[nealchandra]

The way you can test if it's accidental gambling is by answering the following:

If you had worked at a different company with pure cash comp equivalent to your RSUs, would you have invested the same $$ in Google stock? Or would you have invested it instead in an aggressive but diversified portfolio (e.g. 100% S&P 500 or even just a bucket of blue-chip tech stocks).

I am confident that for the vast majority of tech employees they would choose the latter if they were operating in a pure cash regime.

[skybrian]

No, I definitely wouldn't have invested so much in Google. However, I'm not sure how much to attribute to it being a default choice, versus the differences between an inside versus an outside view.

It's easier to be comfortable investing long-term in something you know well. While there's a lot I'll never know about Google, I think I understand the company somewhat better than others. For example, I can discount a lot of news articles as being written by people who don't really understand the culture. If I hadn't worked there, I might worry more.

That's less and less true, though, as much has changed since I left. And for investment purposes, maybe that bias only seemed to be helpful, versus an outside view?