18. World's Greatest Investor

It is January 1, 2023. You are trying to choose what to do with your time and money in 2024. Should you invest in yourself as an entrepreneur (your company, product, etc)? Or give the money to the best investors (Buffet is waiting for your decision) as an indirect investor? Or invest in other opportunities as a direct investor. You decide to attend a YC-demo-day-style investor conference to check some direct investments.

The stage lights blind Satya as he strides on, PowerPoint in hand. "Imagine, if you will," he booms, "a Microsoft where Windows updates actually install overnight, without mysterious delays..." Investors chuckle, but Satya's smile seems more practiced than genuine.

Next, Andy swaggers on, Amazon Prime box in tow. "Tired of waiting for your drone deliveries? Introducing Amazon Now, instant teleportation straight to your living room!" He rips open the box, revealing a hamster wearing a miniature Bezos-sized spacesuit. Laughter mixes with nervous coughs.

Elon, ever the charmer, materializes on stage in a Tesla Cybertruck that promptly gets stuck on the ramp. "Boring tunnels are so last year!" he declares, emerging triumphantly. "Introducing Neuralink 2.0: mind-control your Tesla, your stock portfolio, or even your competitors' marketing teams!" Some raise eyebrows, others scribble furiously.

Tim, impeccably dressed, exudes an air of controlled fury. "Introducing the iBrain," he hisses, holding aloft a sleek helmet. "It anticipates your thoughts, deletes bad reviews, and automatically filters out Elon's tweets!" The audience erupts in applause, clearly fed up with Musk's antics.

Mark, sporting virtual reality goggles, trips over a tangle of wires. "Metaverse 3.0: experience real-world interactions without the pesky inconvenience of... reality!" He fumbled with the controls, accidentally summoning a virtual cow that proceeded to "哞" loudly. Investors, used to Mark's eccentricities, barely blink.

Sundar, Zen-like as ever, speaks of "democratizing the universe" with Alphabet's new line of self-aware toasters. Craig, munching on Costco churros, offers unlimited subscriptions to everything in exchange for a lifetime membership.

In the end, amidst the absurdity, it is Jensen, who steals the show. He simply walks on stage, holds up a single chip, and says, "orders backed up for the next three years." He walks off. The investors, ever pragmatic, erupt in cheers.

You press a button and invest in all of them.

Today’s January 1, 2024. Warren Buffet calls. He congratulates you for surpassing him in 2023. Berkshire Hathaway returned 16% and that’s huge. Sequoia, arguably world’s best venture capital firm, made 7.1% with 100s of people, many offices, meeting with the best startups. Roelof Botha calls but you let it go to voicemail as you need to catch up more properly with him - none of this 2 min stuff.

You, the GOAT, realized 55%. How did you do this with only 1 hour of work in the entirety of 2023? You simply bought a stock called QQQ at your free Robin Hood account that holds non-financial top 100 components of NASDAQ and beat the S&P, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, pretty much everyone on planet in terms of returns.

Humanity, you murmur to yourself, runs predominantly on Dunning-Kruger and stories. And God bless, as progress stands on the shoulders of the hungry and the foolish. But you are neither hungry or foolish. Instead you simply calculated probabilities with many quantified variables such as past returns, future ideas, effort, volatility, quality of life, etc. going into the “investment” decision. And the simplest idea not only won on the absolute return but also in literally all aspects of the decision except for making you famous (any monkey can buy QQQ).

Investco, the manager of QQQ should give me a medal for this public promo. That’s not the intention. I really wanted to make a very simple point but got carried away with the demo day stuff. Simple point is ALWAYS BE CALCULATING EXPECTED RETURN. Don’t lie to yourself with wish/fake probabilities, instead use them in your decision trees. We are in the matrix and you can build your own deterministic causality engine to predict and shape the future.

As an example, let’s look at future revenue. To overcome Dunning-Kruger and create a real future and value instead of a cool story, the entrepreneur needs better than 50-70% probability for increasing the revenue and decreasing costs. If so, then invest in yourself especially the variable (doing cool things, passion, doing something for humanity) figures prominently in your expected return model. If not, then get out of there. Find something with better aggregate odds like a job that gives you revenue (called “salary” and “vacation time”) with 95% probability.

For early stage entrepreneurs who just started building things. How do you know your customer will buy it? Did you get an order with advance payment (80% probability of purchase)? Did you get an order (50%)? Did you get an email that says “yes, that stuff is interesting” (5%)? Or are you thinking that the market is 10000 million billion and if you get 0.000001% of it you will be richer than Jensen (0.000001%)? How do you use data to graduate through the odds? What story, contact, vehicle besides your product do you need to increase your odds?

Probability should be a mandatory subject at schools along with philosophy and communication.

Stay hungry, stay foolish, use a deterministic causality engine (just like how the Rothschilds, Bilderbergs, Rockefellers, three letter agencies, shadow governments, those who rule the world do)