You’re transported back to 1994 with all your current knowledge and $50,000. Your goal is to create the world’s biggest online shopping company.

How do you go about it?

As a further thought experiment, if you travelled back to 1960 with all your current knowledge and the goal of becoming the richest person on earth, what businesses would you start?

  • princess_chef@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I wouldn’t.

    If I had that money with that knowledge, I’d find Bezos and invest all of it for as much equity as possible.

    Then just sit back and reap the rewards without the work.

    Even if I knew what Amazon would become and had some cash to start, I would also know that I’d be going up against one of the most fierce entrepreneurs of this time.

    I think even in this situation, almost no one would beat him.

    • Abundance144@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      With my luck the extra available capital would encourage Bezos to do something that would eventually destroy Amazon, or prevent it from becoming what it is today.

    • TRauck15061506@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      What about if your input takes enough equity from him that he no longer has the drive to build Amazon?

    • NeighborhoodHuge5803@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’d want to know if I executed his entire playbook, including poaching his key big hires at every stage, would it ruin him … The dilution of key employees alone could really kill momentum. People like to think they’re replaceable but lose a few key people at a few key times and watch things crumble. On the other hand, Amazon itself feels almost inevitable, like if it wasn’t bezos/Amazon the market forces would have spoke something similar into being regardless

      A fun/creepy part is imagining bezos’s moment of awareness that I have the time machine, then him coming for me and doing who knows what with it lol.

    • cruzer86@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      It’s like saying what you would do if you could go back and play basketball ball against Jordan.

    • AbiyBattleSpell@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      That is actually a dumb move what ya do is become investor number 3-10 or any that had no major impact on the timeline. Getting too early might affect bezos negatively. I mean didn’t t he start in a garage with little to no money. Imaging ya come in and give him 50k out of nowhere. Be real easy to accidentally grow too fast and he fails due to getting cocky or something 🐱

    • lookmeat@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Eh, investing that much is going to affect the results. With more money (for a lower percentage) Bezos wouldn’t get certain people on the board for Amazon, and you wouldn’t have the same company. It’d miss connections and guidance that now allows some disaster.

      Instead I’d start investing with knowledge of the future. Short Apple then buy when it’s lowest before Jobs returns. Invest heavily in web companies, then short them in 1998 for 2002. Invest heavily in the few exceptions at this point, Google, Amazon, etc. In the early 2000s start a mining operation early on. Do not sell all the bitcoin immediately, but do not try to corner the market. Keep selling every so much to keep the market going as much as usual. When it drops buy more, when it goes higher than you bought it start selling until it drops. Short everything in 2007, focus on buying real-estate post-collapse, and keep it going.

      Now if you really want to use knowledge you have, get some patents out for some key tech, and offer it at good prices for tech. Invest and gain ownership of the right tech, and then offer it to the right person at the right time almost for free, with the hope that they’ll make it more successful. Do small things, invent things that are useful, but really focus on ownership. If you start with sufficient amount of money you should be able to do a very aggressive short for the dot-com bust, and get a lot of money on that.

      This has a huge moral cost too. You have to allow 9/11 to happen, otherwise everything could change. So maybe being rich is kind of dumb, given the insane raw power you have. But I guess you could throw it and play enough to be mostly a billionaire by the mid-2000s after having prevented 9/11, this means that the Iraq war would be different and you’d have to plan carefully to survive a changed financial crisis.