DavidHm

Why would you exclude them? Survivorship bias is something that needs to be eliminated, not baked in.

It's been a while since a stray comment on the internet has made me reconsider so many things that I was previously convinced of.

Thanks for this.

Around 2010 I was speaking with a Turkish friend. I expressed my admiration towards the fact that the Turkish military has multiple times intervened to stop the country from becoming religiously-governed. She (while not being religious) did not fully agree, as she thought democracy was more important.

Fast forward a few years and she has completely turned around and regrets her former opinions.

This doesn't really prove what is the correct approach, but I think speaks about the fact that we often make decisions based on some vague ideals as opposed to practical and realistic outcomes - and we are sometimes wrong.

Most active investment strategies are not scalable - true.

But the real issue is that there is no convincing proof that active managers can reliably out-perform passive investment strategies over long term.

Canada and Russia are mostly empty.

Canada will be fine, they have a long history of cooperating with the US.

Now, Russia on the other hand...with China right next to it? I smell trouble ahead.

I also used to be amazed at the amount of stuff our Bloomberg rep had crammed in his head.

Probably some mathlab, but it really depends on the course/ university.

For example in Europe many courses focus on pure theory.

His prize was for research on international trade and globalization.

This is a very very narrow field, which is dwarfed by the reach of macro economics.

In short, his credibility about macro, especially in regards to the effects of debts and deficits, is questionable.

They don't have to increase prices. They just need to reduce CAPEX (stop reinvesting the money). Their operating margins are healthy.

Financial analysts have been harping at Bezos for the need to make profits or see his valuation tumble since 1998-1999, when he invested an obscene amount of money in expanding his infrastructure.

That's more than 15 years. So far he has been proving them wrong.

Not necessarily. Amazon aspires to have 100% of market share where it competes, or very close to.

Other companies don't aspire to even 50% of market share. See Apple for example. They are happy to have the premium segment locked in and reap the profits out of it.

I agree with you. Joining a company that has a clear revenue model (or has found a decent way to monetize their user base) and is growing by leaps and bounds seems like an easy bet.

But how many of these companies are out there? Granted, we are a few waves after the deluge of social startups with gigantic user bases and no idea on how to monetize them, but what you describe is still a minority of startups.

And the suggestion doesn't seem to be "join a company that is already doing well", it's "join a startup or create one, instead of going to work for some corporation".

This is what I think: in engineering (and even more, in business), right after your graduation there is this window where you have large and famous companies with deep pockets who are eager to get the cream of the class. If you join them even for an year or two, you have significantly smoothed the rest of your working life.

Sure, you can always join them years later, and you don't need them to succeed - but statistically, the impact of taking advantage of this window cannot be denied.

I am going to assume that the sarcasm refers to the absurd arrogance in implying that only and all product managers in silicon valley, california, usa are good.

Overall, I really like the idea, but the language of the site and of the people answering on this thread is really ringing alarm bells in my head.

And therein lies the problem.

It is in the VC's interest to push more and more people to take risky bets - this gives them more horses to bet on, while managing the risk through diversification. For the individual horse (or er, engineer), this still remains a risky proposition.

Which becomes far less risky if before you launch in the startup world, you take a couple of years after graduation to work for a well known and reputed company (say google). That will guarantee a soft landing if your startup experiment fails, which is very likely.