[lettersdigits]

> you just have to expect the competitors to be too incompetent/short-sighted

Same probably goes to %99.9 of all investors as well, otherwise those %99.9 would have been rich from buying Google after their IPO.

Being short sighted is a humans' thing, probably. not a tech CEOs' thing..

[adventured]

Buying Google at the IPO wouldn't have made most investors rich anyway. They IPO'd with far too high of a market cap already (as contrasted to Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, Cisco, etc. from the prior generation).

A 17x return over 12 years won't make most (non-rich) investors rich unless they bet every dollar they have on said investment (a nearly impossible and entirely impractical scenario).

An average investor betting $10,000 - $25,000 on Google's IPO would be a serious investment. $170,000 - $425,000 is a great return off of that, it's just not anywhere near rich.

Had they IPO'd at something more like what tech companies used to, an investor could have seen a 250x to 1000x return up to this point. That would make you rich off of a $10k bet. Amazon for example, has produced something like a 560x return so far from the IPO.