All of Us Have a Voice
If you were to divide the world between experts and non-experts, who would be the experts who decide? Who watches the watchmen?
Capital Thinking • Issue #572 • View online
We have shut down the economy because of the experts. First the mathematical models said there could be up to 140 million deaths worldwide.
Then they said fewer, and fewer, and fewer, and we shut down the economy, and fewer, and they were wrong about the effect of the shutdown, and fewer…
There is no such thing as an expert.
-James Altucher
ALWAYS BE SKEPTICAL OF THE EXPERTS
First, a couple of stories.
In 1799, George Washington caught a cold. He was coughing and he had a fever.
This was considered an emergency. The greatest American alive was sick!
Blood was considered the dominant force in the body for about 2,000 years before this. So if someone was sick, something in the blood needed to be purged.
Hence, bloodletting. I don’t know if leeches were involved.
George Washington died the next day. Not from a cold. From shock. Too much blood loss.
In 1981, just 33 years ago, Bill Gates said, “There is no need for anyone to have a computer in their home.”
Nobody knows what 97% of the universe is made of (physicists call it either “dark energy” or “dark matter” but there is not a single testable theory of what that is).
Here’s an important story for investors. About a decade ago, a company called Odeo was started in order to build a platform for podcasting.
Two of the programmers developed a side project. The side project showed a tiny bit of traction. 10,000 people signed up.
The CEO was getting frustrated with the podcasting platform. Nobody was signing up.
So he made an offer to all of the investors. The investors were some of the most prestigious and sophisticated investors in Silicon Valley and the CEO was a seasoned professional.
He said they were going to focus on the side project BUT if anybody wanted their money back, he would personally buy their investment back at cost. Nobody would make any money but nobody would lose any money.
100% of the professional investors asked for their money back.
Then the CEO renamed the company to Twitter.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to be academics. They tried to sell their company to Yahoo! for $1 million. They were rejected. Then they tried to sell to Excite for $1 million. Rejection. They lowered their price to $750,000. Rejection.
So they figured, ‘OK, let’s go for it.’
In 2001, I had a chance to buy half of a company called Oingo. They were running out of cash and my VC firm was giving a look. Someone came into my office and said, “We can probably pick this up for nothing.”
Oingo was basically an auction system for people to buy words on search engines.
I said, “Are you kidding me? The entire search engine business is dead.”
I was an expert. I had a $120 million venture capital fund. I’ve since written 13 “expert” books.
Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics. Google paid 1% of the company to buy it and Applied Semantics became AdSense, which is 99% of Google’s revenues. Half the company might be worth around $500 million now or more.
*Featured post photo by Gene Jeter on Unsplash