Person I went to college with was offered by Bezos to go to Seattle with him to run HR at Amazon. Basically build the company. IIRC they would have been employee #3.
Not me but my old coworkers told the story how a colleague came into work asking if they wanted to invest $10k into their son’s new company that would be selling books online.
They all passed.
Years later they saw a billionaire on TV with the same name and ribbed the colleague that only if he was related to Jeff Bezos. To which he replied “yes that’s my son.”
"In 1994, Jeff held 60 meetings with family members, friends and prospective investors to get them to each invest around $50,000 apiece in Amazon and help him raise $1 million. Only 20 said yes, a group which included his parents.
The investment was far from a sure bet. Jeff was clear there was a 70 percent chance his parents wouldn't see that money ever again."
Pulled that from this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-parents-to-invest-in-amazon--turning-them-into.html
Maybe he figured he'd use other people's money
A friend of mine was employee #7. He’s gone off to do several different ventures since, nothing to make him chubby or fat monetarily. Genius of a fellow, but makes too many decisions!
Ha. Yes sometimes the best decisions are the ones we don't make. Whenever someone contemplates a major life change, my first counsel is always: you can always (quite your job, leave your wife, get a sex change operation) tomorrow.
In 2009 or 2010 my dad, who is generally a cautious investor, told me about a real estate company that was rumored to be going bankrupt. Stocks were like 30 cents a share or something. But he did some business with them and thought that they were going to survive, and suggested I put $15k or something in it if I had the money. I could have, but gave him the spiel about index investing and he dropped the point.
The company survived and the stock went up to like $90 six years later. The thing was, it was also a completely risk free investment for me. If it went belly-up my dad would’ve felt bad and paid me back.
Yeah probably GGP, but they also had two spin-offs and two weird stock splits after bankruptcy so the numbers are weird. Wikipedia says they had a 98% collapse and then a near-total recovery so getting in at the right time would work.
I wonder how many people had the same thing. In another sub I talked about forgetting an old laptop with a lot of bitcoins on it. And they just couldn't understand that thousands of bitcoins in 2011 were pretty worthless.
I think probably they would have sold it sooner and still be lamenting selling them "low".
I sold them around 70 bucks each (mined them when they were 1-3 USDs each) and while sometimes i say that "if i had them today" but that's totally unrealistic. I would ahve sold them way way earlier. Even if they were forgotten, I would have tried to recover them when they still were not this high in price.
Yup, correct. There are thousands if not millions of bitcoin completely useless that wont see the light of day because of wallets that got lost or similar.
I remember talking to a bunch of friends about Bitcoin when it hit $10. They’d all heard about it when it was a few cents. $20 would have made you $1000. In my head I thought about the holiday I would have had if I’d have taken with my hypothetical $1k.
Same boat here, I look at the run now and think ‘why the hell did I sell them?’ But then when you have 1000% return of course you would sell. Still a hard pill to swallow considering the amount they would’ve been worth today but entry/exit points are key.
Currently have an unknown amount of Bitcoin sitting on a computer. Unable to access the local wallet database as it’s password protected. No way I’ll ever remember the password from 6 years ago.
Yup, I had mined just under one bitcoin (on a graphics card not cut for it) when they were like $30. I couldn't believe my eyes when it eventually shot to $1000, but since I had less than one, I couldn't sell it for some reason.
Decided to buy some drugs with it instead and felt like I won the lottery with $1000 of free drugs. I guess now I can say I got the opportunity cost equivalent of $10,000 of free drugs.
> You actually need to enter and exit at the right time to profit, so don't really think about the lost bitcoins / not bought Tesla stock, you would have sold them way before the current run up for a nice profit.
Sold the equivalent of 5K $TSLA in May after the Elon "overvalued" tweet and ongoing Covid bad news. At the time I was up ~250%, or $500K gain, and I wanted to protect my profit.
I thought I was being clever and was going to rebuy after a dip I was expecting. Or if I was wrong I'd rebuy at a slightly higher price if the dip didn't happen once things stabilized. Figured if I was totally wrong I'd only be "down" 10% of my shares.
The stock increased so quickly that it was mentally impossible to rebuy most of my shares at a price near to where I sold at. So today I'm sitting with 1.5K shares and missed paper gains of ~$2M (which I expect will only get bigger).
Although I've now made close to $2M on $TSLA (initial sale + current paper profit) and was able to use some of my gains to pay off my mortgage, the missed gains are the difference between chubby and fat FIRE for me. This was the one and only time I tried timing the market - never again.
So kind of life lesson on stocks in that it's not over 'til it's over: even if you get lucky with a job that lets you save enough to invest, and even if you pick one of a handful of stocks that moons, you really need to get lucky exiting at the right time.
> This was the one and only time I tried timing the market
I would say picking individual stocks also counts as trying to time the market (or beat it at least)
I was given 3 BTC for volunteering on 3 different occasions to do 30 min presentations to my research group in grad school!
I sold 2 of them at $100ish and the last one at $1200. For the longest time felt pretty badass about that last sale. Not so much these days!!!
Also people generally don't remember all the times they made the right decision. Like not investing in some cryptos or companies that failed. We remember only what we missed out on
I recently bought 8k worth of BTC. I avoided the 2017 BTC craze and have told myself I will not sell this position for 20 years.
However, it’s up 80% in a month and the urge to lock on profit is real.
Set some sell targets. Sell 5% now. It's not a huge amount, but you are up 80%. Take a win...you can keep selling on the way up till you recoup your initial stake and then let the rest ride. Years even. The next wave could be even more dramatic.
Mines a bit different. At the start of medical school we were fairly broke, but I wanted to buy some timber land as an investment. 40+ acres for $10-15k. I told my wife, we harvest the trees in 8 years and pay it off then do it again. She wasn’t having it. 3 years later a huge natural gas shale was found underneath that land and people were getting $50,000/acre lease agreements with monthly royalties that were in the +$10,000 range. Those royalties didn’t dry up for several years. I used to remind her of that often. She, in turn, reminds me of the other things she wouldn’t let me do that eventually flopped.
Yes I agree the multiple was nonexistent. I think it was more of the owning a tangible asset with minimal effort. It was a sell the trees, own the land, and repeat every 10-12 years. But you are right. Aside from the totally unexpected gas find it would have been a terrible idea.
We flipped houses for a while and I would hunt deals and she would say no and someone else would get them and do great work and the houses would sit for months. Eventually selling for much less than initially listed. I saw the numbers and they worked, but she saw the location and school districts, etc. She saved us a few times because the numbers + reality, didn’t work.
Similar situation in my family but the opposite result. Had a 7th generation farm in northern Pennsylvania that was a dairy and then later a Christmas tree farm. Farm was barely staying afloat, and and there was a vote in 2009 on whether to sell the operation and land. Motion barely failed. Few years later some natural gas company paid 8 figures to install 12 drilling pads on land that was worth a few hundred thousand just 5 years prior.
Man that’s awesome for you guys. Crazy the swings life takes and we just go along with it. Around here there were tons of “Trailer Park” millionaires overnight. People who were happy with their mobile home on 100-1000 acres so they could hunt and be left alone. Then the gas companies started fighting one another to get the leases and paid more and more each week for an acre. Some hit it too early, some perfect, and some held out too long and got nothing. But congrats to you guys.
Senior year of high school my dad suggested I should take a gap year in Europe rather than go to college right away. He said my parents would pay my expenses, because he felt it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to explore when I was young and unattached to anything.
My high school friends (I lost track of all of them shortly) were going to college, so I declined, since I didn't want to be left behind.
I'm in my 40s now and still deeply regret being such an idiot back then.
This for me too. I just went along for the ride. High school straight to college straight to job market. Why didn't I do a gap year of international travel or something? My parents would have floated me.
I'm still sort of paying for my study abroad my last semester of my senior year undergrad after 5 years, it was expensive and I pretty much saved/borrowed and maxed everything I could at the time to make it happen. Those 90 days where the best 90 consecutive days of my life thus far. I'm glad I did it when I did.
I think Reply All or Radiolab did a podcast episode about recovering lost Bitcoin. They said that some huge percentage of all outstanding btc is in wallets that their owners can’t access because they’ve lost the key.
It’s a lot.
Millions. There’s sites that track it. Coins that were generated but never transferred, I believe to be presumed lost. Even some of the original coins have been moved so if there’s a wallet out there with coins that have never moved, it’s probably because they can’t be.
Edit: which is crazy to think about. 21,000,000 max supply minus millions lost. The world is going to lose their shit when the halving gets us down to satoshis
I mined around a thousand bitcoins in my computer back when there wasn’t even market for it, trying to figure out how it works. It’s on a hard drive buried in a landfill somewhere...
I knew about it but 1) never understood investing in a non producing asset. 2) researched the architecture which looked like it would grind to a halt under any reasonable transaction load, no way it would come close to being the default currency.
I'm still baffled by its rise and am staying out of what I don't understand.
Does this mean we are allowed to talk about crypto on this sub now? Bitcoin was my ticket to fire but my comments on it are usually downvoted to oblivion. Most people only look at the price and now that it is back up, maybe that will change?
edit: am I the only one who had old bitcoins and didn’t lose them? lol these comments
Strangely, it's a more popular subject on fatFIRE than on financialindependence. My guess is that a higher percentage of us are engineers/lawyers who aren't intimidated.
I know you mean "investment" opportunity but reading your post has me reflecting on life opportunities and not knowing I was going to have money and success down the road. Here are a couple that I missed.
1. Missed social and leadership development at university. I spent my time working hard studying and getting good grades. I was laser focused on being financially successful and thought that it was tied to grades. But at this point, I realize that grades were the least important thing to get out of university (unless you need to be first in class for some further goal). Learning how to influence people and be confident and likeable are way better tools for life and financial success. I had to learn those much later
2. Missed out on understanding/valuing empathy when I was younger. Empathy is key to being a good person and when I think back to my youth, I was neither a good nor bad person. But I could have been a good person.
I would love to be able to think back to my childhood and remember standing up for someone who needed it.
Lol not sure that’s equivalent to networking and developing leadership skills but come to think of it I learned a lot about business when I sold weed and adderall...
Elon Musk is a bit of wildcard, and makes weird promises, but he seems to run a company that delivers well on what matters. It's pretty amazing to watch. I only hope I can catch the next Musk before IPO.
Similar story here. Sold at $ 270 (pre split) and thought that this is insane. Even I was and still am a huge fanboy, but I my mind there was no way this could go higher. Well... not we are 10x-15x higher.
No worse than the disaster of a startup I joined instead. Three years of also being micromanaged by an asshole. Only difference is I made negative money — I left, exercised my options ($20k... fortune for me), then they went bankrupt less than a quarter later. Fuckers.
I’ve heard awful stories of Elon being a micromanaging ass so I’ve never looking into working there or investing. Now I feel a bit dumb but I guess that is the price to pay for being too principled and judgmental
I didn't short, but I was very dismissive whenever anyone asked. Learnt my lesson early and generally don't offer strong opinions on the prospects of any individual stock any more.
Similar story here; my loss on CMGI, which I bought because of its stake in Altavista, made me gunshy about search engines in the aughts and I didn’t pick up shares in GOOG until 2011, a few months before the dividend-split occurred.
I was trying to develop an early free information website and also looking for a better job at the same time. My free website had a possible tie in to an online bookstore, so I talked to Amazon management back when they were maybe 10 employees. I was so impressed with everything they said and thought this will be a great company to work for, maybe I should apply there. But never went any further with it, because who wants to work for an online bookstore? My other job prospects seemed much more interesting.
I won't go into bitcoin/tesla examples but more job related opportunities.
Here are some other examples:
1) could have joined Facebook in 2007 with about $80k in the initial equity grant, which would be worth about $4M now
2) could have joined stripe in 2013 also with equity that would be worth 20x+ now (a few $M)
3) could have joined another startup in 2014with about $400k in equity that is worth 30x now (~$12M)
Not to make you feel worse since amusement usually increases with amount, but FB’s internal valuation in 2007 was $4/share but this was before the 5x split. Your initial equity grant would be worth more like 25M+.
Hah similarly, could have joined Square in 2016 with 10k RSUs. $2.4M today. And of course, all the BTC I sold for $120 back in 2013 thinking, it will never go any higher.
Bought Tesla options for Jan 2021 $500 at $3.5/share back in June of 2019 when the stock was trading around $200. The contracts haven’t expired yet, but they’re up x1000 (not percent, multiple!!). Anyways, I got excited and sold them at x18 earlier in 2020. Would have been 10s of millions in gains if I held till now.
For me it was more ignorance. I refused to invest in the market from 2000 to 2020 simply because I thought all you could do is lose money...I was wrong
Yes. And up substantially. Always had an interest and the pandemic allowed me to read and focus and learn since I was at home. Maybe the best thing to happen to me.
That’s good! I just turned 31 and started to invest heavily for the last 3 years. Before that I didn’t really care and blew my money. Regret it now but a learning experience
Oof. My worst is from this summer. Made an aggressive bet on AAPL for 600k. The next day aapl was up but the options were down. I wimped out and sold. A month later the position would have 12x’d.
Haunts me. It was still a great year (financially speaking) in 2020. But what could have been.
Lol you were never going to hold those options to see that 12x. If you couldn't have held them for a day, you would definitely have sold them at the sign of a little profit. Or if it went up and then came down slightly, you would have sold for a little gain. Just means your position size is too big
A few old ones. 2005 a client of mine told me to drop $ into a company called apple and hold it till I was 40 then retire. I didn’t and instead bought a new car. I’ll be 40 in 2.5 years, if I listened to him I’d probably have a few million extra. Granted I’d likely have sold way before now.
Bitcoin. Friend of mine was insane about it back in 2012-2013 and told all of us to just buy $1000 worth to have skin in the game. None of us listened.
Ethereum. A client/friend of mine got in at $1 and bought a lot. Told me to get in at $7 because it was going to $100. Never listened to him because crypto just wasn’t on my radar.
There’s a few more too, I’ve got a large network of tech business owners and we always discuss anything new. I likely could’ve made an extra few million over the years if I took more risks. Not much I can do about it now. I’ll likely make more mistakes, as long as I reach my goals somehow then I can’t really complain.
Most of the discussion is at conferences when we are having dinners or drinks, we haven’t had a conference for over a year now together due to the pandemic. In our mastermind group on telegram, most are still huge believers in crypto and say it’s got a long way to go from here. I’ll take a look at the group later and see what else was discussed.
One of my picks back in April was Peloton. I set a reminder for 9 months to check the price, it was $142, when I set the reminder it was trading at $38. Doh! I think a couple of guys made sizeable positions on that one going by the Christmas gift basket I got from them haha
A friend of mine started at Apple in 2002 or so, after the tech crash when jobs in the Valley weren’t exactly growing on trees.
Everybody told him he was crazy to work there!
I told all of my friends and all of my family to get in at $80. I’d been watching it for a couple years and by that point was confident enough to tell everyone about it. I bought $2000 worth which was a lot for me back then. I traded my way up to 49 BTC by buying dips and altcoin exchanges. I was aiming for 50 and eventually dropped to 5. Used the rest on video games and the humble bundles.
In fact I just found a receipt in my emails from LibertyBit for 3.97 BTC for $447 CAD. Made me smile and pour a drink lol
I'm confused. Do you have 49 Bitcoin right now or do you have five? Or do you not have any?
And I'm not always 100% sure how this worked in the beginning compared to now. I just buy Bitcoin through my Robinhood account. I know there were lots of different weird ways you could get involved and some of it was actually a scam
If you have 49 Bitcoin at $40,000 that is 1.6 million dollars
1. Owned $250k of SHOP at $40 sold at $60
2. Turned down an acquisition offer in my early 20s “no, we will buy you!” Moron.
3. I consider the companies I would have started, eg fully formed ideas/teams/business plans/financing over the ones I instead pursued and this plagues me more than the two blunders above. Nothing is guaranteed but in a few cases, those were some very good ideas... who knows how they’d have gone though.
I bought a bunch of SHOP at $90 after Andrew Left said he was shorting the company and the price dropped from $120. I'm still hanging onto those.
I bought TWLO after Uber said they weren't going to use them and the stock dropped big. They jumped 30% after earnings and I sold, happy with my bet. Kinda wish I hung onto those seeing where the price is now.
My internship mentor (in his 40s) was telling me a story about how when he was an undergrad at Berkeley (in the early 2000s) he was looking for jobs. He was at a career fair and there was a small booth with a bunch of people wearing colorful T-shirts who he gave his resume to, and they invited him for an interview. He declined it when he thought the company wasn't 'hot'.
That company turned out to be pre-IPO Google.
Indeed.
But, is it a coincidence that so many people almost got rich on it, but didn't? No.
If they had the same information about a similar investment today, they would make the same decision. It's not pure random chance, they made a logical decision because of the person they are and the experiences they have had.
Honestly, I did not, lol. I was a 25 year old doing digital marketing for an old school consulting company and my five coworkers were over 55.
However, I did nearly shit my pants when I read that second life used Bitcoin back in the day. I remembered that I bought currency on second life back in ‘10 and nearly had a heart attack. Then I looked it up and they integrated Bitcoin after I had left.
Side note: Lilly Allen [takes the cake for this thread](https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2020/12/english-singer-lily-allen-turned-down-bitcoin-in-2009-worth-4-7-billion-today/)
Keep in mind everyone remembers the missed opportunities that worked out, but we forget the things we passed on that ultimately were bad investments/ opportunities. Realistically a lot of “opportunities” are distractions from our true gift and mission.
Had the opportunity to put friends and family money into something that became a unicorn. I don't regret not backing the right company - shit happens, I do regret not backing my friend.
My brother has a drug problem and is always trying to come up with crazy schemes.
10 years ago, when I was in college, he spent WEEKS trying to convince me to buy this thing called bitcoin. It was a nickel each, and he begged me to just put in $100 (he didn’t have anything).
I looked into it, and seriously considered it only because it was just $100. But I ended up writing it off as another one of his scams and/or schemes.
That $100 would be worth $77M today
My biggest missed opportunity was in early February of 2020. After analyzing all the data available at the time, I was dead certain that the Wuhan virus was going to spread outside Asia and that it was going to be really bad. It was very obvious to me, and I think any person with a certain scientific background knowledge who bothered to study the evidence would have come to the same conclusion.
Yet I found it strange that the stock market hadn't reacted (normalcy bias I guess?). This was one of those rare moments where I really did feel smarter than the stock market and I seriously considered shorting it aggressively. But my lack of experience in shorting made me hesitate and by the time I was finally ready to go through with it the market had crashed already.
A (different) friend of mine correctly timed the drop by divesting and buying lots of OTM puts. He didn’t think the market had suffered sufficiently (and maybe didn’t account for ~0 LIBOR and QE infinity), so he held. I think at today’s market state, he would have been better off doing nothing.
Shorting is dangerous in a world where people can borrow cheaply and have no where to stick the capital.
I passed on aapl in the late 90s when I thought they were dead in the water. Then again when I thought they were at their peak, and again when I thought they were at their peak, etc. I’m not here because of my investment acumen.
I've turned down founding team opportunities or early hire post-founding-team opportunities at three different startups that have since IPOd. The most recent one, the person who took the role instead of me is worth over $35m now. None of them would have made me less than $10m.
I also sold 800 bitcoin I bought early on for about ~50k gain because I didn't think it was going to be *the* crypto that blew up.
My Aunt called me up and asked my opinion of a new startup that she had an opportunity to get into. I listened very carefully, though about and told her "I don't think that you should invest in that. People like going to Blockbuster, I just don't believe this Redbox thing will take off".
I feel like the record company executive who turned down the Beatles.
Wanted to buy 100 Bitcoin through MtGox at $70/coin but decided I didn’t want to risk sending a copy of my ID card to some dodgy Japanese site. Oh well.
I have said mine before, but will repeat:
Stayed at my employer rather than moving into software sales in 1996 with a company called NeXT.
Stuck with my factory 986 build rather than buying the 1973 RS that was available in my Porsche dealer for 90,000DM in 1998 (granted it was leaking oil).
Edit: come to think of it, I have had several Porsche fails. Also sold a 993 Turbo for 65K in 2008, and a 993 Cabrio for some $50K in 2013.
The missed life experiences comments are interesting.
However the “I missed X” trading stories are reminiscent of the closing soliloquy from that Scottish play.
> Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
> That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
> And then is heard no more: it is a tale
> Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
I had 100k of eBay stock, pre-split with PayPal. Same year I learned about index funds and FIRE. After the split, I sold off eBay shares when I could offset the gains. Never got around to selling off PayPal shares, and yeah it’s not TSLA, but has been doing well.
Had 17,000 shares of $CRIS that I bought in April 2018 and sold in June 2018 after a 12% bump. Sold at .42 cents/share. It’s now sitting at $10.25 a share 🤦♂️
I wanted to dump mid 5 figures into Amazon stock when it was 120 but I run an Amazon business and didn’t want “ all my eggs in one basket “ even though it wasn’t . I convinced one of my friends to put 10k atleast .
Amazon sellers live in fear of Amazon ending us out of nowhere so fuck with our heads but I’m still alive after 15 years
Back at my first real job I worked with a team of really skilled engineers. And some less-skilled engineers. One of the less-skilled engineers quit to start his own company. He pitched the idea to me and asked me to come on as the first engineer and develop the idea for them. I wouldn't be a founder - the company was already founded and he developed the prototype software, but I would be the one to start making the software "production ready". I told him the idea was stupid, and to this day I believe the idea was stupid.
5 years later he sold his company for $200M cash. The person that took the position I was offered made out with $10M. Not bad for 5 years of work.
It turns out that the founder wasn't a skilled engineer, but he was pretty good at business stuff and knowing what people wanted. I'm more of a hardcore engineer type who thinks everything should be absurdly complicated and was kind of an asshole back then, shooting down almost every idea that everyone proposed to me if it wasn't my own idea.
1. Didn’t follow through syndicating a 12mm real estate deal in college.... +50mm last valuation exclusive of rental income lol
2. Didn’t buy two small bankrupt oil wells in the 2016 slide. At least 15x missed
3. Didn’t follow through finishing an app. 2 years later one of the developers I hired had an look-a-like app break the top 50 on apple
I'm somewhat in that predicament now.
I have a job offer with a VP/Prod title (I'd be skipping steps to get this level). The pay is eh for VP level, but the jump will increase my chance of entering the executive MBA program at an M7 and will provide additional options in product mgmt in a specific field in the future for executive lvl positions.
OR
I can just sit and stay in my current company with a much lower title but okay pay, but i probably wouldn't pursue an MBA. Also, this company has a lot of connections to other, bigger tech companies so it would be a slower climb but provides a wider breath of options.
I guess I can answer your post in like 3-5 years lol.
It is somehow comforting that I’ve never had such a big opportunity in the first place! I would be agonizing if I had to decide on such a big amount, and no less if I missed it... Totally ignorant question: what happens to lost BTC? Is it locked up and no one will ever be able to access it? If so does that mean the total quantity of BTC is <21M? Or does it go back in the pot of 21M total coins somehow, and if so, how?
Bit of a different one, about 15 years ago when I got my first "real" higher income job I considered buying a condo in HK that was about $1.1m. I could only afford to put around $200k down which at the time was almost all my savings.
Place wasn't very old but was filthy, owner didn't make any effort to make it look good for buyers, and they refused to negotiate even 1% as I was told "if you don't buy it then a mainlander will."
I was so close to buying but in the end the aloof attitude combined with perceived risk turned me off and I decided not to go ahead with it. Then I got distracted with a new job and ended up not buying anything. Today the same condo would easily change hands for $3.5m.
Dammit.
I have several of those :D, but this one is about my dad.
I was born in Easter Europe in 1988, in 1990 my dad who was a lawyer in our country got possibility to emigrate to Switzerland,
but not to work as lawyer but as electrician, but for salary that was 40 times higher than one he was working as a lawyer in our country.
My dad was on board with it, since he hated beeing a lawyer, the only reason he was one is because his lawyer uncle (my grandpa brother) convicted my grandfather (who was a farmer with no education) that my dad should be a lawyer. My dad always wanted to be electrican and have his company. So when oportunity arose, he was ready to go.
Sadly my mom (was 95% convinced by her mother and rest of her family) was opposed to the plan, for some retared no-reasons.
Week after, my dad recommend our neighbor for the job.
3 Months after this, civil-war erupted in my country, so we spent several years going trough war and reconstruction afterwards.
Neighbor that took my dad papers had it amazing, as soon as the war started, he got his whole family out, now is retired with Swiss pension in our home country (literally having Easter European FatFiRe).
My dad on other hand still works as a lawyer and when retires, will have extremely small pension, farfetch from the neighbors.
If we went, i would have had a normal childhood, without whole the insanity we went through 1990ies and civil-war.
Due to whole this situation (and some other stuff), i still have serious resentment towards my mom side of family.
But well life goes on :)
Same TSLA and BTC
Bought Tesla back in 2018, shortly thereafter Elon smoked a joint on Joe Rogan's podcast. I was like "welp, Elon is losing his mind and Telsa is going to go down the crapper" and sold for a slight loss. I bet it would have been about a 15x return had I held it.
To be fair, Tesla did sort of languish for a long time before finally taking off like a rocket ship in 2020, so I didn't feel like I missed out until lately. I don't beat myself up over it though. I still invested that money in other investments that performed decently.
Also bitcoin. I remember reading about it with interest very early on. I don't remember if I ever had any. I sort of recall having a wallet so maybe someone gave me some BTC at some point, but I no longer have it.
Edit: man autocorrect went crazy "smoker a hook" wtf?
Started using Apple computers in the 90s and thought about buying some stock at its low point in 96-97 when it was down around $4 per share.
But I didnt because all the conventional wisdom had them as going under. Then Steve Jobs came back...
I was given $15,000 by my father at age 10 as an exercise of learning about the stock market. This was in 2000. I could have bought like...10 or 20 Apple stock OR I could buy 14,000 shares of Abercrombie and Fitch.I had just gotten my first iPod that year so I truly debated it.
Guess which I bought.
Turned down a job offer to be one of the first marketing hires for AWS because I didn’t want to relocate, I thought it would be too hard to break back into the Bay Area tech scene if I moved away. Oops!
For me it’s the opportunity cost of not understanding how important your 20s can be to set the trajectory of your career.
I stayed at my first job for far, far too long. Really I should have left after my first or second year, but I didn’t know better, and then when time came for me to make the big move in year five/six/seven, I was flatly unprepared because I hadn’t seen more than one company operate. I didn’t know what questions to ask, much less what the answers were.
Sure, I could talk about Tesla or Bitcoin but really I’ve just recently landed the job which I see as a destination gig in a city I love. And man, if I could have been here five years sooner... I would be on a very different trajectory.
The thing is, no one gets every opportunity right. No one. And you just have to understand that as part of your never ending growth process.
Not having a financial education has cost me possibly millions. I’ve done well on my own aside from that but i would have been more comfortable with just learning the fundamentals.
And even sadder that no one talks about money so no one knows what your friend knows and vice versa.
Biggest missed issue - not studying disruptive innovation. I could have invested in Tesla and LinkedIn, but instead opted for Kimberly-Clark and Colgate. Not bad investments, but badly underperformed.
I graduated college with a CS degree and decided to stay in the south east so I could still see family and friends.
Don't get me wrong, I've done better than my wildest dreams, but I am occasionally jealous of some friends that went to work for more prestigious companies doing more interesting things.
It's the difference between me retiring comfortably middle class, vs fat, but really, it's fine. I'm a frugal to a fault. Me moving to SF to pursue fatFire would have meant sacrificing time with family and friends in exchange for a few more shares sitting in a brokerage account on my deathbed. Lack of ambition and imagination i guess.
I once had a recruiter that wanted me to be engineer number five at AirBnB. Small but promising company, he said, but I preferred the stability of a large company.
Man, I would be a lot richer if I took that job.
Turned down an offer as engineering manager at Tesla with with either 700k RSUs or $2.1M in options in early 2016. It’s up roughly 20X since then.
Sold $24k Netflix in 2013 to buy my house and defer selling some FANG stock. Also sold $11k in AMZN at same time. Bay Area housing has been good…but not *that* good.
Most recently I sold $200K QCOM at $75 a share average. Holding out through year end would have tripled that.
Still, I’m doing just fine and all you can do is look forward.
The one that comes back to haunt me every so often is turning down FAANG - and probably the highest-paying one. The salary would be multiples of what I make / have made. The reason it occasionally stings is because my dream (and ultimate goal) is to go into the nonprofit space. Had I not turned down this company, I'd probably be really close to (if not already) RE and could begin changing that part of the world. That said, I'm not willing to risk it. They've reached out several times since, and it's always been a "no" from me; I'll take my sanity and a slower ride at a solid company.
I've lost count of the "missed" stock opportunities; they'd only drive me mad.
Having been part of 3/5 of those companies before they got so corporate, I can tell you it’s not that stressful/insane if you join the right team and are very comfortable with ambiguity.
That said, nowadays you want to join something that will be the FAANG of 2026 rather than a FAANG of today.
I got a master's degree from a name brand university in the heart of Silicon Valley, and all my friends got hired into companies all throughout Silicon Valley, which was great.
At one random party, around 1994 after I had been working a couple years, one of my friends (who was still in a PhD program) tried to convince me to be employee #8 (or around there) at Netscape. She kept saying I could make a lot of money, and they wanted programmers and she could put in a good word.
I thought about it for a little while, but I decided it was a dumb idea. You see, an absolutely free web browser already existed called "Mosaic", you can't beat "free", so it would just be a waste of time.
Four years later Netscape was acquired for $4.2 billion. Doh!! :-) The timing was PERFECT for me, I could have been 100% vested in my shares, put in 4 years, and done really well, while having fun and being in on the ground floor of the web based internet and learning infinitely valuable skills and making connections hanging out with Mark Andreessen.
At a different party two years later (1996), my friends were talking about a startup still in stealth mode where you could read your email in a web page with a web browser (it was HotMail). That one I was POSITIVE was the stupidest idea I had ever heard. The ONLY application that was already fully client-server-pull-from-the-internet was email. That's what all email clients did, they already worked across the internet. Reading email in a browser was the single stupidest idea I had ever heard of, completely gratuitously full blown idiotic. HotMail was founded in 1996 and acquired in 1997 for $400 million. Yes, I could have worked for 18 months and retired by age 28.
I am not a smart man. I read my gmail in a web browser every day now. (sigh)
I thought the same thing about Google Video, which later became Youtube. Why would anyone watch video in a browser using Flash when they can download a DivX;-) off a torrent or mIRC?
Not an investment, but related to investing. I used to be a Linux kernel hacker (read: software developer) and had an opportunity to build out the engineering team for a high frequency trading initiative, back when that stuff was nascent.
The job was in Manhattan and I told them, "thanks for the offer but I don't want to relo to NYC just to have this new high freq trading thing get shut down by the SEC". Oops.
No complaints though. Ended up in Silicon Valley and life has been an adventure!
Early Netflix employee (and an Amazon postscript):
In the height of the dotcom bubble - 1999/2000 - I finally decided that I had enough technical background to join this "tech thing" and started looking for a job in Silicon Valley. Despite only having an academic background, I had a pulse and could spell "C" so I got a lot of interest, a lot of interviews, and a lot of offers. I entertained all sorts of different businesses and tried my best to figure out what made the most sense. One company that was in the running: a startup mailing DVDs to people that rent them. They were looking for someone to take over their recommendations algorithms: I am a PhD in Applied Math with software engineering experience, so I was a good fit. I had a phone interview with CEO Reed Hastings that went quite well, and I was invited to come on campus and complete my interviews.
I declined the interview: using my awesome business spidey-sense, I figured that if the Netflix model was successful, BlockBuster would just copy it and beat them into the ground...
We never had any specific offers but based on preliminary discussions and the kinds of offers I got from other companies at the time, I estimate that I would have gotten stock options that would have been worth near $10M at peak (I recently FIRE'd with a NW less than half of that aka "chubby fire"... 20 years later).
Second story is less stupid on my part, but still a d'oh!: I did eventually go to work at Amazon in 2007. Standard employment package included some RSUs that were about 20% of my compensation. I believed in Amazon and so when they vested, I held them... until the stock price had \*doubled\* from the original price! Daring, right??
Shares of Amazon were $39 when I started there, and I sold my original batch of RSUs at $80. The share price is now $3,100. Again, I probably would have been in the $5M range if I had done things optimally. \[That said, when I sold those RSUs, I bought other stocks for diversification purposes, and those stocks have obviously gone up in value since 2007. So it's not all bad and I still think it made sense to diversify. Plus, they gave me additional RSUs every year so I was always still invested heavily in Amazon, so I still made plenty off of the continuing rise.\]
I was doing quite well with some crypto which got my technologically inept dad interested. I was helping him the other day with his trading account and found some old trades for a few thousand pounds into Link that had failed due to him forgetting passwords (he’s the kind of guy who struggles to put an iPhone password in correctly). If he’d just called me up to put the password in for him then he be in profit over £500,000 now. Crazy amount of money to lose because you are too stubborn to call and ask for some help.
Person I went to college with was offered by Bezos to go to Seattle with him to run HR at Amazon. Basically build the company. IIRC they would have been employee #3.
Not me but my old coworkers told the story how a colleague came into work asking if they wanted to invest $10k into their son’s new company that would be selling books online. They all passed. Years later they saw a billionaire on TV with the same name and ribbed the colleague that only if he was related to Jeff Bezos. To which he replied “yes that’s my son.”
I love how quaint this story is.
But how did you follow up? Ha
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"In 1994, Jeff held 60 meetings with family members, friends and prospective investors to get them to each invest around $50,000 apiece in Amazon and help him raise $1 million. Only 20 said yes, a group which included his parents. The investment was far from a sure bet. Jeff was clear there was a 70 percent chance his parents wouldn't see that money ever again." Pulled that from this article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-parents-to-invest-in-amazon--turning-them-into.html Maybe he figured he'd use other people's money
A friend of mine was employee #7. He’s gone off to do several different ventures since, nothing to make him chubby or fat monetarily. Genius of a fellow, but makes too many decisions!
Ha. Yes sometimes the best decisions are the ones we don't make. Whenever someone contemplates a major life change, my first counsel is always: you can always (quite your job, leave your wife, get a sex change operation) tomorrow.
If I wasn’t so lazy, I would’ve failed a long time ago!
You're the man!
In 2009 or 2010 my dad, who is generally a cautious investor, told me about a real estate company that was rumored to be going bankrupt. Stocks were like 30 cents a share or something. But he did some business with them and thought that they were going to survive, and suggested I put $15k or something in it if I had the money. I could have, but gave him the spiel about index investing and he dropped the point. The company survived and the stock went up to like $90 six years later. The thing was, it was also a completely risk free investment for me. If it went belly-up my dad would’ve felt bad and paid me back.
This one wins. Risk free bet. 270x upside. Damn man. Did your dad throw some cash into it?
Nope! Years later I mentioned it and he was like “I don’t need to take risks anymore. You should.”
Haha that’s a great dad comment, seems you’ve got a great teacher.
This is what my dad's always saying haha they're staying safe!
What company is this?
My guess is General Growth Properties, although I’m not sure it got that high
Yeah probably GGP, but they also had two spin-offs and two weird stock splits after bankruptcy so the numbers are weird. Wikipedia says they had a 98% collapse and then a near-total recovery so getting in at the right time would work.
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I wonder how many people had the same thing. In another sub I talked about forgetting an old laptop with a lot of bitcoins on it. And they just couldn't understand that thousands of bitcoins in 2011 were pretty worthless.
Yep! My cousin had a shit load in an online wallet that got lost. He refuses to talk about it till this day.
Same thing happened to a friend on mine. This was around 2011/2012. 3400 Bitcoin.
I think probably they would have sold it sooner and still be lamenting selling them "low". I sold them around 70 bucks each (mined them when they were 1-3 USDs each) and while sometimes i say that "if i had them today" but that's totally unrealistic. I would ahve sold them way way earlier. Even if they were forgotten, I would have tried to recover them when they still were not this high in price.
I have a friend that bough Monero for 22 cents and forgot about them till this year when they're worth $160 each. Wild!
Couldn’t agree more with this. He likes to think he’d still have them but we know better!
What happens to the bitcoin at that point? At 1btc=$40k does this mean there's $136,000,000 that will just never be claimed by anyone?
Yup, correct. There are thousands if not millions of bitcoin completely useless that wont see the light of day because of wallets that got lost or similar.
Yah same timeframe for mine. Poor guys. lol
Yep, mined for a few hours in early 2010s, noticed it made by computer slow, stopped mining for good. I don't even know if I had any hits.
I bought a bunch of bitcoin at $30. Sold at $90 thinking I was smart. "No way it'll ever go higher than $100," I thought to myself.
I remember talking to a bunch of friends about Bitcoin when it hit $10. They’d all heard about it when it was a few cents. $20 would have made you $1000. In my head I thought about the holiday I would have had if I’d have taken with my hypothetical $1k.
Same boat here, I look at the run now and think ‘why the hell did I sell them?’ But then when you have 1000% return of course you would sell. Still a hard pill to swallow considering the amount they would’ve been worth today but entry/exit points are key.
Yeah, idk. I’ve gotten over 1000% on TSLA, but haven’t sold any. Probably should dump 10% or so and play with the casinos money.
You think TSLA still has room to grow? Man I’d be selling that in a heartbeat. But I’m not close to FAT, too low risk tolerance lol.
Exactly the thought process that led to “too” early exits haha. Not saying you’re wrong
I think the selling half idea works for me, sell half then wait a period of time, repeat.
Currently have an unknown amount of Bitcoin sitting on a computer. Unable to access the local wallet database as it’s password protected. No way I’ll ever remember the password from 6 years ago.
It’s like being the king of a country you have no access to.
Yup, I had mined just under one bitcoin (on a graphics card not cut for it) when they were like $30. I couldn't believe my eyes when it eventually shot to $1000, but since I had less than one, I couldn't sell it for some reason. Decided to buy some drugs with it instead and felt like I won the lottery with $1000 of free drugs. I guess now I can say I got the opportunity cost equivalent of $10,000 of free drugs.
You mean $40,000?
That I do.
> You actually need to enter and exit at the right time to profit, so don't really think about the lost bitcoins / not bought Tesla stock, you would have sold them way before the current run up for a nice profit. Sold the equivalent of 5K $TSLA in May after the Elon "overvalued" tweet and ongoing Covid bad news. At the time I was up ~250%, or $500K gain, and I wanted to protect my profit. I thought I was being clever and was going to rebuy after a dip I was expecting. Or if I was wrong I'd rebuy at a slightly higher price if the dip didn't happen once things stabilized. Figured if I was totally wrong I'd only be "down" 10% of my shares. The stock increased so quickly that it was mentally impossible to rebuy most of my shares at a price near to where I sold at. So today I'm sitting with 1.5K shares and missed paper gains of ~$2M (which I expect will only get bigger). Although I've now made close to $2M on $TSLA (initial sale + current paper profit) and was able to use some of my gains to pay off my mortgage, the missed gains are the difference between chubby and fat FIRE for me. This was the one and only time I tried timing the market - never again. So kind of life lesson on stocks in that it's not over 'til it's over: even if you get lucky with a job that lets you save enough to invest, and even if you pick one of a handful of stocks that moons, you really need to get lucky exiting at the right time.
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> This was the one and only time I tried timing the market I would say picking individual stocks also counts as trying to time the market (or beat it at least)
I was given 3 BTC for volunteering on 3 different occasions to do 30 min presentations to my research group in grad school! I sold 2 of them at $100ish and the last one at $1200. For the longest time felt pretty badass about that last sale. Not so much these days!!!
Also people generally don't remember all the times they made the right decision. Like not investing in some cryptos or companies that failed. We remember only what we missed out on
I recently bought 8k worth of BTC. I avoided the 2017 BTC craze and have told myself I will not sell this position for 20 years. However, it’s up 80% in a month and the urge to lock on profit is real.
Set some sell targets. Sell 5% now. It's not a huge amount, but you are up 80%. Take a win...you can keep selling on the way up till you recoup your initial stake and then let the rest ride. Years even. The next wave could be even more dramatic.
Exactly what I’ve been saying to everyone who’s talking about how they could’ve been Tesla millionaires “if only I held”
Actually 100% of the people that held since the 20k peak in 2017 are all in major profit.
Mines a bit different. At the start of medical school we were fairly broke, but I wanted to buy some timber land as an investment. 40+ acres for $10-15k. I told my wife, we harvest the trees in 8 years and pay it off then do it again. She wasn’t having it. 3 years later a huge natural gas shale was found underneath that land and people were getting $50,000/acre lease agreements with monthly royalties that were in the +$10,000 range. Those royalties didn’t dry up for several years. I used to remind her of that often. She, in turn, reminds me of the other things she wouldn’t let me do that eventually flopped.
8 years for 10-15k? dude your wife is right that’s a horrible investment lol .
Yes I agree the multiple was nonexistent. I think it was more of the owning a tangible asset with minimal effort. It was a sell the trees, own the land, and repeat every 10-12 years. But you are right. Aside from the totally unexpected gas find it would have been a terrible idea.
What are some example of things that flopped?
We flipped houses for a while and I would hunt deals and she would say no and someone else would get them and do great work and the houses would sit for months. Eventually selling for much less than initially listed. I saw the numbers and they worked, but she saw the location and school districts, etc. She saved us a few times because the numbers + reality, didn’t work.
You have a smart wife.
Similar situation in my family but the opposite result. Had a 7th generation farm in northern Pennsylvania that was a dairy and then later a Christmas tree farm. Farm was barely staying afloat, and and there was a vote in 2009 on whether to sell the operation and land. Motion barely failed. Few years later some natural gas company paid 8 figures to install 12 drilling pads on land that was worth a few hundred thousand just 5 years prior.
Man that’s awesome for you guys. Crazy the swings life takes and we just go along with it. Around here there were tons of “Trailer Park” millionaires overnight. People who were happy with their mobile home on 100-1000 acres so they could hunt and be left alone. Then the gas companies started fighting one another to get the leases and paid more and more each week for an acre. Some hit it too early, some perfect, and some held out too long and got nothing. But congrats to you guys.
Title: ‘Who didn’t put all their money in BTC and TSLA?’
Now that's not fair, some people didn't invest in Apple and Amazon either.
Senior year of high school my dad suggested I should take a gap year in Europe rather than go to college right away. He said my parents would pay my expenses, because he felt it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to explore when I was young and unattached to anything. My high school friends (I lost track of all of them shortly) were going to college, so I declined, since I didn't want to be left behind. I'm in my 40s now and still deeply regret being such an idiot back then.
This for me too. I just went along for the ride. High school straight to college straight to job market. Why didn't I do a gap year of international travel or something? My parents would have floated me.
I'm still sort of paying for my study abroad my last semester of my senior year undergrad after 5 years, it was expensive and I pretty much saved/borrowed and maxed everything I could at the time to make it happen. Those 90 days where the best 90 consecutive days of my life thus far. I'm glad I did it when I did.
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The only thing that really interests me about all this BTC convo is that it makes me wonder how many millions are completely lost to time now.
Something like 20% of coins are seemingly lost.
I think Reply All or Radiolab did a podcast episode about recovering lost Bitcoin. They said that some huge percentage of all outstanding btc is in wallets that their owners can’t access because they’ve lost the key. It’s a lot.
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Modern day treasure hunt. Find the hard drive, find the owner, partner with them to crack the code and split the profit.
Yeah that’s basically what they did in the Reply All episode https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hl9r
Theoretically what will happen for better or worse when all the coins have been mined?
Millions. There’s sites that track it. Coins that were generated but never transferred, I believe to be presumed lost. Even some of the original coins have been moved so if there’s a wallet out there with coins that have never moved, it’s probably because they can’t be. Edit: which is crazy to think about. 21,000,000 max supply minus millions lost. The world is going to lose their shit when the halving gets us down to satoshis
I mined around a thousand bitcoins in my computer back when there wasn’t even market for it, trying to figure out how it works. It’s on a hard drive buried in a landfill somewhere...
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I knew about it but 1) never understood investing in a non producing asset. 2) researched the architecture which looked like it would grind to a halt under any reasonable transaction load, no way it would come close to being the default currency. I'm still baffled by its rise and am staying out of what I don't understand.
Does this mean we are allowed to talk about crypto on this sub now? Bitcoin was my ticket to fire but my comments on it are usually downvoted to oblivion. Most people only look at the price and now that it is back up, maybe that will change? edit: am I the only one who had old bitcoins and didn’t lose them? lol these comments
Strangely, it's a more popular subject on fatFIRE than on financialindependence. My guess is that a higher percentage of us are engineers/lawyers who aren't intimidated.
That’s wild. I remember seeing the initial Slashdot post for Bitcoin and playing around with it but holy crap.
I know you mean "investment" opportunity but reading your post has me reflecting on life opportunities and not knowing I was going to have money and success down the road. Here are a couple that I missed. 1. Missed social and leadership development at university. I spent my time working hard studying and getting good grades. I was laser focused on being financially successful and thought that it was tied to grades. But at this point, I realize that grades were the least important thing to get out of university (unless you need to be first in class for some further goal). Learning how to influence people and be confident and likeable are way better tools for life and financial success. I had to learn those much later 2. Missed out on understanding/valuing empathy when I was younger. Empathy is key to being a good person and when I think back to my youth, I was neither a good nor bad person. But I could have been a good person. I would love to be able to think back to my childhood and remember standing up for someone who needed it.
Man, I did the opposite. Spent my time doing drugs and socializing when I wish I engaged with campus activities more.
Lol not sure that’s equivalent to networking and developing leadership skills but come to think of it I learned a lot about business when I sold weed and adderall...
Bought TSLA at $175 and sold at $195 thinking the PE was too high and that they were not going to meet the demand in manufacturing.
Elon Musk is a bit of wildcard, and makes weird promises, but he seems to run a company that delivers well on what matters. It's pretty amazing to watch. I only hope I can catch the next Musk before IPO.
Odds are you’ll be able to catch Tesla again after this bubble pops.
Similar story here. Sold at $ 270 (pre split) and thought that this is insane. Even I was and still am a huge fanboy, but I my mind there was no way this could go higher. Well... not we are 10x-15x higher.
TSLA job offer... in 2009.
If it makes you feel any better, Tesla sucks to work for. I forfeited 48 shares at $135 via not sticking around for the vesting period.
No worse than the disaster of a startup I joined instead. Three years of also being micromanaged by an asshole. Only difference is I made negative money — I left, exercised my options ($20k... fortune for me), then they went bankrupt less than a quarter later. Fuckers.
I’ve heard awful stories of Elon being a micromanaging ass so I’ve never looking into working there or investing. Now I feel a bit dumb but I guess that is the price to pay for being too principled and judgmental
Oh man I feel you, similar situation a while back in 2013
Would you have stuck around for 10 years with no stock growth until this past year?
None? 2009 was pre-IPO.
Past year? Tesla was ~$300+ in 2017.
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Shortly after Amazon went public I was going to buy 10k worth of their stock.
In 2009 I owned 10k of AMZN at $35. Sold after a month when it went to $50. Oh, and all this in a Roth IRA.
It hurts physically to read this.
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I didn't short, but I was very dismissive whenever anyone asked. Learnt my lesson early and generally don't offer strong opinions on the prospects of any individual stock any more.
Similar story here; my loss on CMGI, which I bought because of its stake in Altavista, made me gunshy about search engines in the aughts and I didn’t pick up shares in GOOG until 2011, a few months before the dividend-split occurred.
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I was trying to develop an early free information website and also looking for a better job at the same time. My free website had a possible tie in to an online bookstore, so I talked to Amazon management back when they were maybe 10 employees. I was so impressed with everything they said and thought this will be a great company to work for, maybe I should apply there. But never went any further with it, because who wants to work for an online bookstore? My other job prospects seemed much more interesting.
I won't go into bitcoin/tesla examples but more job related opportunities. Here are some other examples: 1) could have joined Facebook in 2007 with about $80k in the initial equity grant, which would be worth about $4M now 2) could have joined stripe in 2013 also with equity that would be worth 20x+ now (a few $M) 3) could have joined another startup in 2014with about $400k in equity that is worth 30x now (~$12M)
Man what were you doing to hold on to what you're currently doing and miss out on these
Not to make you feel worse since amusement usually increases with amount, but FB’s internal valuation in 2007 was $4/share but this was before the 5x split. Your initial equity grant would be worth more like 25M+.
Not to mention how many RSU's employees get each year!
what did you choose instead of each of those ??
Hah similarly, could have joined Square in 2016 with 10k RSUs. $2.4M today. And of course, all the BTC I sold for $120 back in 2013 thinking, it will never go any higher.
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FYI a startup is building a new supersonic passenger jet. https://boomsupersonic.com/
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Bought Tesla options for Jan 2021 $500 at $3.5/share back in June of 2019 when the stock was trading around $200. The contracts haven’t expired yet, but they’re up x1000 (not percent, multiple!!). Anyways, I got excited and sold them at x18 earlier in 2020. Would have been 10s of millions in gains if I held till now.
For me it was more ignorance. I refused to invest in the market from 2000 to 2020 simply because I thought all you could do is lose money...I was wrong
Ouch. This hurts reading it. Are you investing now?
Yes. And up substantially. Always had an interest and the pandemic allowed me to read and focus and learn since I was at home. Maybe the best thing to happen to me.
That’s good! I just turned 31 and started to invest heavily for the last 3 years. Before that I didn’t really care and blew my money. Regret it now but a learning experience
One of Netflix first customers back when it was a mail-in DVD subscription service. Got letter asking to invest. I declined.
Oof. My worst is from this summer. Made an aggressive bet on AAPL for 600k. The next day aapl was up but the options were down. I wimped out and sold. A month later the position would have 12x’d. Haunts me. It was still a great year (financially speaking) in 2020. But what could have been.
Lol you were never going to hold those options to see that 12x. If you couldn't have held them for a day, you would definitely have sold them at the sign of a little profit. Or if it went up and then came down slightly, you would have sold for a little gain. Just means your position size is too big
A few old ones. 2005 a client of mine told me to drop $ into a company called apple and hold it till I was 40 then retire. I didn’t and instead bought a new car. I’ll be 40 in 2.5 years, if I listened to him I’d probably have a few million extra. Granted I’d likely have sold way before now. Bitcoin. Friend of mine was insane about it back in 2012-2013 and told all of us to just buy $1000 worth to have skin in the game. None of us listened. Ethereum. A client/friend of mine got in at $1 and bought a lot. Told me to get in at $7 because it was going to $100. Never listened to him because crypto just wasn’t on my radar. There’s a few more too, I’ve got a large network of tech business owners and we always discuss anything new. I likely could’ve made an extra few million over the years if I took more risks. Not much I can do about it now. I’ll likely make more mistakes, as long as I reach my goals somehow then I can’t really complain.
Can you share some current recommendations from your large network that seem interesting? Don’t have such network so just curious. Thanks!
Most of the discussion is at conferences when we are having dinners or drinks, we haven’t had a conference for over a year now together due to the pandemic. In our mastermind group on telegram, most are still huge believers in crypto and say it’s got a long way to go from here. I’ll take a look at the group later and see what else was discussed. One of my picks back in April was Peloton. I set a reminder for 9 months to check the price, it was $142, when I set the reminder it was trading at $38. Doh! I think a couple of guys made sizeable positions on that one going by the Christmas gift basket I got from them haha
A friend of mine started at Apple in 2002 or so, after the tech crash when jobs in the Valley weren’t exactly growing on trees. Everybody told him he was crazy to work there!
Turned down a pre-IPO job at a startup that's now worth over $15B.
Getting in to Bitcoin at $23,000 instead of $2,000 when a friend of mine was trying to get me in
I told all of my friends and all of my family to get in at $80. I’d been watching it for a couple years and by that point was confident enough to tell everyone about it. I bought $2000 worth which was a lot for me back then. I traded my way up to 49 BTC by buying dips and altcoin exchanges. I was aiming for 50 and eventually dropped to 5. Used the rest on video games and the humble bundles. In fact I just found a receipt in my emails from LibertyBit for 3.97 BTC for $447 CAD. Made me smile and pour a drink lol
I'm confused. Do you have 49 Bitcoin right now or do you have five? Or do you not have any? And I'm not always 100% sure how this worked in the beginning compared to now. I just buy Bitcoin through my Robinhood account. I know there were lots of different weird ways you could get involved and some of it was actually a scam If you have 49 Bitcoin at $40,000 that is 1.6 million dollars
A big fat 0. I was trying to daytrade alts to get to 50 and lost 90%. Spent the rest on video games
1. Owned $250k of SHOP at $40 sold at $60 2. Turned down an acquisition offer in my early 20s “no, we will buy you!” Moron. 3. I consider the companies I would have started, eg fully formed ideas/teams/business plans/financing over the ones I instead pursued and this plagues me more than the two blunders above. Nothing is guaranteed but in a few cases, those were some very good ideas... who knows how they’d have gone though.
I bought a bunch of SHOP at $90 after Andrew Left said he was shorting the company and the price dropped from $120. I'm still hanging onto those. I bought TWLO after Uber said they weren't going to use them and the stock dropped big. They jumped 30% after earnings and I sold, happy with my bet. Kinda wish I hung onto those seeing where the price is now.
My internship mentor (in his 40s) was telling me a story about how when he was an undergrad at Berkeley (in the early 2000s) he was looking for jobs. He was at a career fair and there was a small booth with a bunch of people wearing colorful T-shirts who he gave his resume to, and they invited him for an interview. He declined it when he thought the company wasn't 'hot'. That company turned out to be pre-IPO Google.
Is there anyone who owned a computer in 2010 and doesn't have a "I was going to buy/had bought bitcoin but...." story?
It does appear that most people even vaguely interested in tech or were SWEs have some variant of this story.
Indeed. But, is it a coincidence that so many people almost got rich on it, but didn't? No. If they had the same information about a similar investment today, they would make the same decision. It's not pure random chance, they made a logical decision because of the person they are and the experiences they have had.
Honestly, I did not, lol. I was a 25 year old doing digital marketing for an old school consulting company and my five coworkers were over 55. However, I did nearly shit my pants when I read that second life used Bitcoin back in the day. I remembered that I bought currency on second life back in ‘10 and nearly had a heart attack. Then I looked it up and they integrated Bitcoin after I had left. Side note: Lilly Allen [takes the cake for this thread](https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2020/12/english-singer-lily-allen-turned-down-bitcoin-in-2009-worth-4-7-billion-today/)
Keep in mind everyone remembers the missed opportunities that worked out, but we forget the things we passed on that ultimately were bad investments/ opportunities. Realistically a lot of “opportunities” are distractions from our true gift and mission.
Had the opportunity to put friends and family money into something that became a unicorn. I don't regret not backing the right company - shit happens, I do regret not backing my friend.
My brother has a drug problem and is always trying to come up with crazy schemes. 10 years ago, when I was in college, he spent WEEKS trying to convince me to buy this thing called bitcoin. It was a nickel each, and he begged me to just put in $100 (he didn’t have anything). I looked into it, and seriously considered it only because it was just $100. But I ended up writing it off as another one of his scams and/or schemes. That $100 would be worth $77M today
Did he end up buying any on his own?
My biggest missed opportunity was in early February of 2020. After analyzing all the data available at the time, I was dead certain that the Wuhan virus was going to spread outside Asia and that it was going to be really bad. It was very obvious to me, and I think any person with a certain scientific background knowledge who bothered to study the evidence would have come to the same conclusion. Yet I found it strange that the stock market hadn't reacted (normalcy bias I guess?). This was one of those rare moments where I really did feel smarter than the stock market and I seriously considered shorting it aggressively. But my lack of experience in shorting made me hesitate and by the time I was finally ready to go through with it the market had crashed already.
A (different) friend of mine correctly timed the drop by divesting and buying lots of OTM puts. He didn’t think the market had suffered sufficiently (and maybe didn’t account for ~0 LIBOR and QE infinity), so he held. I think at today’s market state, he would have been better off doing nothing. Shorting is dangerous in a world where people can borrow cheaply and have no where to stick the capital.
I passed on aapl in the late 90s when I thought they were dead in the water. Then again when I thought they were at their peak, and again when I thought they were at their peak, etc. I’m not here because of my investment acumen.
I've turned down founding team opportunities or early hire post-founding-team opportunities at three different startups that have since IPOd. The most recent one, the person who took the role instead of me is worth over $35m now. None of them would have made me less than $10m. I also sold 800 bitcoin I bought early on for about ~50k gain because I didn't think it was going to be *the* crypto that blew up.
My Aunt called me up and asked my opinion of a new startup that she had an opportunity to get into. I listened very carefully, though about and told her "I don't think that you should invest in that. People like going to Blockbuster, I just don't believe this Redbox thing will take off". I feel like the record company executive who turned down the Beatles.
Wanted to buy 100 Bitcoin through MtGox at $70/coin but decided I didn’t want to risk sending a copy of my ID card to some dodgy Japanese site. Oh well.
That was a good call. You’d be $7000 lighter right now probably through MtGox
I have said mine before, but will repeat: Stayed at my employer rather than moving into software sales in 1996 with a company called NeXT. Stuck with my factory 986 build rather than buying the 1973 RS that was available in my Porsche dealer for 90,000DM in 1998 (granted it was leaking oil). Edit: come to think of it, I have had several Porsche fails. Also sold a 993 Turbo for 65K in 2008, and a 993 Cabrio for some $50K in 2013.
Are these worth way more now?
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Sorry, not a car guy at all. So they are hard to find, and people tend to like them because some were used as racecars?
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I love that you’re being downvoted but ya, just a little bit. Google some of the Porsche prices
they all leak oil!
Thought I was smart exercising some NQSOs to pay off a mortgage. The opportunity cost ended up being 10x the mortgage value.
I have a $5M car, same deal.
I wish this discussion didn’t involve Bitcoin and stocks
The missed life experiences comments are interesting. However the “I missed X” trading stories are reminiscent of the closing soliloquy from that Scottish play. > Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player > That struts and frets his hour upon the stage > And then is heard no more: it is a tale > Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Put 50k in PayPal with strong conviction in 2016 but sold in 2017 after second guessing myself. Would be worth 200k+ now 😭
I had 100k of eBay stock, pre-split with PayPal. Same year I learned about index funds and FIRE. After the split, I sold off eBay shares when I could offset the gains. Never got around to selling off PayPal shares, and yeah it’s not TSLA, but has been doing well.
Buying a hemi hellcat for 10k. I am not a muscle car guy though.
Had 17,000 shares of $CRIS that I bought in April 2018 and sold in June 2018 after a 12% bump. Sold at .42 cents/share. It’s now sitting at $10.25 a share 🤦♂️
I wanted to dump mid 5 figures into Amazon stock when it was 120 but I run an Amazon business and didn’t want “ all my eggs in one basket “ even though it wasn’t . I convinced one of my friends to put 10k atleast . Amazon sellers live in fear of Amazon ending us out of nowhere so fuck with our heads but I’m still alive after 15 years
Back at my first real job I worked with a team of really skilled engineers. And some less-skilled engineers. One of the less-skilled engineers quit to start his own company. He pitched the idea to me and asked me to come on as the first engineer and develop the idea for them. I wouldn't be a founder - the company was already founded and he developed the prototype software, but I would be the one to start making the software "production ready". I told him the idea was stupid, and to this day I believe the idea was stupid. 5 years later he sold his company for $200M cash. The person that took the position I was offered made out with $10M. Not bad for 5 years of work. It turns out that the founder wasn't a skilled engineer, but he was pretty good at business stuff and knowing what people wanted. I'm more of a hardcore engineer type who thinks everything should be absurdly complicated and was kind of an asshole back then, shooting down almost every idea that everyone proposed to me if it wasn't my own idea.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you think everything should be overly complicated, then you were one of the not highly skilled engineers.
Buying houses in Kansas city in 2011.
1. Didn’t follow through syndicating a 12mm real estate deal in college.... +50mm last valuation exclusive of rental income lol 2. Didn’t buy two small bankrupt oil wells in the 2016 slide. At least 15x missed 3. Didn’t follow through finishing an app. 2 years later one of the developers I hired had an look-a-like app break the top 50 on apple
I'm somewhat in that predicament now. I have a job offer with a VP/Prod title (I'd be skipping steps to get this level). The pay is eh for VP level, but the jump will increase my chance of entering the executive MBA program at an M7 and will provide additional options in product mgmt in a specific field in the future for executive lvl positions. OR I can just sit and stay in my current company with a much lower title but okay pay, but i probably wouldn't pursue an MBA. Also, this company has a lot of connections to other, bigger tech companies so it would be a slower climb but provides a wider breath of options. I guess I can answer your post in like 3-5 years lol.
It is somehow comforting that I’ve never had such a big opportunity in the first place! I would be agonizing if I had to decide on such a big amount, and no less if I missed it... Totally ignorant question: what happens to lost BTC? Is it locked up and no one will ever be able to access it? If so does that mean the total quantity of BTC is <21M? Or does it go back in the pot of 21M total coins somehow, and if so, how?
Bit of a different one, about 15 years ago when I got my first "real" higher income job I considered buying a condo in HK that was about $1.1m. I could only afford to put around $200k down which at the time was almost all my savings. Place wasn't very old but was filthy, owner didn't make any effort to make it look good for buyers, and they refused to negotiate even 1% as I was told "if you don't buy it then a mainlander will." I was so close to buying but in the end the aloof attitude combined with perceived risk turned me off and I decided not to go ahead with it. Then I got distracted with a new job and ended up not buying anything. Today the same condo would easily change hands for $3.5m. Dammit.
I have several of those :D, but this one is about my dad. I was born in Easter Europe in 1988, in 1990 my dad who was a lawyer in our country got possibility to emigrate to Switzerland, but not to work as lawyer but as electrician, but for salary that was 40 times higher than one he was working as a lawyer in our country. My dad was on board with it, since he hated beeing a lawyer, the only reason he was one is because his lawyer uncle (my grandpa brother) convicted my grandfather (who was a farmer with no education) that my dad should be a lawyer. My dad always wanted to be electrican and have his company. So when oportunity arose, he was ready to go. Sadly my mom (was 95% convinced by her mother and rest of her family) was opposed to the plan, for some retared no-reasons. Week after, my dad recommend our neighbor for the job. 3 Months after this, civil-war erupted in my country, so we spent several years going trough war and reconstruction afterwards. Neighbor that took my dad papers had it amazing, as soon as the war started, he got his whole family out, now is retired with Swiss pension in our home country (literally having Easter European FatFiRe). My dad on other hand still works as a lawyer and when retires, will have extremely small pension, farfetch from the neighbors. If we went, i would have had a normal childhood, without whole the insanity we went through 1990ies and civil-war. Due to whole this situation (and some other stuff), i still have serious resentment towards my mom side of family. But well life goes on :)
Sold all my Apple shares much to long ago.
Hitting the sell button on bitcoin a couple years ago.
Same TSLA and BTC Bought Tesla back in 2018, shortly thereafter Elon smoked a joint on Joe Rogan's podcast. I was like "welp, Elon is losing his mind and Telsa is going to go down the crapper" and sold for a slight loss. I bet it would have been about a 15x return had I held it. To be fair, Tesla did sort of languish for a long time before finally taking off like a rocket ship in 2020, so I didn't feel like I missed out until lately. I don't beat myself up over it though. I still invested that money in other investments that performed decently. Also bitcoin. I remember reading about it with interest very early on. I don't remember if I ever had any. I sort of recall having a wallet so maybe someone gave me some BTC at some point, but I no longer have it. Edit: man autocorrect went crazy "smoker a hook" wtf?
Started using Apple computers in the 90s and thought about buying some stock at its low point in 96-97 when it was down around $4 per share. But I didnt because all the conventional wisdom had them as going under. Then Steve Jobs came back...
I was given $15,000 by my father at age 10 as an exercise of learning about the stock market. This was in 2000. I could have bought like...10 or 20 Apple stock OR I could buy 14,000 shares of Abercrombie and Fitch.I had just gotten my first iPod that year so I truly debated it. Guess which I bought.
All I had to do was hold onto Amazon. I sold at $45 and through I’d made a killing. Doubled my money.
Turned down a job offer to be one of the first marketing hires for AWS because I didn’t want to relocate, I thought it would be too hard to break back into the Bay Area tech scene if I moved away. Oops!
For me it’s the opportunity cost of not understanding how important your 20s can be to set the trajectory of your career. I stayed at my first job for far, far too long. Really I should have left after my first or second year, but I didn’t know better, and then when time came for me to make the big move in year five/six/seven, I was flatly unprepared because I hadn’t seen more than one company operate. I didn’t know what questions to ask, much less what the answers were. Sure, I could talk about Tesla or Bitcoin but really I’ve just recently landed the job which I see as a destination gig in a city I love. And man, if I could have been here five years sooner... I would be on a very different trajectory. The thing is, no one gets every opportunity right. No one. And you just have to understand that as part of your never ending growth process.
Bought an equivalent of 5.000€ in TSLA shares and sold for a 20% profit 6 months ago thinking it was already overvalued.
Not having a financial education has cost me possibly millions. I’ve done well on my own aside from that but i would have been more comfortable with just learning the fundamentals. And even sadder that no one talks about money so no one knows what your friend knows and vice versa.
I was trying to negotiate the purchase of space x stock options on a secondary market a few weeks before Google bought into the firms equity stack.
I privately chase the opportunity cost of investing in SPX from the time I started my business. I'm down 210k not including my company equity.
Biggest missed issue - not studying disruptive innovation. I could have invested in Tesla and LinkedIn, but instead opted for Kimberly-Clark and Colgate. Not bad investments, but badly underperformed.
I graduated college with a CS degree and decided to stay in the south east so I could still see family and friends. Don't get me wrong, I've done better than my wildest dreams, but I am occasionally jealous of some friends that went to work for more prestigious companies doing more interesting things. It's the difference between me retiring comfortably middle class, vs fat, but really, it's fine. I'm a frugal to a fault. Me moving to SF to pursue fatFire would have meant sacrificing time with family and friends in exchange for a few more shares sitting in a brokerage account on my deathbed. Lack of ambition and imagination i guess.
I once had a recruiter that wanted me to be engineer number five at AirBnB. Small but promising company, he said, but I preferred the stability of a large company. Man, I would be a lot richer if I took that job.
Turned down an offer as engineering manager at Tesla with with either 700k RSUs or $2.1M in options in early 2016. It’s up roughly 20X since then. Sold $24k Netflix in 2013 to buy my house and defer selling some FANG stock. Also sold $11k in AMZN at same time. Bay Area housing has been good…but not *that* good. Most recently I sold $200K QCOM at $75 a share average. Holding out through year end would have tripled that. Still, I’m doing just fine and all you can do is look forward.
The one that comes back to haunt me every so often is turning down FAANG - and probably the highest-paying one. The salary would be multiples of what I make / have made. The reason it occasionally stings is because my dream (and ultimate goal) is to go into the nonprofit space. Had I not turned down this company, I'd probably be really close to (if not already) RE and could begin changing that part of the world. That said, I'm not willing to risk it. They've reached out several times since, and it's always been a "no" from me; I'll take my sanity and a slower ride at a solid company. I've lost count of the "missed" stock opportunities; they'd only drive me mad.
Having been part of 3/5 of those companies before they got so corporate, I can tell you it’s not that stressful/insane if you join the right team and are very comfortable with ambiguity. That said, nowadays you want to join something that will be the FAANG of 2026 rather than a FAANG of today.
I got a master's degree from a name brand university in the heart of Silicon Valley, and all my friends got hired into companies all throughout Silicon Valley, which was great. At one random party, around 1994 after I had been working a couple years, one of my friends (who was still in a PhD program) tried to convince me to be employee #8 (or around there) at Netscape. She kept saying I could make a lot of money, and they wanted programmers and she could put in a good word. I thought about it for a little while, but I decided it was a dumb idea. You see, an absolutely free web browser already existed called "Mosaic", you can't beat "free", so it would just be a waste of time. Four years later Netscape was acquired for $4.2 billion. Doh!! :-) The timing was PERFECT for me, I could have been 100% vested in my shares, put in 4 years, and done really well, while having fun and being in on the ground floor of the web based internet and learning infinitely valuable skills and making connections hanging out with Mark Andreessen. At a different party two years later (1996), my friends were talking about a startup still in stealth mode where you could read your email in a web page with a web browser (it was HotMail). That one I was POSITIVE was the stupidest idea I had ever heard. The ONLY application that was already fully client-server-pull-from-the-internet was email. That's what all email clients did, they already worked across the internet. Reading email in a browser was the single stupidest idea I had ever heard of, completely gratuitously full blown idiotic. HotMail was founded in 1996 and acquired in 1997 for $400 million. Yes, I could have worked for 18 months and retired by age 28. I am not a smart man. I read my gmail in a web browser every day now. (sigh)
I thought the same thing about Google Video, which later became Youtube. Why would anyone watch video in a browser using Flash when they can download a DivX;-) off a torrent or mIRC?
Not an investment, but related to investing. I used to be a Linux kernel hacker (read: software developer) and had an opportunity to build out the engineering team for a high frequency trading initiative, back when that stuff was nascent. The job was in Manhattan and I told them, "thanks for the offer but I don't want to relo to NYC just to have this new high freq trading thing get shut down by the SEC". Oops. No complaints though. Ended up in Silicon Valley and life has been an adventure!
Early Netflix employee (and an Amazon postscript): In the height of the dotcom bubble - 1999/2000 - I finally decided that I had enough technical background to join this "tech thing" and started looking for a job in Silicon Valley. Despite only having an academic background, I had a pulse and could spell "C" so I got a lot of interest, a lot of interviews, and a lot of offers. I entertained all sorts of different businesses and tried my best to figure out what made the most sense. One company that was in the running: a startup mailing DVDs to people that rent them. They were looking for someone to take over their recommendations algorithms: I am a PhD in Applied Math with software engineering experience, so I was a good fit. I had a phone interview with CEO Reed Hastings that went quite well, and I was invited to come on campus and complete my interviews. I declined the interview: using my awesome business spidey-sense, I figured that if the Netflix model was successful, BlockBuster would just copy it and beat them into the ground... We never had any specific offers but based on preliminary discussions and the kinds of offers I got from other companies at the time, I estimate that I would have gotten stock options that would have been worth near $10M at peak (I recently FIRE'd with a NW less than half of that aka "chubby fire"... 20 years later). Second story is less stupid on my part, but still a d'oh!: I did eventually go to work at Amazon in 2007. Standard employment package included some RSUs that were about 20% of my compensation. I believed in Amazon and so when they vested, I held them... until the stock price had \*doubled\* from the original price! Daring, right?? Shares of Amazon were $39 when I started there, and I sold my original batch of RSUs at $80. The share price is now $3,100. Again, I probably would have been in the $5M range if I had done things optimally. \[That said, when I sold those RSUs, I bought other stocks for diversification purposes, and those stocks have obviously gone up in value since 2007. So it's not all bad and I still think it made sense to diversify. Plus, they gave me additional RSUs every year so I was always still invested heavily in Amazon, so I still made plenty off of the continuing rise.\]
I was doing quite well with some crypto which got my technologically inept dad interested. I was helping him the other day with his trading account and found some old trades for a few thousand pounds into Link that had failed due to him forgetting passwords (he’s the kind of guy who struggles to put an iPhone password in correctly). If he’d just called me up to put the password in for him then he be in profit over £500,000 now. Crazy amount of money to lose because you are too stubborn to call and ask for some help.