Screwups
My Top Mistakes
Summary
A running list of my biggest mistakes
Keeps the ego in check and shows how difficult it is to make the right decisions
Ex-post, my general strategy for becoming successful was apparently:
Be very close to extremely good decisions
Then do the opposite
2004 — Crypto Hardware Paper
Wrote a paper on accelerating cryptographic primitives with hardware
Years later, cryptominers told me the ideas in my paper were used in several
crypto mining hardware systems
Never connected the dots
2005 — Declined Google
Declined an offer from Google
Larry Page called me in person to tell me that I was the first person in Google
history not to accept an offer
2007 — Elon Musk and Tesla
Met Elon Musk at a barbecue in Palo Alto
Tried to convince him that big oil companies would never allow Tesla to succeed
Bought one of the first Model S in ~2012 (people will stop me in the middle of
the street to take pictures of the inside)
Still managed to not buy Tesla at IPO
2007 — Sold NVIDIA Too Early
Sold a (very) large amount of NVIDIA stock that would have ended up being roughly a
1000x gain
2008 — Declined Facebook
Interviewed at Facebook. At the question "What is your favorite Facebook
feature?" I answered with a "I don't have a Facebook account. Social networks
seemed like a fad"
I still got an offer
When I didn't take it, they offered me money to talk to their product team to
study why I was resistant to the addiction.
I still don't have a Facebook and Instagram account
2011 — Declined Uber
My next door neighbor in San Jose was an early employee at Uber
He took me out for coffee and proposed me to join Uber working on AI
I would have been around employee ~20
I told him that I didn’t want to join a taxi company
2012 — Didn’t Buy Bitcoin
Almost bought $100k worth of Bitcoin at around $1
Got distracted and forgot to press buy on Mount Gox
Then I let other people convince me that Bitcoin was nonsense (thank you Will)