The Lyft driver picked me up from work today and, gesturing at the spaceship-like building behind me, asked: “Do you work at NVIDIA?” I said yes. He said: “Wow.”

He told me that 8 years ago, his wife got offers from both Qualcomm and NVIDIA. She chose Qualcomm because she didn’t want to work for a tiny company that only made gaming chips. “Then her Qualcomm stocks went straight down,” he said. “If she had taken the NVIDIA offer, we’d have been retired by now.”

Anyone could have said the same thing about buying Bitcoin, investing in Facebook, buying a house in Mountain View, or a million other things now that we have the benefit of hindsight. We like to think that we came so close to an opportunity because we’re special, but the truth is that we’re just short-sighted.