Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?

[rivo]

This is a thought experiment. Let's assume somebody sent you back in time, to the year 1996. Knowing what you know now, you could start companies called Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. and do everything right from the beginning.

Would you succeed?

Also, would people like Larry, Sergey, or Mark Zuckerberg be virtually unknown in the tech world?

(Surely, there's much more you could do with your knowledge of the future but let's focus on starting companies for now.)

[gaius]

you could start companies called Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. and do everything right from the beginning

No you couldn't, because you only see these companies from the outside. You might know the idea, but how many search engines, social networks, etc are/were there? Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals discuss logistics.

The one valuable piece of knowledge you'd have would be exactly when to jump from the NASDAQ ship.

[mseebach]

I'd start a bunch of buzzword-heavy .com's and cash out late 1999. Then I'd go into real estate and cash out in 2007. Then I'd retire.

[ShabbyDoo]

Why not just make "risky" stock trades? It's work to actually build stuff. Seriously though, I think the OP meant something a bit different than the literal interpretation of future knowledge that I'm taking.

[keltecp11]

Well put.

[Tangurena]

Going back to 1996? With what I know now? I'd try to make a lot less mistakes with the woman I was in love with back then.

[mrduncan]

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. - Alan Kay

[vorador]

Well, Cassandra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra) knew the future but no one believed her. It would probably be the same with VCs.

[josefresco]

Don't you people watch movies? This never turns out well.

Quoting Jeff Goldblum: "Ooh, aah, that's how it always starts, and then later the running and screaming"

[Celcius]

I've got no idea but re-coining (or I guess pre-coining) the term web 2.0 into something that doesn't make me cry a bit on the inside every time I or others mention it is pretty high on my list.

[zepolen]

I think a lot of success is down to circumstance, right moment, right time, right person and I doubt if you tried to make another Google you'd succeed in the same way.

[mattlarge]

I think Zepolen is correct, so much comes down to timing. If you look at a lot of the "successes" that you would want to get there before they were reaching slightly beyond current tech/social environment. For example, Flickr/YouTube were predicated on the fact that storage costs were crashing and end user bandwidth was drastically increasing. You couldn't have created them much earlier.

Wikipedia was timed for the explosion of users on the internet allowing for massive crowd sourcing, again you couldn't have gotten there much earlier.

The best way to leverage knowledge like that would be to go back and become the world's most prescient VC. Also avoiding the bubble bursting and the current crash would be great.

I like the idea of going back and getting myself into a position to work on some of these projects though. being able to be there when they happened would be cool

[medianama]

I think you are giving way too much importance to idea and timing.

The reason Flickr, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc are succesful because they could execute better than their competitors and that might not change by going back in time.

[quoderat]

Anything I wanted to.

But first, I would get enough money to completely opt out of doing anything like starting companies, worrying about what anyone thinks, etc., and find a lot of land in the middle of nowhere, drop my own fiber link in at vast cost, and ignore the rest of the world as much as I could.

[jeremyawon]

what do you need a fiber link for if you're going to ignore the rest of the world?

[rgrieselhuber]

Two chicks. Oh wait.

[fiaz]

I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.

[tsally]

Could the first black president have been elected with out it? (Serious question)

I doubt Bush would have gotten elected for a second time if it wasn't for 9/11 and I think Obama would have had a much harder time getting elected if Bush hadn't destroyed the public's opinion of the republican party.

[Angostura]

... thus precipitating the dirty-bomb attack of 2006

[gaius]

No-one would believe you.

[banned_man]

Founding a company would be the wrong way to go about exploiting this time hack. Too much relies on execution, so the possibility for failure is substantial. There is a much easier way to make money if you can time-travel.

What I'd do: ask for 30 minutes before I go, and log into Yahoo finance. Find a 2% gainer for each day on the stock market. Each day, move half of my net worth into the gainer (only half as a measure of caution; I might inadvertently alter the future and screw myself). The reason to aim for +2 is to avoid insider trading suspicion; putting my money into a +10 or -20 (shorting) every day would land me in jail; no one would believe I could tell the future because of time travel. Each day, I'd earn a 1% profit.

Starting from $10000, I'd get to $10 million within 720 trading days, or about 3 years. At this point, I'd limit my profits to $100k per day because otherwise I'd be at the level where I could actually change the future, eroding my gains. So I'd gain "only" $25m/year for the next decade, cashing out at $250m.