this was just one of dozens (or hundreds) of small short positions his fund invested in, then not so much.

Anyone can bet small amounts all over the roulette table and then only tell their friends about the ones that won while ignoring all the ones that lost.

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Says the commenter in a community for a startup ecosystem where the big money throws a million bucks at a hundred different projects and hails themselves as genius world leaders when one of them doesn’t fail. And where publishing a detailed investment case to be criticised on later is not the norm.

HN isn’t a monolith. VCs certainly have the benefit of diversification, but founders generally don’t.

It specifically says at the end they refuse to give the amount.

Given the research involved, and a well known firm, I'm sure it wasn't pocket change.

They might have bet a million dollars on it, but if their normal short position is also around a million dollars, then I am not as impressed.

If they wanted to show everyone how smart they were, I expected a quote something like: "We were so confident in our analysis that we invested 10x our normal short position in it!"

There is a reason the interviewee pivots from questions about how big of a take to from the short to the situation “certainly not something to be celebrated.”

it's not about being smart or anything, they just explain how they figured it out, doesn't matter how much money they made, that's just focusing on the wrong things

It does matter, because it's very easy to construct an explanation for how you "figured it out" after the fact, if one of your hundred small bets happened to work out. The person doing it may even fool themselves!

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