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roncesvallestoday at 3:52 PM1 replyview on HN

Also a product of the US stock market going up and to the right for the last couple of decades. It's very easy to convince yourself that you are some great perceptor of the world because you've been getting 30% CAGR on your portfolio for the last few many years.

But in hindsight it was always more likely to be green than red, and you could handily beat the market average if you had any kind of tech tilt at all, which many of these people naturally did. This applies to private equity too. I think a lot of mediocre tech VCs ended up with green books because the tide was just rising so fast; if you invested in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red.


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crhullstoday at 5:03 PM

I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.

Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail.

The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.

My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.

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