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There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural netw

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an ActionScript specialist as it was clearly the future of interactive web design - specialized in Blackberry app development as one of the first mobile computing platforms - made major investments in NFTs (any time, really...) Bottom line - if you want to have a chance at outsized returns, but are also willing to accept the risks of dead ends, be early. If you want a smooth, mid-level return, wait it out...

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
bombcar 6mo ago
Some of those things involve a bit of money as a gamble; others require some time learning tooling that can be repurposed (mobile game developers can obviously do mobile apps), and others would be dedicating years of your life into something that may be a dead end.
jghn 6mo ago
A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!
- wolframhempel 6mo ago
  To be fair, I remember being about ten years old and berating my friend who just told me that he had something called "Rebel Assault" on a CD how this was completely impossible as CDs could only store music and how he was a complete idiot for believing otherwise... :-)
- irishcoffee 6mo ago
  I distinctly remember staring at my check/bank/debit card laying on the desk in front of my keyboard, all the info punched in to buy $500 of bitcoin for something like $0.29 a coin. Didn't pull the trigger. I just tell myself I'd have sold them when they doubled in price or they'd have been hacked in one of the mt. gox attacks and I'd have lost them anyways. Today it would be about 120m. Oh well.
  - jghn 6mo ago
    Same. there's no chance I'd have the riches associated with those coins. Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night. There was a local food delivery service at the time that accepted bitcoin. Can you imagine looking back on life and realizing you spent the equivalent of $1M on a burrito?
    - cheevly 6mo ago
      My roommates and I literally bought a pizza with our stash of bitcoins. So yes, we fully understand how this feels.
    - lostmsu 6mo ago
      > Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night. Admirable self-reflection.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- benhurmarcel 6mo ago
  You would probably have sold early for a relatively small amount too. I bought 10ish BTC at some point for almost nothing, sold them for a low 4-digit amount thinking they were stupid anyway. I still think they were stupid but it turns out they could have paid off my house easily. Oh well.
  - Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
    Question is whether you sold all or just a segment. If you bought 100 btc early on, sold 99 of them, you'd still have something worth a deposit for a house or a car now, which is still life-changing.
    - tartoran 6mo ago
      Or bought btc early on and forgot about it. Then haphazardly attenpting to find it on some old HD when the price skyrocketed.. There was a guy who combed through a trash landfill to recover a HD that presumably had dozens of millions in BTC
- irusensei 6mo ago
  IMO the only way you'd be rich with bitcoin would be if you forget about your coins and reminded of it years later or if you were a hardcore "fix the money fix the world hodl" believer. Otherwise you would most likely have sold during one of huge crashes or values, attempted trade and lost it all, invested into the new shitcoin NFT or whatever or just got hacked along the way.
  - jghn 6mo ago
    indeed. even if I didn't lose them along the way or have them stolen via hack, I would have cashed out back when they were outlandishly priced at $100. I never would have held on to them this long. But even $100 would have been nice given you could still pop them out for free on a standard PC back then with mining software.
anticorporate 6mo ago
There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right path for me usually takes a little time to assess where it's headed and what the impacts may be.
- 0x3f 6mo ago
  > My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way.
  - lawtalkinghuman 6mo ago
    > That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. Or in prison for fraud.
  - ashwinsundar 6mo ago
    I didn't realize maximizing money is the way to achieve moral excellence. It's interesting how Puritanical the EA folks are
    - 0x3f 6mo ago
      There is no moral excellence but which you invent for yourself. But given the first principle or goal of 'having the most impact', maximizing money is often quite useful.
      - ashwinsundar 6mo ago
demaga 6mo ago
None of those examples are useful. 1. 2016 was years after Bitcoin was developed. So you could still make 200x returns without being early adopter. 2. Is this even true? I'd bet scraping experts or people who can fine tune LLMs have easier time finding a job than classical ML academics. 3. Candy Crash was released when iPhone was on its 5th iteration. If anything, you just added to OPs points. Being an early adopter gives limited advantage.
- Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  to be fair a friend of mine made one of the first flashlight apps on iOs and made a tidy sum out of it. I think the question really is about how well you hit your timings. You can have held bitcoin but sold it went it hit $5k or less. You can have a technical advantage in a given field but somehow waste it (dead startup, serious illness) and lose your timing. Nobody knows what the right timings are, but I think the OP is pushing for a more consistent risk investment strategy and setting up the timings to raise the floor significantly at the cost of losing some of the best possible ceilings.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  Index funds give you something like the expected value over a huge class of possible investments. What you aim for if you want to invest early is rather a probability distribution of - get rich with a small (but nevertheless realistic) probability p - get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little bit with probability 1-p This is a very different offering than the profit probability distribution that index funds give you.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > What you aim for if you want to invest early Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do. > get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.
    - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
      > I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. This holds if you consider "underperforming" to be a comparison of expected values. On the other hand, if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared, the index fund is the one that looses in the comparison.
      - mahemm 6mo ago
        Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? If not, I'd be curious to hear what is different in that for you.
aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
> - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now > - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush I disagree: Concerning the first point: how neural networks are today is very different from how they were in former days. So, the knowledge of neural networks from the past does only very partially transfer to modern neural networks, and clearly does not make you a very sought-after specialist right now. Concerning your second point: the success of mobile games is very marketing-centric. While it is plausible that being early in mobile games development when the iPhone was released might have opened doors in the game industry for you, I seriously doubt whether having this skill would have made you rich.
- erikerikson 6mo ago
  I can confirm your response to the point you can first
- imtringued 6mo ago
  There's also the problem that there is currently a huge transformer monoculture in the AI space. Everything gets better if you throw transformers at the problem. If you had worked on anything other than a transformer based architecture post 2016, such as Mamba or RWKV, you would have wasted your time. Mamba 3 is the third iteration and somehow I doubt that it will catch on.
rob 6mo ago
I should've started registering a bunch of two and three character and generic .com domains in the early 90s when registration was free.
rdiddly 6mo ago
Crucially those are all investments. Just like creating AI or buying data centers to run AI is an investment. Whereas merely using AI feels more like being in the general population of consumers. The shape of the outlay for it is un-investment-like. A monetary investment is a big charge up front, not a monthly fee. A skills investment looks like effort spent learning, but I mean how difficult is it to type reasonably precise English? Conclusion: you're a customer, not an investor, so you can start any time.
not_a_bot_4sho 6mo ago
Wow, shots fired here for me. I was ahead of the game with my intimidate expertise in ActionaScript and Silverlight! I made 3D engines in browsers well before WebGL was a spec. It was quite profitable for a few years, then poof. Dead end lol
- brailsafe 6mo ago
  Shockwave director studio even!? I think these ideas are similar to long-term relationships. Identify when it's clear it's worth your time, like the author, and commit appropriately, and then when it's time to move on move on. AngularJS, Backbone, Knockout, YUI, were all a wave of pretty groundbreaking frontend technology. It was absolutely worth experimenting with and committing to once they had some uptake, but probably not before then unless you wanted to work on the teams building them. Time went on, they had years of longevity that overlapped with the next wave of Vue, React, and the rest, and those became worth investing in long-term. Along the way, fundamentals in underlying web technologies were crucial, programming, logic, networking, markup, design. Actionscript was totally worth investing in, until it ran it's course, and then other things came along and you would have adapted your game programming and engine programming skills yo a different platform.
mock-possum 6mo ago
In all fairness I was an actionscript specialist, and up until 2010 or so I was making REAL good money doing contract flash work - Luckily I was also doing frontend work alongside, so when the time came to transition to html+css+javascript, it wasn’t much of a move at all, it was just putting down AS and focusing fully on JS
fermentation 6mo ago
There's really no need to be "early" for something like this. I've seen coworkers who've never used agentic coding pick it up and know everything that need to in ~2 days. The people who really dive in and are running orchestrated agents overnight are in general not building much of real value.
hakunin 6mo ago
> If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return Except you would've probably sold it at any of 1.5x, 2x, 4x, or 10x points. That's what people keep missing about this whole "early bitcoin". You couldn't tell it will 2x at 1.5x, you couldn't tell it will 4x at 2x, and so on.
koonsolo 6mo ago
I get what you are saying, but as someone who was coding mobile apps in 2003 (iPhone was released in 2007), I have to give a few details. By the time iPhone was released, it was already too late for small companies. When you developed apps and games for MS PocketPC and Blackberry, you charged $20 per app, and any average quality product would make money. In 2007, there were only 2 kinds of success stories: 1. Companies that were able to throw a lot of money around (Your example of Candy Crush). 2. Some rare flukes of someone getting rich with some app. So what I was trying to say: The golden days were really before the release of the iPhone.
ivm 6mo ago
FWIW I easily moved from ActionScript game development for Facebook to Objective-C game development for iPhone, riding both hype waves as a result. So, it was a decent tech pick in 2007-2009.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

bombcar 6mo ago

Some of those things involve a bit of money as a gamble; others require some time learning tooling that can be repurposed (mobile game developers can obviously do mobile apps), and others would be dedicating years of your life into something that may be a dead end.

jghn 6mo ago

A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!

wolframhempel 6mo ago
To be fair, I remember being about ten years old and berating my friend who just told me that he had something called "Rebel Assault" on a CD how this was completely impossible as CDs could only store music and how he was a complete idiot for believing otherwise... :-)
irishcoffee 6mo ago
I distinctly remember staring at my check/bank/debit card laying on the desk in front of my keyboard, all the info punched in to buy $500 of bitcoin for something like $0.29 a coin. Didn't pull the trigger. I just tell myself I'd have sold them when they doubled in price or they'd have been hacked in one of the mt. gox attacks and I'd have lost them anyways. Today it would be about 120m. Oh well.
- jghn 6mo ago
  Same. there's no chance I'd have the riches associated with those coins. Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night. There was a local food delivery service at the time that accepted bitcoin. Can you imagine looking back on life and realizing you spent the equivalent of $1M on a burrito?
  - cheevly 6mo ago
    My roommates and I literally bought a pizza with our stash of bitcoins. So yes, we fully understand how this feels.
  - lostmsu 6mo ago
    > Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night. Admirable self-reflection.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
benhurmarcel 6mo ago
You would probably have sold early for a relatively small amount too. I bought 10ish BTC at some point for almost nothing, sold them for a low 4-digit amount thinking they were stupid anyway. I still think they were stupid but it turns out they could have paid off my house easily. Oh well.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  Question is whether you sold all or just a segment. If you bought 100 btc early on, sold 99 of them, you'd still have something worth a deposit for a house or a car now, which is still life-changing.
  - tartoran 6mo ago
    Or bought btc early on and forgot about it. Then haphazardly attenpting to find it on some old HD when the price skyrocketed.. There was a guy who combed through a trash landfill to recover a HD that presumably had dozens of millions in BTC
irusensei 6mo ago
IMO the only way you'd be rich with bitcoin would be if you forget about your coins and reminded of it years later or if you were a hardcore "fix the money fix the world hodl" believer. Otherwise you would most likely have sold during one of huge crashes or values, attempted trade and lost it all, invested into the new shitcoin NFT or whatever or just got hacked along the way.
- jghn 6mo ago
  indeed. even if I didn't lose them along the way or have them stolen via hack, I would have cashed out back when they were outlandishly priced at $100. I never would have held on to them this long. But even $100 would have been nice given you could still pop them out for free on a standard PC back then with mining software.

anticorporate 6mo ago

There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right path for me usually takes a little time to assess where it's headed and what the impacts may be.

0x3f 6mo ago
> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way.
- lawtalkinghuman 6mo ago
  > That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. Or in prison for fraud.
- ashwinsundar 6mo ago
  I didn't realize maximizing money is the way to achieve moral excellence. It's interesting how Puritanical the EA folks are
  - 0x3f 6mo ago
    There is no moral excellence but which you invent for yourself. But given the first principle or goal of 'having the most impact', maximizing money is often quite useful.
    - ashwinsundar 6mo ago

demaga 6mo ago

None of those examples are useful. 1. 2016 was years after Bitcoin was developed. So you could still make 200x returns without being early adopter. 2. Is this even true? I'd bet scraping experts or people who can fine tune LLMs have easier time finding a job than classical ML academics. 3. Candy Crash was released when iPhone was on its 5th iteration. If anything, you just added to OPs points. Being an early adopter gives limited advantage.

Quarrelsome 6mo ago
to be fair a friend of mine made one of the first flashlight apps on iOs and made a tidy sum out of it. I think the question really is about how well you hit your timings. You can have held bitcoin but sold it went it hit $5k or less. You can have a technical advantage in a given field but somehow waste it (dead startup, serious illness) and lose your timing. Nobody knows what the right timings are, but I think the OP is pushing for a more consistent risk investment strategy and setting up the timings to raise the floor significantly at the cost of losing some of the best possible ceilings.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
Index funds give you something like the expected value over a huge class of possible investments. What you aim for if you want to invest early is rather a probability distribution of - get rich with a small (but nevertheless realistic) probability p - get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little bit with probability 1-p This is a very different offering than the profit probability distribution that index funds give you.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > What you aim for if you want to invest early Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do. > get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. This holds if you consider "underperforming" to be a comparison of expected values. On the other hand, if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared, the index fund is the one that looses in the comparison.
    - mahemm 6mo ago
      Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? If not, I'd be curious to hear what is different in that for you.

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago

> - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now > - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush I disagree: Concerning the first point: how neural networks are today is very different from how they were in former days. So, the knowledge of neural networks from the past does only very partially transfer to modern neural networks, and clearly does not make you a very sought-after specialist right now. Concerning your second point: the success of mobile games is very marketing-centric. While it is plausible that being early in mobile games development when the iPhone was released might have opened doors in the game industry for you, I seriously doubt whether having this skill would have made you rich.

erikerikson 6mo ago
I can confirm your response to the point you can first
imtringued 6mo ago
There's also the problem that there is currently a huge transformer monoculture in the AI space. Everything gets better if you throw transformers at the problem. If you had worked on anything other than a transformer based architecture post 2016, such as Mamba or RWKV, you would have wasted your time. Mamba 3 is the third iteration and somehow I doubt that it will catch on.

rob 6mo ago

I should've started registering a bunch of two and three character and generic .com domains in the early 90s when registration was free.

rdiddly 6mo ago

Crucially those are all investments. Just like creating AI or buying data centers to run AI is an investment. Whereas merely using AI feels more like being in the general population of consumers. The shape of the outlay for it is un-investment-like. A monetary investment is a big charge up front, not a monthly fee. A skills investment looks like effort spent learning, but I mean how difficult is it to type reasonably precise English? Conclusion: you're a customer, not an investor, so you can start any time.

not_a_bot_4sho 6mo ago

Wow, shots fired here for me. I was ahead of the game with my intimidate expertise in ActionaScript and Silverlight! I made 3D engines in browsers well before WebGL was a spec. It was quite profitable for a few years, then poof. Dead end lol

brailsafe 6mo ago
Shockwave director studio even!? I think these ideas are similar to long-term relationships. Identify when it's clear it's worth your time, like the author, and commit appropriately, and then when it's time to move on move on. AngularJS, Backbone, Knockout, YUI, were all a wave of pretty groundbreaking frontend technology. It was absolutely worth experimenting with and committing to once they had some uptake, but probably not before then unless you wanted to work on the teams building them. Time went on, they had years of longevity that overlapped with the next wave of Vue, React, and the rest, and those became worth investing in long-term. Along the way, fundamentals in underlying web technologies were crucial, programming, logic, networking, markup, design. Actionscript was totally worth investing in, until it ran it's course, and then other things came along and you would have adapted your game programming and engine programming skills yo a different platform.

mock-possum 6mo ago

In all fairness I was an actionscript specialist, and up until 2010 or so I was making REAL good money doing contract flash work - Luckily I was also doing frontend work alongside, so when the time came to transition to html+css+javascript, it wasn’t much of a move at all, it was just putting down AS and focusing fully on JS

fermentation 6mo ago

There's really no need to be "early" for something like this. I've seen coworkers who've never used agentic coding pick it up and know everything that need to in ~2 days. The people who really dive in and are running orchestrated agents overnight are in general not building much of real value.

hakunin 6mo ago

> If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return Except you would've probably sold it at any of 1.5x, 2x, 4x, or 10x points. That's what people keep missing about this whole "early bitcoin". You couldn't tell it will 2x at 1.5x, you couldn't tell it will 4x at 2x, and so on.

koonsolo 6mo ago

I get what you are saying, but as someone who was coding mobile apps in 2003 (iPhone was released in 2007), I have to give a few details. By the time iPhone was released, it was already too late for small companies. When you developed apps and games for MS PocketPC and Blackberry, you charged $20 per app, and any average quality product would make money. In 2007, there were only 2 kinds of success stories: 1. Companies that were able to throw a lot of money around (Your example of Candy Crush). 2. Some rare flukes of someone getting rich with some app. So what I was trying to say: The golden days were really before the release of the iPhone.

ivm 6mo ago

FWIW I easily moved from ActionScript game development for Facebook to Objective-C game development for iPhone, riding both hype waves as a result. So, it was a decent tech pick in 2007-2009.