He wagered his time. Everything you choose to work on means you're not working on something else. So by choosing to work on something, you're necessarily "betti

He wagered his time. Everything you choose to work on means you're not working on something else. So by choosing to work on something, you're necessarily "betting" that it's going to be more fruitful than the infinitely many other things you could be doing. Expending resources, whether time or money, on something with an uncertain outcome is a bet. I'm not sure what the objection is to using that term. Nobody said Newton was a Silicon Valley VC.