Blessed by the Potato

Oh those many years ago, when Google first went public, I thought about investing in it. I was a keen user of Google, loving the slick, minimalist interface and improved search results from right from when I first used it in beta. But when the initial share price was announced at $85 or so, I balked. No way was I going to drop that kind of money on a company that didn’t have a solid revenue stream in place, especially following as it did the bust of the dot-com bubble where so many other bright-ideas-but-no-revenue companies ballooned up just to crash. I figured it was overhyped and would fall not too long after the IPO into a range that would be more appropriate, less inflated by rumour and speculation. (Also, to avoid an odd-lot-trade, a share price of $85 (US, which was expensive at the time, too), would have required buying 100 shares. While I might have believed in it enough to invest say $500 or even $1000 in Google just to see what happened in the long run, I couldn’t put down the nearly $10,000 it would take to buy a lot of 100 shares…)

Well, I was wrong. Google’s just kept going up, nearly linearly, for the last three and a half years, and is actually profitable. Someone get me a time machine!