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?

  • dabidoeBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    You’re inviting a whole “butterfly effect / stream of time” debate that for argument’s sake your actions don’t ripple the fabric of time and change the future.

    I would not try to create a new software company and compete against the giants as that even with the “biff from B2TF” god-knowledge would not save you from the day to day grind of having to run a company which requires massive time $ and energy commitment.

    I would exploit the hell out of early technologies at their peak profit-value ratio. Reverse engineer the Gary Vee school of thought on “attention economy” and put $ into the platforms early when the value/eyeballs ratio is good and then transition to every platform.

    Outside of exploiting knowledge of the future it would make sense to take that money and invest in the growing trends. If I could earn enough money I would try to do venture capital angel funds for ideas that were profitable longterm.

    That said I fear that all of my decisions would alter the fabric of spacetime and start ww3. So in reality I would dump it all into stock and live quietly in the woods.