In 1985 my dad made $5m. Well, not really. He had a company, Consco Enterprises, which made accounting software for Fortune 100 companies. His company went public through a reverse merger and on the day of the IPO, his share of the illiquid stock was worth about $5m.

He never sold a share (the stock basically traded by appointment) and in 1989, not only was the economy going into an IT recession, but mainframes (the platform on which his software worked) were being replaced by PCs. The company quickly went bankrupt, or near bankrupt, and Computer Associates scooped up the assets for pennies on the dollar. Frustrated and depressed over this turn of events, my dad basically “dropped out” at this point and didn’t work again, choosing to spend his days listening to music and thinking about what could have been.