I had a friend who said the same thing about Google when they first IPOed. His suggestion was that they should take their new cash and just go buy a real busine

I had a friend who said the same thing about Google when they first IPOed. His suggestion was that they should take their new cash and just go buy a real business so they're real (specifically suggested AOL Time Warner). This was a trader at one of the world's biggest hedge funds. He went on to have a very successful career in finance nonetheless. It's hard to make predictions about things we don't understand. A lot of our expertise isn't transferable to other domains and we sometimes overestimate the generalizability of our expertise. Doubters and cheerleaders are both likely to be wrong and there is also so much you can't predict about the boarder environment businesses must operate in. Sometimes even the best of us fail and the most incompetent of us get lucky once in a while.