Career Pivots and Monte Carlo Simulations

In a recent interview with Jack Altman, venture capitalist Elad Gil talks about the concept of viewing someone's career as a Monte Carlo simulation. "If you were to rerun someone's life a million times, on average how do they do?"

I recently made the decision to leave my job as an SDE II at AWS, and join a startup called Method Security. I'm incredibly excited about this opportunity, but I'll always be curious about the paths not taken. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to publicly record the list of other startups I was considering. Years from now, I can revisit this list and see how the other options played out.

This list is ordered by my conviction at the time: a mix of personal interest, career growth expectations, mission impact, and financial upside. Valuation is an imperfect proxy for most of these factors, but it's an easy way to compare outcomes. When I revisit this, I will likely come up with a better comparison approach.