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by svisser 4413 days ago
Taking back everything else? Does that include knowledge, experience and lessons learned? Because that greatly affects what pg would start doing today.
3 comments

Yeah, exactly. If we could go back in time with just a few pieces of information, we could be gods. Predict and invest in every major startup success, write about it and look like a prescient guru, make even more money from speaking engagements, etc.

If you can't take back your knowledge and experience, then it's kind of a boring/null question- you're just back to where you started, and you'll just be affected differently by the roulette of random encounters. (Which could make a bigger difference than we might realize, but there's pretty much no way to predict whether this will turn out better or worse.)

The question is about starting today though, so it's not about going back in time with knowledge of future events.
Still, the knowledge and experience you gained via circumstance are important.
If you have all the knowledge and experience, you are who you are already.
Isn't your question then the same as: did you think you got lucky?
Luck could one factor yes- but its mostly a question about with enough work can everything man has done be repeated?
He could invest in the stock market with that information.
Not just the stock market- he could hunt down and invest in every would-be-successful startup, and give them precisely the prescient advice they'd need to avoid making any mistakes. His success rate would shoot through the roof and he would seem like a god.