

Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future? - rivo

This is a thought experiment. Let's assume somebody sent you back in time, to the year 1996. Knowing what you know now, you could start companies called Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. and do everything right from the beginning.<p>Would you succeed?<p>Also, would people like Larry, Sergey, or Mark Zuckerberg be virtually unknown in the tech world?<p>(Surely, there's much more you could do with your knowledge of the future but let's focus on starting companies for now.)
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gaius
_you could start companies called Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc.
and do everything right from the beginning_

No you couldn't, because you only see these companies from the outside. You
might know the idea, but how many search engines, social networks, etc
are/were there? Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals discuss logistics.

The one valuable piece of knowledge you'd have would be exactly when to jump
from the NASDAQ ship.

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mseebach
I'd start a bunch of buzzword-heavy .com's and cash out late 1999. Then I'd go
into real estate and cash out in 2007. Then I'd retire.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Why not just make "risky" stock trades? It's work to actually build stuff.
Seriously though, I think the OP meant something a bit different than the
literal interpretation of future knowledge that I'm taking.

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Tangurena
Going back to 1996? With what I know now? I'd try to make a lot less mistakes
with the woman I was in love with back then.

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mrduncan
_The best way to predict the future is to invent it._ \- Alan Kay

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vorador
Well, Cassandra (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra>) knew the future but
no one believed her. It would probably be the same with VCs.

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josefresco
Don't you people watch movies? This never turns out well.

Quoting Jeff Goldblum: "Ooh, aah, that's how it always starts, and then later
the running and screaming"

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Celcius
I've got no idea but re-coining (or I guess pre-coining) the term web 2.0 into
something that doesn't make me cry a bit on the inside every time I or others
mention it is pretty high on my list.

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zepolen
I think a lot of success is down to circumstance, right moment, right time,
right person and I doubt if you tried to make another Google you'd succeed in
the same way.

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mattlarge
I think Zepolen is correct, so much comes down to timing. If you look at a lot
of the "successes" that you would want to get there before they were reaching
slightly beyond current tech/social environment. For example, Flickr/YouTube
were predicated on the fact that storage costs were crashing and end user
bandwidth was drastically increasing. You couldn't have created them much
earlier.

Wikipedia was timed for the explosion of users on the internet allowing for
massive crowd sourcing, again you couldn't have gotten there much earlier.

The best way to leverage knowledge like that would be to go back and become
the world's most prescient VC. Also avoiding the bubble bursting and the
current crash would be great.

I like the idea of going back and getting myself into a position to work on
some of these projects though. being able to be there when they happened would
be cool

~~~
medianama
I think you are giving way too much importance to idea and timing.

The reason Flickr, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc are succesful because they could
execute better than their competitors and that might not change by going back
in time.

~~~
mattlarge
True, but I was being a little ham fisted in my original reply. They did win
out by executing better than their competitors in the competition of the
moment, but what I was trying to suggest was that, in all probability, no-one
could have succeeded in trying to do those things at an earlier time. You
couldn't go back to 1996 and start YouTube.

With YouTube you couldn't have survived the storage costs at an earlier time,
and also there needed to be ubiquitous playback, in the form of Flash. Flickr
similarly would have been financially onerous due to storage costs ealier on.

In 1996 our bandwidth was so tiny that you really could not have done YouTube
at that point.

Wikipedia is a slightly different point. It was launched in 2001, so in 1996
you obviously could have gotten a lead on it, but if you look at the growth
curve it wasn't until 2005/2006 that it really took off. I just don't think
that the community of editors/users was broad enough until that point.

You are totally right that good execution counts for most of the success and
going back in time would allow you to do that much better with the hindsight
gained. My thought is just that there are constraints over what is achievable
at any given time and the common thread that I see in wildly successful
companies is that they managed to jump on those turning points just before
they are there, first mover advantage and all that gumph.

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quoderat
Anything I wanted to.

But first, I would get enough money to completely opt out of doing anything
like starting companies, worrying about what anyone thinks, etc., and find a
lot of land in the middle of nowhere, drop my own fiber link in at vast cost,
and ignore the rest of the world as much as I could.

~~~
jeremyawon
what do you need a fiber link for if you're going to ignore the rest of the
world?

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rgrieselhuber
Two chicks. Oh wait.

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fiaz
I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.

~~~
Angostura
... thus precipitating the dirty-bomb attack of 2006

~~~
ph0rque
"Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip."
<http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html>

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banned_man
Founding a company would be the wrong way to go about exploiting this time
hack. Too much relies on execution, so the possibility for failure is
substantial. There is a much easier way to make money if you can time-travel.

What I'd do: ask for 30 minutes before I go, and log into Yahoo finance. Find
a 2% gainer for each day on the stock market. Each day, move half of my net
worth into the gainer (only half as a measure of caution; I might
inadvertently alter the future and screw myself). The reason to aim for +2 is
to avoid insider trading suspicion; putting my money into a +10 or -20
(shorting) every day would land me in jail; no one would believe I could tell
the future because of time travel. Each day, I'd earn a 1% profit.

Starting from $10000, I'd get to $10 million within 720 trading days, or about
3 years. At this point, I'd limit my profits to $100k per day because
otherwise I'd be at the level where I could actually change the future,
eroding my gains. So I'd gain "only" $25m/year for the next decade, cashing
out at $250m.

