Two experts told him a venture would fail. He invested anyway and it worked out big. He learned that experts are useful for predicting outcomes in stable fields, but often wrong about early-stage bets where the variance is high.
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.
How do I beat bigger competitors? Michael Ovitz, co-founder of CAA and former President of Disney
How do I become the person I want to be? (with Emily McDonald aka emonthebrain)
