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Billionaires Build

paulgraham.com

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Re: Billionaires Build

#141

Post by bergstromm466 »

Meekro wrote: post #76
Traster wrote: post #28

For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. It's a massive blind spot that PG fails to address is that it's the exact same sense of mission that he sees in start ups that creates the permission structure to exploit people. It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become bil…

California legislators made this kind of argument earlier this year as they tried to force Uber to reclassify their drivers as employees. California voters rejected that. Uber drivers themselves overwhelmingly wanted to keep their contractor status. Maybe they don't consider themselves exploited?

> Uber drivers themselves overwhelmingly wanted to keep their contractor status.

Only after the ride shares corps spent over two hundred million dollars misrepresenting Prop 22. That's one fifth of a billion dollars... to write themselves a law. [1]

Asking in good faith, do you genuinely believe what you wrote above?

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/200-million-uber-lyft-write-own-...

Re: Billionaires Build

#142

Post by nglx »

jariel wrote: post #50
Swizec wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg has fallen out of touch. The world is very different for the young ones. I’m not old but my tech career started back around 2007. It was very different. Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won. Tech is to 2020 what finance was to 1980. And VCs are seen as the big baddies. People don’t join this industry for the love o…

"Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won." You must be young. The difference between 1999 and 2009 was an order of magnitude greater than 2009 to 2019. This is your personal growth journey, not really an objective thing.

I think peak web was around 2005, when Google was still working, Amazon was non-bloated, personal pages still were easier to find, and medium/wordpress nonsense was scarce.

Then the fundamental greed driven changes happened, and here we are with an AOL situation again.

So the difference between 2005 (or 2009) and 2019 is greater, and it is for the worse. A lot of programmers are backstabbing and greedy creatures now who pretend to be good but are only after money and power.

I'm not talking about startup founders here, it is the corporate programmers who are insufferable now.

Re: Billionaires Build

#144

Post by treis »

ac2u wrote: post #140
treis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a posi…

>Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. Are you sure you didn't just come up with that example yourself to suit the narrative? Until you know what all selected companies chose as an answer for that, aren't we just guessing as to what quality they were looking for? To be clear, I'm not accusing you of making it up, as my memory of it is dim t…

What examples can you remember?

Re: Billionaires Build

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

aliceryhl wrote: post #143

> If Boom manages to ship an airliner at all, international airlines will have to buy it. That isn't obvious considering the concorde failed.

Well, its obvious, though not in the sense the author intended: its not like there are airliner retail stores to which airliners are shipped in hopes that someone will walk-in and buy them. Airliners are shipped -- and built --- in response to firm orders; if no one buys them, nothing is shipped.

But its quite possible that they could get something certified and theoretically sellable but not have something that the economics make any sense for airlines to actually purchase, much less such a clear case that international airlines are generally compelled to do so.

Re: Billionaires Build

#146

Post by jariel »

nglx wrote: post #142
jariel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won." You must be young. The difference between 1999 and 2009 was an order of magnitude greater than 2009 to 2019. This is your personal growth journey, not really an objective thing.

I think peak web was around 2005, when Google was still working, Amazon was non-bloated, personal pages still were easier to find, and medium/wordpress nonsense was scarce. Then the fundamental greed driven changes happened, and here we are with an AOL situation again. So the difference between 2005 (or 2009) and 2019 is greater, and it is for the worse. A lot of programmers are backstabbing and greedy creatures now…

Yes, 'peak organic html' was about 2005.

But this I'm afraid is a little bit of mythology from those who were there at the time, and have/had a certain view of what the 'web ought to be'.

In the 'big big picture' - the web blew up between 1995-2005 in the modern world, and then blew up on a much bigger scale with mobile afterwards.

US is only 5% of world population. Europe not quite 10%.

Our view of 'what the web ought to view' I think has some legit elements, but I'm not sure if they're representative of what real material value is.

The world is big.

Just the mere presence of the web - in all it's incarnations - is a very powerful thing.

It's still roiling and people are still coming online and it's powerful.

I actually don't think Amazon retail (i.e. sans AWS) is an important artifact in the big picture.

Re: Billionaires Build

#147

Post by stopachka »

travisjungroth wrote: post #134
stopachka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think billionaires are much closer to what I mentioned than to politicians. You can tell this by the fact that most billionaires have engineering degrees or were tinkerers. One defining quality is that billionaires need to scale work that often involves management. In this case consider prolific basketball coaches, or generals in war. The reason I shy away from including politicians, is because their m.o is starkly…

Sure, coaches and generals are also much better comparison. Either way, I think your argument is weak. “Sure you feel this away about billionaires. But change ‘billionaire’ to something different and your feelings change.” Well, duh. That’s not even an analogy. You’re just literally changing the subject of the sentence. Billionaires are super different than writers in ways that are relevant to this discussion.

My argument is more like this:

Most people have a natural bias towards billionaires. To remove the particulars of the essay, to look at it with fresh eyes.

Yes, indeed it changes things, and no one change will map completely. Do this a few times though and a clearer sight comes through

Re: Billionaires Build

#148

Post by tylerhou »

dkyc wrote: post #27
glaive123 wrote: post #18

> that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Any statement that has the word "only" in it is guaranteed to be wrong. I wonder if PG worded it this way intentionally (straw man fallacy). Most people agree early employees should get more equity. This doesn't address whether startup founders are hoarding equity for themselves and their investors instead of fairly rewarding early employees.

I wouldn't say this is a straw man. Every billionaire being exploitative/criminal is a real political position among the American Left, see e.g. this tweet [0] by Robert Reich. He was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, so not some extremist weirdo. [0] https://twitter.com/rbreich/status/1193526297647108097

When leftists say "exploit," it's because they regard paying workers less than the marginal value they produce with labor exploitative. (Cf. boss makes a dollar, I make a dime.) They claim that it's unfair that that product of labor goes to the company's owners — hence, to fix this, leftists want to "seize" or "democratize" the means of production. (Sitenote: this a core tenet of capitalism: value going to owners.)

Others would disagree that this is exploitative because they believe that wages should be set by the market.

It's clear that workers are not compensated for all of the value they produce, and that the excess value goes to owners. The disagreement is whether this is exploitative. Leftists argue that it's not fair for owners to capture value without contributing any work. Rightists argue that capital is a scarce (i.e. limited) commodity, so owners deserve to be compensated for providing capital. Who you agree with is up to you to decide.

Pg's blog post strawmans "exploit" because he uses a different definition of exploit than leftists use. This might be because he misunderstands leftism, but the cynical believe that he is deliberately strawmanning them for his own gain (since pg benefits from capitalism). A more honest blog post would examine whether value going to owners or founders is exploitative or not.

Re: Billionaires Build

#149

Post by travisjungroth »

waisbrot wrote: post #19

It's a pretty poor argument when your own summary of the opposing side > the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people needs to be revised to a keener straw-man in your very next paragraph: > the key to becoming a billionaire — the defining feature of billionaires — was to exploit people Here he's swapping necessary-but-not-sufficient for definitionally-equal-to.

And then later brings up that there are exploitative people that aren’t billionaires. Never is the central point, that exploitation is necessary for becoming a billionaire, ever refuted.
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