Being late but still being early

I heard about Bitcoin for the first time in 2011. I was on a trip to Tahoe with my dad when highway patrol closed I-80. During the winter it's the only road connecting the Bay Area and the Sierra Nevada, so we had to spend the night in a motel in Auburn. We turned on the little TV to a news reporter losing their mind that this internet currency — totally made up, exclusively digital — had just crossed $5 in value. It was named Bitcoin, of all things. My dad shook his head and said something about Dutch tulips. It's currently at $88,000, down from $100k earlier this year.

Fast forward a few years to university in 2015. I became intimately familiar with Nvidia when we were using their chips for ML training jobs¹. Split-adjusted, the stock was around $0.70, but it was trading at an unbelievably high P/E ratio. We all figured we were in a bubble and put our internship profits into the other "more diversified" FAANG stocks instead. The stock is up 200x since then.

I was objectively early. But I felt late both times. Everyone that I knew had already heard of them, which conventional wisdom would make you think that the market has already priced in the proper value.

In the frame of technical risk versus market risk, Nvidia and Bitcoin had to contend with both. In the early days they were tackling unsolved problems in game theory and matrix parallelization. Working with them on the ground, I knew they were succeeding. Which I probably should have taken as a good signal of potential upside, since it spoke to the de-risking of technical risk. And yet I hesitated. I didn't know how to price their current value. Is this price high or low? Will there actually be market adoption? It was the market risk that concerned me.

I suspect technical people are biased towards this failure mode. Our "missing out on bitcoin" stories are rarely about a lack of awareness. They're more often about our lack of conviction where tech meets capital markets. Interestingly, I don't see many of my financier friends share the same fear. They're quite open about having no idea about the tech, but they feel confident in the charts.

In little ways and big ways, we're always trying to do some estimate of where we're falling on the adoption curve. It influences the value of your stock options, obviously, but I also see it crop up in more subtle ways.

It's easy to feel like you're late to a trend when you're living in San Francisco. You probably aren't the first to hear about something. You might not even be in the first hundred thousand. But relative to market adoption, you might as well be the first one to know. Your reference group is distorted: you're comparing yourself to the small slice of people who heard before you instead of the 99.99% who haven't heard at all.

I can admit I don't have a native skill in accurately assessing future market conditions. To be honest, I don't think almost anyone does.² But I would rather take the opportunity for asymmetric reward by understanding the tech, than by trying to figure out whether we were early or late.

Maybe that's a resolution going into the new year. Put some money where your adoption curve is.

Footnotes

1. Back then TensorFlow was really the only computational graph game in town. ↩

2. There's a reason why VCs' hit rate is usually only 1/100 within a fund's vintage. This also reminds me of the story of McKinsey trying to price the cellphone market size back in 1980. They guessed 900k by 2000. The answer was actually 109 million. Oops. ↩