Be an Optimist

“Pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich.”

There’s a viral YouTube video from late 2007 called "‘Here Comes Another Bubble’ (I’ve linked it below). It’s a Silicon Valley twist on Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. The song outlines the absurdity of the tech entrepreneur space and highlights some of the over-inflated companies of the mid-2000s.

If you read the comments under the video, you’ll see people come back every few years to pay tribute to the song’s timelessness. There are decade-old comments and comments from this week all saying “the exact same thing is happening now.” According to the YouTube comments, we have been in an almost 20-year-long bubble.

Now watch the video. Most of the companies they point out failed or are fictitious, but watch closely. You see Facebook highlighted for being worth 15 billion dollars? Insanity. How could a website be worth 15 billion dollars? It’s a fair objection for the 2007 pessimist. After all, they were right about all the other internet companies - why not this one too?

Facebook, now Meta, currently is worth north of 1.5 trillion dollars. Being right about all the other fad companies meant missing out on the couple of home runs. Same goes for just about anything in life. Most things are just fads, and we will laugh about them years from now, but every once in a while we’re thrown pitches right over home plate.

Be an optimist. Strike out often. You’ll hit a couple of big ones.

The last three books I read…
The Bomber Mafia
Impact Players
Essentialism