Ask HN: How do you evaluate ideas and risk?

[martin_hnuid]

Interested in hearing about how some of you analyze ideas and make decisions based on risk and potential reward.

For example, there are business ideas that might be relatively safe, require relatively little money yet might not scale past a nice (or very nice) lifestyle business. They still require a lot of work and commitment.

The opportunity cost could be opting to go with a more complex idea that would require far more commitment and investment in time and money. In return this option might be able to scale far past a lifestyle business.

And so, the risk in the first case might be the opportunity cost of not going for the larger idea. The risk in the second case could be years of work and never reaching the promise of a larger payoff/exit.

I know it's more complex than the above. Just providing a super-simple "fork in the road" example to start a discussion.