As a common trope in tech, it's at least as old as 1999. From Cryptonomicon: The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1." We look for pl

As a common trope in tech, it's at least as old as 1999. From Cryptonomicon: The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1." We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode we can predict that just by looking at age histogram and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck you money before we turn forty. This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck you money" at a glance.