I was just playing blackjack at a casino. I play blackjack in a fairly boring way, by just betting the table minimum (in this case, $10) every time. I’ll split when I can split unless I have 20. I might double down on 9, 10, or 11. But that’s it.
At this casino, they had two special side bets that you could make. One of them was a bet on pushing; it would pay 2:1 if you tie. The other one was “match the dealer”, where if one or more of your cards matched the dealer’s cards, it would pay according to some table that went from 4:1 to 22:1.
In the two hours I played at this particular blackjack table, I was the only player who didn’t do any of these side bets. Everyone else bet at least $5 on each, except one woman who would ask for change to put $1 on each. In retrospect, she was probably the most sober person I had encountered that evening who did not work there.
I don’t do these side bet things because I don’t understand them. I don’t go to casinos very often and don’t do much gambling. My attitude toward gambling is that any money I wager is already lost, and my attitude towards anything I don’t understand in a casino is that it must be there to make my money and I part ways. I googled later, and found someone who claimed these extra features basically increase the house edge to something greater than 5%. The house edge in blackjack is usually 0.5%, so it’s a pretty good deal for them.
It’s generally good advice to not bet on anything expecting to make profit. It’s also good advice not to invest in things you don’t understand either. People compare investing to betting frequently. Often they shouldn’t; games of chance follow well defined rules that are able to be understood in advance, while investing happens in the real world, and there is no obligation for the real world to follow predictable rules that we understand well. On the other hand, they are similar in that people risk capital in search of a reward.
This is a long-winded preface to the idea that people who invest in technology companies might be even bigger idiots than people who gamble in casinos expecting to win big.
I think most technology investors are middle-age or older men who can’t really know what it is that they’re investing in, simply because it’s just too complicated. Yet they also think that they know this thing they can’t understand is expected to have a +15% CAGR for the next ten years for companies like your company. So, if your company doesn’t grow at +15% this year, it’s a turd and we should flush everyone working there down the toilet.
This is just the rich man’s version of sitting at the blackjack table, betting on “Match the Dealer”, and then getting mad at the dealer because the chart says 22:1 on it somewhere and that isn’t what happened.
Now I kind of want to create the equivalent of a casino to part these fools from their money. I guess that’s what AWS is.