Opportunity Cost

When we think about opportunity cost, it is about trade off and choices, because we can’t be at two
places at the same time, we can’t make two donuts each will cost us $10 while we only have $10 capital
so we have to make a choice. What happen next is just a work of faith, when we make a good choice
and utilize it well, then maybe we can grow nicely, when we made a bad choice, then maybe we will be
stacked to some point that we are in loss (I really don’t want to use negative phrases on this). Despite of
all effort and work we already made to make and work on choice already made, it costs us something,
some amount of money, some times already wasted. Some start-up founders will see this as a ‘learning
curve’ that everybody needs to walk through.

We know what Zuck of Fb did to his co-founders, Eduardo Saverin and Winklevoss brothers and vice
versa. They made their choices, most of them are bad but it is necessary to grow business at that time.
So, “it is just pure business”. This infighting fight becoming famous on the movie, but as all “Hollywood”
style applied, it all comes to huge wealthy result for everybody.

It is not happening on real life, when choices are made, money burnt, cost has to be paid, expenses to
be burdened, time to time, some or most of them are recurring expenses. Those movies, “the social
network”, “startup” (in techstorm TV), “wisdom of the crowd” (HBO) only show very little effect on
financial point of view of how founders made bad decisions. As those movies shown that choice to be
made that “black” money was accepted on a first round of funding and it went bad because of illegal
practices source of money, the other movie showed that even a great fully-sourced tech innovator can’t
even pay the salary of his employee.

What are lesson learned here?

1. From these three showcases, the founders showed incredible passion of what were they making;
something cool, something revolutionary and something viral; above all of that, they solve
problems; social life problems (because nerd is having a lot of trouble to get a girl), new species of
money (because all money in the world is tied up on a system called financial worldwide system),
own crime solving by the crowd (because criminal tend to hide in the middle of the crowd)

How did they made the choices, maybe we just didn’t see it or maybe we already did, founders are
suffering while making choices, they sacrificed their life, family, graduation from reputable college,
 not to mention that they have to “swim in a sea of sharks”. They sacrifice it all to pursue their
passion and dreams, that was a big choice to be made

2. Viral is good, bad things promoted is good marketing, well, at least on those three show cases. All of
founders passion is actually realized, becoming viral, million users is registered, solving many
problems, and let us not forget that increasing network as a huge intangible asset beside users
themselves. This is considered as a big interest for nowadays type of investors, ventures, private
equity owners

3. It is not easy to find a person or a company, who is willing to ‘swim together’ with founder, when
we find one, then choices has to be made, some opportunity cost will occur but growth is hacked
and future become more certain.

Many influencer and I mean successful influencer in this platform already teach a lot of things about
this, as a start-up company, founders have to make a choice, whether they are going to spend some
expenses to chase funding in all variances that is available or just keep doing what they are doing best
(maybe they are still a ‘company man’) and try to bootstrapping their own idea.