56% of billionaires build. 44% of billionaires inherit.
Billionaires Build
191–200 of 957 posts
Re: Billionaires Build
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest thing you're ignoring is that Prop 22 brings real, tangible benefits to workers compared to what they have today. It has companies pay I believe 41% of their healthcare costs, whereas previously this was 0%. And it includes the 120% of minimum wage provision, on top of vehicle maintenance costs. This is real money that real drivers and couriers will be "topped up" in certain cases, that they simply weren'…
> the AB5 world where the vast majority of them can't work at all anymore but the ones that remain are full-time employee Why do people keep lying that AB5 had a requirement for people to be full-time employees? I know in many office-based work environments, there is a strong preference for all regular (non-contract) employees to be full-time employees, but that’s not true in lots of industries, and there is nothing…
It's really not just a norm that office workers assume most employees will be full-time. Many aspects of labor law are set up with the assumption that full-time is the normal state of affairs and part-time work is for exceptional or temporary situations. And legally many benefits are tied to full-time status. If you are part-time and get laid off you might not be able to collect unemployment, depending how few hours you were working. Under the ACA companies only need to offer healthcare options to full-time employees.
The bigger point though is there would still be major limitations on flexibility even if Uber/Lyft was able to offer every driver the option of full or part-time. They still wouldn't be able to set their own hours, only work a few weeks here and there with no predictable schedule, sign up and start working immediately with minimal overhead, etc.
Re: Billionaires Build
#193If rich people are so great, why do founders not want to work for them?
[deleted]
Re: Billionaires Build
#194Billionaire can also be framed as succeeding at creating a power differential at scale. The trick is that you can't achieve scale without using power differentials, and iphones are the fruit of scale. Idea: what you kind of want is for the power difference to decay at scale, so that way you don't have amazon workers pissing in water bottles. Remember: "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys A…
Very good, something I have been thinking about as well. Inequality is bad because of the massive power differentials. How do you propose we "solve" that while still being able to reap the benefits of scale? Any pointers or books to read about this topic? Admittedly I haven't looked too hard.
here is an easy paper about "the elements of a general theory of social change" http://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/research/stratofc.pdf
Re: Billionaires Build
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt the same way but pg has since changed the title from "What You Can Learn from How to Ace a YC Interview" to "Billionaires Build" so he obviously wants to emphasize that aspect.
Thanks for the heads up. The old title was also clickbaity but this new title is even more so. I wonder if even HN comment reactions are more towards the title vs the content.
I don't think the reactions are primarily to the title since the comments were much the same before the title changed.
Re: Billionaires Build
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m working at my job doing just fine. My employer is pretty happy and so am I. Then a new guy comes along and says, “I can do thorough’s job better than he can.” My boss hires him and she agrees. At length, she decides to keep the new guy and fire me because he’s meeting her needs better than I am. She doesn’t need to pay me anymore. There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that the…
If the new guy doesn't follow regulations or doesn't pay taxes like you do (Airbnb, Uber) or if he somehow provides drugs to the boss and as a result she needs him day in and day out (Facebook), then this shouldn't have happened.
[deleted]
Re: Billionaires Build
#197Tl;dr
YC looks for founders who understand users and can make what they want.
Understanding users is hard. That is why Facebook and google data collect.
Making what they want is technically challenging. That is why intelligence is required.
Re: Billionaires Build
#198Ctrl-F “employees” 0 results It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.
What's wrong with this? Employees have different risk profiles than founders. Employees can jump from job to job within a few days. The same is not true for founders. Employees paycheck is (basically) guaranteed until the outfit collapses. The same is not true for founders. If I dump all my time and savings into founding a company and it fails, will my employees bail me out and help me get back on my feet?
First, I would argue that most employees never get a meaningful offer to accept more risk if they so choose. I think it would be better if employees could choose to accept more risk in the form of profit sharing in place of salary, but it’s not typically on the table, even at a startup.
Second, the point here is that PG is misapprehending (or deliberately obfuscating) what people mean by “exploitation.”
When Marxists talk about exploitation what they mean is that employees (workers) are not paid the full value of their labor. This is usually explained away with “risk profile” by capitalists, as you did above, but most employees don’t have a choice to accept a higher risk profile in return for getting paid the full value of what they produce.
Re: Billionaires Build
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt as many small businesses as he could. He started with providing a wider range of books to people over the internet. For the person who wanted a specific book and was only able to get it on Amazon this is a "good" thing. For the local bookstore who is now bankrupt that is a "bad" thing. I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith t…
Amazon didn't kill small businesses. We killed them by using Amazon. And I'm glad to have participated. I much prefer Amazon passing the savings of time and money to me rather than some small business owner. The small businesses I was forced to use previously were inefficient, slow, overcharging, had terrible customer service, exploited employees, etc. As an example: we killed tons of movie rental businesses by switc…
> The small businesses I was forced to use previously were inefficient, slow, overcharging, had terrible customer service, exploited employees, etc.
Amazon is substantially worse on most (if not all) of those metrics.
Re: Billionaires Build
#200Ctrl-F “employees” 0 results It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.
Nothing is stopping those employees from taking all the risks and starting their own businesses. Of course they'll give up their stable consistent paychecks and benefits for possibly years with only a small chance of high returns. Lower risk, lower reward.
At a personal level, a lot, if not most, billionaires never risked anything the vast majority of their employees would have to risk. They were either already rich-enough (or _very_ rich like Bezos), or from families that can support them if something fails.
At a company / systemic level, if say Musk or Bezos fail right now, their companies might be at risk and that can lead to thousands of people unemployed. But they already reaped the fruits high reward you're talking about.
And a LOT of people take the risks you're talking about, since new businesses are started everyday. But we're talking about billionaires in this context, and the current crop took a risk that the general population would consider it negligible.