For a lot of folks, especially those from Silicon Valley, I imagine when they hear “IPO” they think about getting in on the ground floor of an investment that’ll make them rich. After all, we’ve heard so many stories about early Google/Facebook/Yahoo/etc. employees that became mega wealthy after their company’s IPOs.

Actually, IPOs are typically a bad investment for retail investors (that’s you and me).

If you’re considering investing in an IPO, you should first consider The New Issues Puzzle study:

Companies issuing stock during 1970 to 1990, whether an initial public offering or a seasoned equity offering, have been poor long-run investments for investors. During the five years after the issue, investors have received average returns of only 5 percent per year for companies going public and only 7 percent per year for companies conducting a seasoned equity offer.

...while the exact magnitude of the underperformance of issuing firms is dependent upon the benchmark used, both IPOs and SEOs have underperformed all of the commonly used benchmarks: the CRSP-equally weighted and value-weighted Amex-NYSE and Nasdaq indices, and the S&P 500. The underperformance relative to the S&P 500 Index is particularly noteworthy, for it does not include dividend income.

There you have it. A study that tells you that you’d be better off buying the S&P 500 than a hot new IPO.

But those nerds don’t get it. It’s 2026 and you have a Robinhood account, they’re not talking about you. They’re talking about other investors. Fine, let me offer another take…

What’s the rush?

You wouldn’t be wrong if you said, “Jon, if you get into the right business at the right time (typically early before everyone gets wise to how good of an investment it is), you can make a lot of money”. The trick there, of course, is choosing the right business and not the business that’ll do well for a little while then collapse or eventually lag behind the S&P 500. Remember: even the most educated, most experienced investors fail to beat the S&P 500.

My feeling - which is based on reading and listening to the legendary investor Peter Lynch - is to just relax and let businesses prove that they're good businesses before you decide to give them your hard earned dollar.

Take Apple for example: if you got in on the ground floor of Apple, you would’ve gone for one hell of a ride. If you managed to keep your nerve during the years while it looked like it was a dying company, you would’ve come out the other side feeling pretty good (and rich). But it’s important to remember that most investors don’t have the stomach or capital to experience multiple years of chopping waters and, don’t fool yourself, we’re most investors.

But let's say you decided to invest in Apple long after they’ve proven themselves as a business. Let’s say you decided to invest in Apple even long after they released the first iPhone and even after Berkshire Hathaway decided to buy in.

Let’s say you invested in Apple the day it became a one trillion dollar company. One trillion dollars. How much more upside could there be? Well, if you had invested $10,000 on the day Apple became a one trillion dollar company, your investment would’ve grown to $45,200 today. That’s a 352% return on a business that absolutely everyone has heard of. Not bad!

I know it’s not the “parabolic returns” that the r/WallStreetBets crowd are after, but I would much rather have a boring 352% return than an exciting 0% return.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I vibecoded this little blog of mine rather than using an existing solution like Wordpress.

Part of the reason why I decided to code my own blog was just so I can learn how to build a website, again, in 2026. The last time I built a website for myself was well over 10 years ago. I remember designing it in Photoshop, coding it in TextWrangler, and then uploading my little HTML/CSS files to my Bluehost server through Cyberduck. A lot’s changed since then.

For this site, I wrote out my thoughts regarding what functionality I wanted, mentioned that I wanted the design to be stupid simple, and then Claude mostly took care of the rest. I tell Claude what I want, it gives me the files, I commit the files to GitHub and then those files are presented to you by Vercel. No designing, no coding, no drag-and-dropping. What a different process.*

The other reason why I went with my own solution is that I know just how little functionality I need. I know my posts will mostly just be text so I added functionality to support different text styles. I know that, someday, there might be a bunch of posts so I added the ability to tag posts so there’s some sort of organization (I’m currently not bothering with tags since there’s so few posts). YouTube embeds are supported and so are image uploads. That’s it.

There are no tools to support sharing posts on social media, no SEO tools, no fediverse support, no ad tools, no store support. None of that stuff. This is a web 1.0 blog and that’s by design.

I originally planned on making this blog a sort of template that others could clone and use for their own needs, but I started to notice that things got complicated when I tried making something that’ll work for everyone vs. just myself so I abandoned that idea.

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

*For any developers reading this: I know I can optimize that flow to be even simpler, but I refuse to pay for Claude Code and hey, I don’t mind taking the longer route sometimes.

That’s the question I always get asked when I tell someone I don’t work, so I thought I'd start capturing what books I'm reading, shows I'm watching, hobbies I'm interested in or whatever else I currently have going on.

I'm currently reading Behave by Robert Sapolsky. I've always been interested in behavior and what influences the decisions we make, but lately I've been interested in learning more about how the brain actually works. This book is scratching both of those itches very well. I challenge myself to read at least 12 books a year. This is the 16th book I’ve read in 2026.

Becca and I have been on an Alone kick for awhile now. We just wrapped up watching season 10. If you’re interested in watching people have mental breakdowns in a beautiful environment, this is the show for you. Pro tip: always bring a ferro rod.

GTA6 is coming out in November so I recently pulled the trigger on buying a PS5. I think the perception of GTA (Online) is that it’s all chaos and folks griefing you, but it’s actually a very relaxing and enjoyable game to play if you play in a Closed Friend Lobby with just your homies.

I’ve recently taken up an interest in tennis. I’m terrible of course, but it’s stupid fun to run around chasing a fuzzy ball. It’s also a great workout and anytime spent in the sun is a good time. My hope is to get decent enough so I can eventually play pickup matches with folks.

Guitar. I’ve consistently sucked at guitar since I was about 16-years-old. I’m a good example of how if you don’t practice consistently and correctly, you will not progress much. I really don’t mind being a shitty guitarist though, I have no aspirations to write songs or anything - I mostly just enjoy noodling occasionally. I most recently picked up a RAT distortion pedal so I can try playing some stoner metal.

Vibecoding. Yeah, I still don’t love that name, but it’s been decided it seems. As someone who, at one point in their lives, designed websites in a photo editing application and coded in a note taking application, it is a real trip to be able to create just about anything by like writing in plain English. As much as I enjoyed the process of coding or designing, I was always more interested in the output regardless of how I got it so not writing code and not moving individual pixels isn’t a loss for me.

I’ve vibecoded a few different things so far; the most complicated being this blog. I’ll likely write another post about the creation of this site, but I couldn’t just create a simple HTML file with some text in it. No, not in 2026. In 2026, you just have Claude code an entire publishing platform for you (so that’s what I did).

Some daily habits that don’t change: every day my goal is to exercise, stretch, and meditate.

Exercise doesn’t have to be intense, but it does have to be consistent and the older I get, the more I’m focusing on strength training (I used to only focus on cycling and/or running). Stretching used to be optional, but no more. I used to dread having to stretch (“it’s boring!”), but I’ve learned to enjoy it. My meditation goal isn’t anything crazy (I’m not trying to be a monk), but just even a few minutes of daily meditation does wonders for my mental health. Of course I vibecoded a to-do app for myself to track all this stuff.

When I started this post, I was thinking it’d just be a simple list, but I guess I felt like typing this morning.

You’ve done it. You’ve found the last personal website on the internet.

Honestly, I don’t have much of a plan for my little website here. All I know is that I’m not too interested in posting on social media platforms anymore. It feels icky.

Heck, I have so little in mind for this site that this might be my first and last post. Who knows.

My current thinking is that it’d be nice to have a place to capture snippets/quotes from articles or books I’m reading... or anything really. Writing is fun even when I don't have anything to say.

Although I don’t post on social media much, I do occasionally post to my Instagram story and I do keep my Goodreads account up to date with what I’m reading if you’d like to follow me there.

More to come? We'll see.