When I look at today's most valuable companies' stocks, I
noticed that
throughout most of their history, the value is in
fact not recognized by the
market. And at some point, the market
clicks and its value goes up in a very
concentrated period of
time. It took more than 20 years for the market to realize
how
valuable NVIDIA is. And in the year 2022, NVIDIA stock went up
exponentially.
This is pretty inspiring to me because a lot of things we do
today might not be
deemed valuable by the external world even two
years down the way. But if
what we did truly was valuable, at
some point in the future it will come back.
One advice I heard
from Aravind, CEO of Perplexity, about starting a company
was
that before diving into entrepreneurship, one should ask
themselves: "Is
this something I want to work on for the next 10
years?"
Because this rules out starting a company purely based on a
short-term project,
even if it's very tempting. Once we rush to
build a company based on a short-
term project, our expectation
for it to succeed goes up very quickly. And if
there's no
immediate indication of success, we start to question why we are
doing this. This recently led me to ask this question more often:
what are some
invariants of my long-term passion? Previously, I
focused my time on small
projects that I believed could impress
other people. But more often, I tend to
focus my small projects
on my long-term passions. What I found is that even if
some of
these small projects fail, it doesn't stop me from continuing on
a track
forward with my passion. I am even more hopeful to do another
project surrounding
my passion.