I'm curious what everyone here considers their best investment. Not necessarily from a financial standpoint (thought it certainly could be, and that'd be interesting to hear too) ... but maybe your best investment has been the time you spent to learn something new, or the time you've spent with your family. What's your best?
Invested in myself by doing things that scare the shit out of me - Around junior year of HS I realized I had nothing to lose (I was pure white trash, still am, really.) so if something looked impossible, I went for it. I wound up in an ivy leagueish college, worked my ass off, I starved, went out with beautiful girls, photocopied text books because I couldn't afford them, I drove an old porsche I found in a junkyard, went on tour with my band, went to europe with $80 in my pocket. Made a lot of mistakes, but god damn it was fun.
This (along with a lot of other stuff you mentioned...) is interesting, what happened? Were you just looking around a junkyard and stumbled across it? What state did you get it in and how much did you know about cars when you got it?
Wait, What? Normal people don't know what kinds of cars are sitting in their local junk yards? heh... somehow we knew it was there.
I grew up in a family of backyard mechanics and my brother had a 924 parts car in the driveway. He graciously let me pick and pull parts for free and helped a LOT.
Believe it or not, as long as it isn't wrecked too badly, you can probably get almost any car back on the road with $100 craftsman tool set and a good sized hammer. Or, better yet, find tools for really cheap at garage sales.
Writing a code generator. It was so difficult that every other programming task since was easy in comparison.
Conventional wisdom advises not to try anything too hard because you might fail. True, but that advice discounts the biggest dividend of all: who you become in the process.
I didn't realize how important this was until I saw how easy it was for me to do most ordinary programming gigs. It was like playing basketball with a regulation hoop when I had already practiced with a smaller one. Other programmers struggled because they hadn't seen that problem before and they had never stretched themselves.
Building hard things on my own made me a much better programmer when I did work for others. By far, my best investment ever.
I've seen you mention this code generator in a few comments. Can we get more details about this project? I'm sure many here would be interested to know. If you've written another comment on HN explaining it in more depth, or written a blog post about it, I for one would love to check it out.
I wrote the original in Basic as a tool that we used in our service business. We collected requirements and entered them into the app as "blueprints". File layouts, form parameters, process parameters, etc. The generator read the blueprints, then built the data base and wrote all the necessary custom functions and routines. Most of the programs were already there as parameter driven shells.
I rewrote it in Visual Basic, then in php.
This was a handy tool for systems analysts who knew what they were doing, but not for the average user. There were 2 basic problems: collecting requirements and entering them as parameters is hard and you still had to convert the data.
Now I'm working on a front end to the 3rd generation of the generator. It will read existing data files and use an artificially intelligent process to build the parameters then were previously collected by a human. It will also populate the new data base. This is the basis of my start-up.
I will keep the community updated with my progress. I also got your email from your profile and will give you (and anyone else who's interested) an update. Thanks for your interest.
I had the same experience. Time and time again I'd walk into a situation where some enterprise app had been put together in some haphazard fashion by any number of people. As the person brought in to fix this otherwise unmaintainable system I had to figure out a way to deal with the mass of code and complexity that was already in place and somehow transform it into something worthwhile. That is when I got the idea for code generators. Now I can walk into a mess and generate reliable code for various application features and slowly replace functionality as necessary.
When I had cash[1], I mostly kept large cash positions, you'll pretty always find something valuable to do with cash eventually. Whereas getting out of bad/sub-optimal assets is trickier. I've had opportunities to invest cash along with labor to get some pretty good stakes in a couple businesses that turned out right. I also didn't realize this at first, so I tried to buy stocks and mutual funds, thus missing out on a couple great deals later when I didn't have the cash.
If you're good with money, don't be in such a hurry to get out of cash. If you sit on cash for two years, then make a 60% return on it in year 3, you've outperformed anyone making 10% each year. I'm sure there's a personality type that goes crazy if they're sitting on a significant amount of cash for two years that isn't doing anything, but that's not me. I'd rather be liquid than to have money in bad or even just sub-optimal assets.
[1] After the crash, I had enough to live for ~3 years without working too much. I wrote the first draft of a book, wrote some specs out on business ideas to see if any of them really resonated, studied some rationality, biochemistry, and the history of lots of different regions of the world. Did some martial arts, read lots of books, and traveled in a pretty spartan way, mostly slumming it through a dozen or so countries. A couple months ago I felt like it was time to get back into things, my newest professional endeavor soft-launches next Wednesday.
Reminded me of the rule I've developed when it comes to evaluating job, contract or startup opportunities: cash is never wrong.
Because equity may or may not yield significant value for you. Because the work may or may not be interesting. Because a project may succeed or fail. Because you don't know how long the relationship will last, or whether it will lead to better things via contacts and word of mouth, etc. (though it certainly may.) But getting cash pay is never wrong.
Once you have cash, there are tons of other things you can do with it. It can be used to buy you more free time later, more energy, more opportunities, more convenience, more capital for your own startups, better health, more happiness, more security, more toys, more tools, a bigger/healthier family, and, perhaps indirectly, and despite what some people tell you, and most especially if you're a man, money DOES help buy love.
Best mattress, duvet, pillows and sheets I could afford - makes a massive difference to the start and end of the day - no matter what else happens in-between.
Learning Statistics. I never would have picked it, but was forced into it thanks to my economics minor, and I've used it more than most of my CS courses.
I've never met anyone who regretted learning more math. It's the safest investment there is.
I found probability and statistics to be a very valuable thing to learn as well. I wouldn't have done it on my own because it just seemed so boring compared to the other maths(calc, linear algebra, etc...) but it really has a lot of use in those disciplines that you now have the context to understand. Thankfully my college had it as a requirement for cs.
My underdog consulting "startup"; it cost me $10 for the domain and 3 days to do the site html. I just wanted somewhere to document previous side gigs just so I can have a line-item in my resume.
Holly crap! in the last 10 days it has been on FIRE. Three different B2B projects and it's paying more than my last full time job, which was by every measure a very posh gig.
It's such an specialized technical niche, the entire global search volume for it is less than 5k annually. A fact I didn't even care to research before I "sunk" 3 days into it. I just wanted something on my resume.
So you put your previous work up and they found you?
Just out of my curiosity for how this could develop that quickly, are these long-term projects or quick projects that you've already completed but pay well because of their specialized nature?
So you put your previous work up and they found you?
Hah! I wish. No, I actively pushed it within its first 2-3 weeks and bid on bucket-loads of projects and proposals. Even started blogging actively while transitioning from being employed in Australia, to returning to the U.S. with not much to do.However, I heard back from no one. For some reason I took active interest in this random field and started reaching out to NGOs, government agencies and academia; helping them make good use of this. I even attended a few webinars, some boring shit, because I cared and wanted to make sure these public institutions got this mundane application of technology right.
This does sound like a lot of work, but for me it was more like a game; I would have my laptop on the kitchen counter while cooking or prancing around the house, and ooh, a project! "typety typety type!". Mostly as a joke for me and my girlfriend since we had a few weeks between finishing my work contact, and actually taking the flight out of the country. It was just something we did mostly as tongue in cheek "hey, we're important" sort of a thing.
Out of the goddamn blue, almost 2 months later, here they are, private sector.
The work is best described as "research and analysis"; the deliverables are usually a report, an spreadsheet, a simple "API", or in most extreme cases a yes/no answer :-)
Come'on man ... this conversation ends here, I am not patio11.
Recently? Probably deciding to go downtown for coffee with Thomas (tptacek) last Christmas break, which lead to a very enlightening conversation about consulting. (Short version: "People will pay you money to consult for them." I did not know this. For real.)
All time? I've got to go with the wee little project that was supposed to pay for a video game or two, even though that is a pandering answer here. If not that, working hard academically and financially to get into WashU, which offers opportunities roughly equivalent to many schools except the quality of their Japanese program ended up being lifechanging for me.
Financially? I had a burrito at this new restaurant called Chipotle, read that McDonalds was spinning them off, and bought a few hundred dollars worth of stock over the next few years. Don't do that -- invest in index funds. That said, burritos now make up a larger contributor to my net worth than anything save bingo cards.
It's really hard to pin down just one thing, but I'll try. :)
The big thing for me, both personally and professionally, has been networking socially. Whether that meant going to Defcon last year to get away from it all (and meeting a ton of awesome people in the process), or utilizing my contacts at work to get where I wanted and needed to be to do my best.
Learning how to effectively do that has been an incredible blessing. It's also given me a ton of friendships I wouldn't have otherwise.
that's a great response! i think all too often, members of the hacker community view 'social networking' as somewhat of a slimy, schmoozy 'MBA-type' of necessary evil, but when done properly (like OP apparently has), it can lead to true personal connections and friendships which can benefit both parties
A couple friends & I pooled our cash and gave a buddy $150 for a week's vacation. Our buddy ended up meeting his wife on that trip. Best money I ever spent.
I used California's Paid Family Leave program to take the entirety of July off work. My daughter just turned 4 months and every day she learns something new. Even though I'm at a rapidly-growing company, I wouldn't trade time with family for anything.
"The best investment you can make is in yourself." ~Warren Buffet
He's absolutely right. As long as you remain alive and able bodied, your investment is protected and will yield a return and you will derive the enjoyment and benefit from that return directly, without delay and continuously.
I'll add one caveat: Before you go and spend $120,000 on an education, make sure you are acquiring the knowledge and other assets you hope to gain in the most efficient and cost effective way as possible.
The quote is spot-on. Almost every investment in oneself will generate a healthy ROI in the long run in my opinion.
Minor footnote: Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine but I cannot count how many times I have seen the name of Warren Buffett spelled as Warren Buffet. (http://www.google.com/search?q=warren+%2Bbuffet)
Making my own (unreleased) web framework from scratch;
Learning the Rete algorithm (very fast matching of many patterns against many data items). It's the most elaborate algorithm I can implement, it was hard to learn mostly because of how incredibly abstract the descriptions of it are, but it's applicable in many situations to make really cool features possible so it was well worth it.
There actually isn't a lot of prerequisite knowledge before you can learn Rete, just general knowledge of graphs I think.
I did spend a lot of time trying to understand how it all works with pen and paper, reading the original Rete description and the wikipedia article, it's a bit annoying because it seems descriptions of Rete are very few AND they use different terminology and approaches to explaining, AND there are really a lot of implementation choices to make depending on the specifics of your problem, so I had a lot of difficulty wrapping my head completely around the concept.
In fact, the first implementation I made was very contrived and I unknowingly bypassed a lot of problems and I didn't even know my understanding was still incomplete. It's only when I tried to make another implementation for a more difficult problem that I realized and fixed my lackings.
Now that I really understand it though, it really doesn't sound that complicated to me anymore, it's pretty "simple and intuitive". If I didn't remember all the pain I had to go through to understand it, I might think that it's in fact a pretty simple algorithm. I think the way too abstract and obtuse descriptions of it are to blame for much of the difficulty because there really isn't a lot to the fundamentals of the algorithm (though the explosion of implementation choices can get messy to sort through).
I guess about now would be a great time for me to start a blog. ;)
Several good life investments, but I'll go with a monetary one...using all my savings at the time (a shade under $6k) and convincing my Dad to lend me a bit more cash so I could purchase Google's dutch auction IPO shares.
I have the confirmation email from Google laminated and framed in my office. :-)
Plus I got to pay my Dad back with a nice bonus too!
One of the best investments we've made has been in allocating time for family.
An example is finding a night nurse after we had our first child. It allowed my wife to recover from a tough birth, both of us to have some quiet together time, and it allowed me to get the rest I needed in order to keep working. The nurse would show up around 9-10pm each night and took off at 6am, and would wake my wife for the late night feedings as necessary.
It was pure gold and those 4 weeks allowed us to recover and adapt to the strange new world of parenting (and it also gave us a bit more confidence to handle novel situations as they arose).
As soon as I realized I had to be involved with startups, I quit grad school, bought a one-way plane ticket to California and haven't looked back since. Best $500 spent ever.
You truly can't appreciate the pace, the spirit and the community that is Silicon Valley without physically living in it. These past few years have been the greatest and most fulfilling time in my life so far.
When I began to realize I was spending more time building random web apps with a friend instead of doing my research. To be fair, my research was pretty bland, so it wasn't that hard to get distracted :)
My college degree - partially for the name that led to great internships/jobs that gave me insightful experience, but mostly for the friends (including my cofounder), social experience, and general maturing that happens there.
3 years & $150k and I think it's paid for itself in the 1 year I've been out of school.
Professional: Obsessive software hacking in my teens and 20s combined with PhD in computer science. Basically, doing what I love and putting in my 10000 hours.
looking back, what aspects of your Ph.D. training do you find most useful now? was it deep expertise in one particular sub-field? was it a certain type of work ethic or approach to problems? was it the doors it opened for you professionally? etc.
The field certainly helped. I worked in databases, data structures and algorithms, and the exposure to those ideas has been a huge benefit since I'm still working in those areas. I'm constantly surprised at how things that are just intuitively obvious to me are alien to many others. Grad school is when much of that intuition was absorbed, I think.
I think that "work ethic" (mine, at least) is just hardwired. Same for approach to problems. I wouldn't say that grad school influenced these so much as help me realize what they were. I actually goofed off quite a bit in grad school. My work ethic (as in long hours, and job above all else) wasn't tested until I joined my first startup.
Opening doors: not so much. My thesis adviser was not in the mainstream of our field, and most of my friends were in other fields. My professional contacts started developing when I joined my first startup. I was extremely lucky at this startup in three ways: 1) working with world-class engineers, 2) in a well-conceived and well-funded startup, and 3) they were willing to take me, an academic who actually liked writing software, and give me a chance.
Having a PhD was a potential problem early on. I tried teaching/research after grad school, and discovered that it wasn't for me. (This may have been the transition from a Canadian school with easy access to small amounts of funding, to a grant-writing powerhouse in the US, where professors seemed to spend all of their time pursuing grants.) I was lucky in my transition to the software industry -- I have friends who wanted to make that transition and were not able to. And in fact, at my first startup, there was vague suspicion of me just for having the degree. But now, years later, I think that it was time well spent, better probably than what I'd get out of the usual first jobs after college.
Another thing to keep in mind is what sort of PhD you do. A highly theoretical focus is rarely good preparation for life in the software industry. A highly applied focus is great preparation, (I'm thinking of the long list of developers who have come out of UC Berkeley, and of course, there are the google founders.)
Professional: trying to write an HA/clustered "Hello World" app. The knowledge of the deployment and operational aspects has served me well in my software career.
Financial: actively managing my own real estate investments.
The key differences between running one's own software business and actively managing one's properties are:
- it's a turn-key business where the "product" is so simple and in such high demand that it is relatively hard to screw up by any reasonable person
- a deeper understanding of the tax system; software consulting typically touches either Schedule C or Sched E (Part 2), while real estate involves schedules A, C, and E(part 1 and 2).
- a deeper understanding of protecting myself legally
I spent $600 on a train ticket from Halifax to Vancouver with stops along the way, and did it by myself. Besides being a great trip, I was exposed to a greater variety of people than I usually have a chance to interact with.
The interesting thing I've found out about taking a train cross country (one of those big double-decker Amtraks with observation deck) is that the people on these trains are relaxed. And interesting. I met a couple of cute girls who were doing something inscrutable - it turned out they were making their own Sudoku puzzles by hand with pen and paper. Even the families are cool. Because if you're traveling on the train from Chicago to New York, you're not in a hurry.
The only drawback is if you don't pay for the expensive sleeper cars - sleeping is difficult. To put it this way, there are times where I remember not not sleeping.
Definitely. One of my fellow passengers said it best: it's like a hostel on wheels. I would do it again in a second.
I agree about sleeping being difficult, especially as a tall guy. At some point though, rolling through the prairie provinces in the middle of the night and looking up at the stars from the observation car while playing cards or talking with new friends, sleep seems overrated anyway.
I might get knocked on the head by HN for saying this, but .... my MBA. Wait, wait, before you hit me, let me explain. My undergrad major was in CS and I did a minor in economics, but I never took marketing classes, I never took a class in organizational behaviour, in pricing theory, accounting etc. I was exposed to a lot of this during my MBA program and it has helped me immensely in the startups I've done since finishing my MBA.
I find that people who have always been entrenched in technical fields have a hard time stepping back and it seeing issues through the eyes of the "average" person - for some definition of average.
But a close second in terms of investment, a second monitor. For programming, having two screens is essential I find. I'd say my productivity increased by 20% (e.g. being able to iteratively prototype more readily, leading to quicker turnaround)
I can give you a horrible APPL-related investment. I bought AAPL in '02 when it was $12-13 and sold 6 months later because I needed the funds. Purchased a hedged position via a CFD, was worth $400k, which would be worth $10M+ today
Lesson: do buy stock in companies whose products you use and like, and companies who are actually doing something new and interesting. I bought the stock on the back of OS X, which I was a beta tester of, and also on the iPod becoming an entire platform, hence Apple moving into consumer electronics and taking out Sony. Second part of the lesson would be to stick to your initial instincts and not doubt yourself. I ended up making some money from it, but sold far too early because a lot of people whose opinions I valued at the time told me I was crazy for investing so much in a 'tech stock'.
The "buy what you know" mantra will get you in serious trouble if you only take it at face value. Its important to know and like the product(s), but that will only get you so far, it won't necessarily make for a sound investment decision.
Knowing and liking the companies products is a nice bonus at best. If your primary motivation for investing in a company is any reason other than a stellar financial outlook, you're not investing wisely. Some horribly despised products have made some of the best investments (cigarettes), while some truly loved products (General Motors) have made terrible investments.
The two ideas aren't completely detached from one another, but when it all boils down, the most important reason is always about the financials of a company and their ability to make money.
That mantra may also be a product of survivorship bias. We hear successful investors like Peter Lynch advocate it a lot, but I wonder how many people have lost money buying what they know but just don't bother warning everyone 'be careful buying what you know'.
Your examples aren't very good. Cigarettes are a politically incorrect product, and GM cars are a more politically correct product, but I can't imagine many people who know better to actually prefer GM cars over the competition. Likewise, if an enthusiastic smoker wanted to invest in his favorite tobacco company, maybe that would work out.
A better example than GM might be Krispy Kreme, which was a terrible investment even though the doughnuts are delicious.
That's exactly my point though. Whether the product is good or not has little or no bearing on whether the stock is a good buy. It's all about the underlying financial fundamentals of the company.
I gave you a decent example of your point, but I'm still not sure the point is good in the general case. GM was a bad investment and a bad bunch of cars.
Then I don't understand what the general case is that you're referring to. That overall if people invest in products they like then overall they'll get good investment returns?
I'm saying that someone liking or not liking a product and investing for that reason is irrelevant to the investment returns they can expect, because that decision is based entirely on preference -- the movement of the stock on the other hand is driven entirely by the financials.
See, that's not true at all. Someone liking or disliking a product is based largely on whether the product is crap or not, just like the success of the company.
No it's not. Someone liking or disliking a product is based on their own perception of it's value. There will never be universal agreement on whether a product is good. Who's to say you're right vs. your neighbor who says the product is crap? How can you possibly use that as the basis for an investment decision?
I wish you the best of luck with that investment strategy. To look at a company and say "Hmmm, I like their product. I'll buy the stock!" is horrible advice to give. That's what amateurs do. You haven't looked at the underlying fundamentals of the company. You haven't looked at the management team. You haven't looked at it's current valuation. You have no basis to say that investment is going to succeed -- it could be wildly overvalued, but you wouldn't know because you're investing based on emotion and feelings, not based on facts.
You're saying there's no such thing as an objectively good product, simply because people disagree on the matter of which products are good and which are bad. But disagreement isn't any sign that there's no fact to the matter--people disagree about matters of fact all the time.
A good product might not be sufficient or necessary to make a good stock, but it seems like a major influence--and I would be very reluctant to invest in a company which pathologically produces poor products (GM, Microsoft, Dell, HP). Of course there are other factors to consider, and investing in individual stocks is a fool's errand anyway.
AAPL has been the greatest investment of our era. When I first bought in, it was not even clear that the company would survive. But the shares were going at a bargain...
Love the point about the university media. This is also how I stumbled onto the web! But there were a lot of cute girls around there, too.
Especially when I was 19 I finished high school (standard time at Czech Republic) and move to UK for few months. I was quite young, barely speak English, have very little money (like 500 pounds) and don't know anybody there.
These few months learn me a lot about independence and such.
The best investment I ever made was education. In the form of quitting school and learning on my own. Classroom learning never worked for me. My only regret is not being able to do it earlier in life.
Typical boilerplate email response letters using plain text vs HTML email response using brochure type format, they even respond better to the generic HTML than to the customized plain text email.
These are emails to people posting job work available on any site, or "friends of customers wondering what we've done".
These brochures are based off email list type designs, such as would be used to solicit donations for a charity or to keep past customers informed of happenings at a retail outlet.
I'm not quite sure in what kind of context and what kind of audience: is it for contract/freelance kind of jobs to present yourself? (or your company)
Your comment made me wonder how that would work for full-time job applications and at first thought, I'd think it would annoy people more than anything because you'd be more likely to send them to your peers. (and the HN-type tend IMO to prefer plain text)
But, I'm ready to challenge that idea. If people have used HTML emails for job applications/cover letters with success, I'd be very interested to read about it because it sounds like it's not the right place to do so, but it would still make one pop out of the pile.
Life is time machine. My best investment is that I spend almost half and one year to do what I love and love what I do. It's really amazing to be myself and Be truely myself. I love my unique life no matter what happened but only precious memory and I learned why once the poor stranger man wanted to frighten me , even wanted to bully me and he really wanted to steal my money to just have a meal. In other words, I really hope he can have a decent life. I was totally shocked by this big gap between the rich and the poor. I am also one of the poor.
and What's more? In this free and care-free, happy year, I know TED talks and I join the big Global communities to share the ideas worth spreading and Sharing in actions. I know what's my great interest and my passion and I can do better and improve daily. I deserve what I give. So I am lucky dog. Certainaly, my very precious inverstment is include the family and friends too in this half and one year. More and more precious things in this Gap Year. okay.
Going to college.
It paid for itself after about 1.5 years.
If I didn't go to college, I probably never would have believed that I could start a successful business. I went to college hoping for a good job when I got out. I left college hoping to retire at an early age.
Here is my best and worst investments. When I was around 14, I wanted to get into the stock market. So, I heard that AMD had beat Intel to the punch with x86-64 chips and Intel was planning on licensing the technology. So I invested in AMD at around 10 and I ended up selling it at around 18. Then took that money and invested in a treasure hunting company at .70 a share and it dropped to .10 a share. They had claimed to have a new technology for finding gold that did not disrupt the reefs, so they would be able to get permits to look for sunken Spanish galleons. Didn't really work out for me, but I was young and I thought it was cool to say that I invested in a gold mining company.
I spent a taking English classes at a local community college so I could graduate a year early from high school. I consider the decision to graduate early one of the best I've ever made. Staying there a year longer would have been a complete waste of time, and life since then has been so much better.
In terms of programming, my best investment has definitely been learning Vim. I sacrificed a little productivity for a week or so, and now I'm way more productive than I was before.
Probably learning a new language. Wanted to develop a JP site so after 2 years and lots of studying starting to get a handle on the lang, and having lots of fun doing it. Very rewarding so far.
Financially, probably China. Only problem is can't convert RMB -> USD so it's like monopoly money. Maybe one day can buy gold and send it over on a container vessel :)
1) My kids.
2) My health (and I couldn't have gotten well without the help of my kids).
3) Time spent getting to know some really interesting people who broadened my horizons.
4) "Travel" (well, more accurately, living different places).
This is financial, but good move on my part. I invested in Apple the day before the release of the first iPhone ($120 a share). I then recently used some of it to buy a car way out of my league ($270 a share).
AAPL has been very good to me as well, I bought in at $73.25 in 2006. I bought more in 2009 right around the 3gs announcement at $140.66. Then in 2010 when the iPad was announced I bought a couple of times (especially when it went below 200 at an average price of $201)
I have found it tends to dip right around or after announcements, there are usually good chances to buy especially if the announcement doesn't blow everyone out of the water.
