Google's Megatrend Growth

Shaan shares a story about how even seemingly "late" investments in established tech companies can still yield massive returns due to megatrends.

"I was looking back at 2010 when I graduated college. I had an iPhone, used Google constantly, used Chrome - I knew these companies were significant. At the time, Google seemed super established, having been around for over a decade. Same with Apple, which was even older at 20 years.

When I graduated, Google's revenue was $5 billion. Today it's $55 billion. If you had just bought these companies back then - Google, Amazon, Facebook - you would've made 10x your money. If I had taken my last year of college tuition and instead said 'Hey dad, instead of putting that into college, let's put it into these 4 companies that we use their products daily,' we would have 10x'd our money.

The lesson is: even when it feels late, if it's a megatrend, it has way more room to run than you expect. Some megatrends were the internet as a whole, mobile, and cloud. AWS is a perfect example - it's already $40-50 billion in revenue but keeps growing at the rate of the fastest growing startup.

Peter Thiel said it best - there are many money managers out there, financial advisors, investment bankers, mutual funds, and they'll all try to pitch you their strategy. But often, it's the simplest and most obvious strategy that is all you need."