Two experts said an investment idea failed in the 2000s and would never work. He invested anyway and it became significant for his portfolio. He learned that expert opinions work for understanding outcomes but fail at early-stage investing, where information is sparse and outcomes are unpredictable.
I talked to 2 people who I considered to be experts in that field, and they said, oh, this has been tried before in the 2000s. This will never work. And we ended up obviously making the investment, and I'll tell a lot more of that story, but it was an important lesson for me as an investor, and I think this might carry on to any field you're in. Like, sometimes experts know too much, and you have to take their wisdom with a grain of salt. And so we ended up making that investment, and it's been obviously an important one for us. My A/B testing so far has been experts can be useful to teach you about the end thing, but broadly not useful, particularly as applied to early-stage investing, which is such an outlier business.
