My Top Mistakes#

Summary#

A running list of my biggest mistakes
To keep the ego in check and show how difficult it is to make the right decisions
Ex-post, my general strategy for becoming successful is apparently: get very close to extremely good decisions, then do the opposite at the last second

I got an offer to do my PhD at Berkeley in 1999, but my mother (and my girlfriend at the time) convinced me to stay in Italy and help "Italy come back" ("if the smart guys leave, who stays?" was their pitch)
If I hadn't listened to them, I would have been in Silicon Valley in the midst of the dot-com bubble
Can you even imagine the possibilities?
I ended up still studying in the US, but in the depression of the post-dot-com bubble in the snowy Midwest
I got rid of that girlfriend (not of my mother)

At DSN Conference in 2001 Urs Holzle tried to recruit me for Google and get me to drop out of my PhD program
I asked my advisor, who made the good point: "you can't use that Linux cheapo thingy to build compute clusters. You need Sun servers!"
Of course this Google thing was never gonna work

Wrote a paper on how to use hardware to accelerate cryptographic primitives (SHA1 and Merkle Trees, which is exactly what hardware cryptomining relies on)
See my cryptography publications
Years later, cryptominers told me the ideas in my paper were used in several cryptomining hardware systems

Managed to pass the Google interview (when the interviews were almost impossible to pass!), with inverting red-black binary trees, etc
Got an offer, but I ended up declining it
The Google people were so blown away that they had Larry Page call me in person to tell me that I was the first person in Google history not to accept an offer
I convincingly countered that I had a startup idea that was more important to pursue than a corporate job at an ad startup

Met Elon Musk at a barbecue in Palo Alto. He was surprisingly tall and had less hair than today: weird that billions of dollars can even make your hair grow back
Over burgers this dude told me about Tesla.
Funny coincidence, I had watched the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" just a few weeks before, so I tried to convince him that big oil companies would never allow Tesla to succeed. Musk didn't listen to my sound advice.
Still, I had a second chance to make money on Tesla
After selling my first startup, I splurged on one of the first Model S cars in Silicon Valley - it was so rare that people would stop me in the street to take pictures of it!
It felt good to be kind of a celebrity
Of course I wasted $200k on the car but still managed to not buy Tesla stock at the IPO

Sold a (very) large amount of NVIDIA stock that would have ended up being roughly a 1000x gain
I still receive messages from money managers about diversifying my holdings from NVDA
Yes, I lost an insane amount of money, but I gained billions of dollars in wisdom by spending a lot of Fridays having dinner with Jensen

It's 2008 and my friends insisted I interview at a pre-IPO Facebook
Nailed the technical interview, then we moved to the chit-chat part
At the question "What is your favorite Facebook feature?", I answered with "I don't have a Facebook account. Social networks are clearly a fad"
Despite the cringeworthy answer, I still got an offer
When I didn't take the offer (I was working on startup #1), they offered me $1000 to talk to their product team to understand how I could be resistant to the network effect
As of right now, I still don't have a Facebook or an Instagram account: social networks are clearly a fad

My next-door neighbor in San Jose was an early employee at Uber
One Saturday he took me out for coffee and proposed that I join Uber working on AI
After his pitch about "mobility as a service" and "OS of the real world", I told him that I didn't want to join a taxi company, and tried to convince him to join my startup #2
I would have been around employee ~20

In my splurging phase after selling startup #1, I decided to put money to work
I had a background in cryptography and this Bitcoin stuff looked pretty cool so I decided to buy $100k worth of Bitcoin at around $1 on Mt. Gox
Then I got distracted by something else and literally forgot to push "buy"
A few days later I remembered the Bitcoin thing and at lunch I spoke about it to a very smart guy I knew (PhD from MIT and so on). But he was like "nah, this bitcoin is a joke", so I was like "yeah, that makes sense. It's just a waste of electricity"

For the next batch of mistakes I need to let some time pass to see how things shake down, but I have more. Stay tuned!