Missed opportunities
By Gabriel Weinberg
July 23, 2011 1:00 PM
I've been at the right place at the right time with the right idea, but for one reason or another didn't act on it or execute. Here are a few of those missed opportunities in startups and investing:
I can't say I have any regrets though, and that's my central point. I like to think about startups as a career path. There are many apt analogies here, but along such a path there will be bumps, ups and downs, many at-bats with swings-and-misses. That's just the nature of the game.
- Yahoo IPO, Apr 1996. I was ready to put all my money into this. Granted, I was 16, so not a lot of money, maybe ~7K. I had been on the Internet pre-Web and really thought they were onto something. I got talked out of it and didn't do it. Of course, I could have been wrong and lost it at all too!
- Posterous, 2001-2003. I had a thesis (which still seems true) that email is perhaps the easiest path to virality and mainstream adoption of Web services. I had three different projects around that time where you could send an email to an address, and then the service would auto-create an account and auto-publish content. I wasn't thinking big enough though (mine were too nichey) and I didn't have enough staying power. I did ride the same email thesis through my last successful company, but it had very little to do with publishing content.
- Bitcoin, 2010. I was following this closely and ready to pull the trigger here, but just didn't because I thought it would take a lot of time and I'm so busy with DuckDuckGo and other things. I didn't think hard enough about it to realize I should have just bought coins instead of doing calculations around mining for them.
- Angel Investing, ongoing. As like probably most investors, I've already passed on several things that are doing awesome. Now they stare me down every day!
If you don't have your fair share of failures after a while, then you're probably not trying hard enough, or at least not exposing yourself to enough opportunities. Nobody's perfect so to have captured opportunities you need missed ones too.
If you liked this post, you might also like Traction (book in-progress).
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