Being Early is Not Enough

Things I was “early” on

2013: Bitcoin. I was mining it. Even had cold storage wallets.

2015: Deep learning. I was using Justin Johnson’s neural style transfer work. I was going to work on an app using it. See my GH repo here as proof where I wrote this script so I could get text message updates when training runs had completed.

2020: GPT: I was fooling around with GPT-2 generating snippets of text with a toy demonstration neural net small enough to run on my laptop.

There’s a long list of startups that I met the founders IRL before their first funding rounds. 3 of them are now on their Series B with $100+MM valuations. I was given the opportunity to put small angel checks into each of these.

What do all of these misses have in common? One of a few things happened:

I didn’t meaningfully seize the early opportunity

If I engaged with them, I didn’t go hard enough, for long enough

I didn’t hold onto my exposure in them.

Being early is not enough, it’s only a pre-condition to immense upside.

What I’ve learned is that:

There is no upside to pessimism about an idea or a person (other than avoiding problems).

Try to get even a tiny bit of exposure to something promising.

Hold on once you have the exposure. Vest, HODL, do whatever it takes. It’ll be years before the promise shows.