Risk as a Function of Perception

I am just about to wrap up Brad Stone's "The Everything Store," his book on Jeff Bezos and the inception, initial rise followed by hard times, and ultimate success of Amazon.

Usually biographies humanize their subjects, but in this case, Bezos has essentially become a god in my eyes. An angry god to be sure, and one that knows the devil is in the details.

Beyond Bezos though, what really struck and stuck with me as I have been reading, was how the book perfectly captured the anxiety and fear that permeated the markets during the bear cycle and dot.com bubble pop back in 2000.

At that time Amazon's stock fell to less than $10, losing hundreds of millions of dollars for shareholders and employees. And they were getting trashed in the media.

Amazon's then treasurer summed up the fear and anxiety perfectly:

The most anxiety-inducing thing about [the Wall Street bears and negative media] was that the risk [of going to zero] was a function of perception and not the reality.

The real danger was that the negative media might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that strain of bearish thinking actually took hold for awhile. Large numbers of people illogically thought the Internet revolution and all its invention would just disappear.

It feels like this history was rhyming again yesterday when the crypto sector lost hundreds of billions off its network value virtually overnight.

The bears and perma-critics are still smugly declaring defeat for cryptocurrencies. Many retail investors probably didn't know anything about the underlying tech so they probably think crypto dead too.

But just as Amazon and its cohort of other dot.com bubble survivors have shown, these sorts of revolutions have a way of upending short-term criticism over the long run. As the internet continues to prove, it has had and will continue to have an extremely powerful non-linear impact on every single sector it touches.

Amazon used the power of the internet to provide customers - end users - with a level of instant, personalized satisfaction that was impossible before, which has helped it to become a real contender to become the everything store for the whole freaking world.

The seeds carried by the sudden deluge of blockchain and cryptocurrency technological speculation have just been laid. Already flowers are starting to appear giving a preview of what may be possible soon for end users. It's amazing how quickly they have taken root, and I am sure that there will be an Amazon (or ten or hundred) that'll bloom and grow atop this new technology soon.