While that's an appealing idea and much as I like Venkatesh Rao, I think the explanation is simple in a different way. Making money on investments isn't genera

While that's an appealing idea and much as I like Venkatesh Rao, I think the explanation is simple in a different way. Making money on investments isn't generally about know something will happen sometime in the future. It's about knowing exactly when that something will start to pay off. And that knowledge is much more wrapped in small details. Amazon spent ten years losing money but had investors who believed it would even eventually make it, which it did. Determining whether Amazon would have been a good investment at the start wasn't about knowing ecommerce would work, it was about noticing things like committed Amazon's investors were, etc, etc.