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I think you have a point and I'm not sure I entirely disagree with you, so take this as lighthearted banter, but:

Coming from the opposite angle, what makes you think these folks have a habit of being right?

VCs are notoriously making lots of parallel bets hoping one pays off.

Companies fail all the time, either completely (eg Yahoo! getting bought for peanuts down from their peak valuation), or at initiatives small and large (Google+, arguably Meta and the metaverse). Industry trends sometimes flop in the short term (3D TVs or just about all crypto).

C-levels, boards, and VCs being wrong is hardly unusual.

I'd say failure is more of a norm than success, so what should convince us it's different this time with the AI frenzy? They wouldn't be investing this much if they were wrong?


The universe is not configured in such a way that trillion dollar companies come into existence without a lot of things going well over long periods of time, so if we accept money as the standard for being right, they are necessarily right, a lot.

Everything ends and companies are no exception. But thinking about the biggest threats is what people in managerial positions in companies do all day, every day. Let's also give some credit to meritocracy and assume that they got into those positions because they are not super bad at their jobs, on average.

So unless you are very specific about the shape of the threat and provide ideas and numbers beyond what is obvious (because those will have been considered), I think it's unlikely and therefor unreasonable to assume that a bystanders evaluation of the situation trumps the judgement of the people making these decisions for a living with all the additional resources and information at any given point.

Here's another way to look at this: Imagine a curious bystander were to judge decisions that you make at your job, while having only partial access to the information that you have to do the job, that you do every day for years. Will this person at some point be right, if we repeat this process often enough? Absolutely. But is it likely, on any single instance? I think not.

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