On a financial podcast today, Josh Brown, a financial analyst was asked by the host how normal investors could buy into privately held companies so they could take advantage of “hot companies” before they IPO’d or were maximally funded by private equity funders so that they had a chance to make a killing like wealthy pre-IPO investors do.
Josh replied,
“The only way they could is to be one of the early hired employees at the company who gets stock options, RSUs or some other equity.”
He followed up , only half in jest, with, “Get hired as an early employee at Facebook or Uber.”
Then he said, “… at the end of the day, life is not fair. Don’t you think everybody wishes that they had the ability to invest in Facebook in 2006? Obviously, it’s not going to be democratized because the wealth of the world is not democratized. It sucks.”
To me, this was refreshingly honest and direct.
Life is not fair. Most people do not get what they think they “deserve“.
It’s better to acknowledge this and deal with it instead of trying to pretend otherwise.
Being a tech guy for my entire sales career, I wish I had gotten in on the dotcom boom and made millions like some people I knew (or read about) back then. I wish I had become an Apple, Microsoft or Facebook millionaire.
I didn’t.
I wasn’t in the right place at the right time. Nor did I have the connections, education, job, money or luck to take advantage of those boom times.
Whatever.
Those were not the cards I was dealt.
I’ll miss out on the AI bubble and crypto too. And I expect to miss out on a few more bubbles over the remaining years of my life.
Chances are, so will you.