An interesting exercise is to go through the wikipedia lists of the richest people in different countries. Follow the links for the the top 5 or 10 individuals listed, and see how they made their fortune. It's a rather high-entropy information dump - you can infer a lot about different parts of the world, from not much reading.
How People Get Rich Now
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Re: How People Get Rich Now
#92You can't look at the richest 100 people and say anything at all that's useful to regular people or even super smart tech folks, because they're outliers of the largest magnitude.
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#93Let me guess, start-ups is how people get rich?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#94It's hard to take this article seriously. People get rich now from companies because multiples have been artificially pushed higher by low interest rates. If that weren't the case, the top 100 would still likely be dominated by heirs. All that's changed is the Fed is manipulating the market more now than before, and that's benefiting growth stocks and fund managers of growth stocks... among other things.
Technology has changed things. Amazon generates twice as much revenue per employee as Walmart.
So the bottom line is Tech can sell a hell of lot more of china's stuff per American worker than old retail.
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#95>So it's not 2020 that's the anomaly here, but 1982. The real question is why so few people had gotten rich from starting companies in 1982...a wave of consolidation was sweeping through the American economy
Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Bloomberg, etc were all started in the late 70's/ early 80's. Their founders are the richest people in the world.
Seems like the question he's asking, though, is why weren't they obscenely wealthy after only 5 years, but that requires a different thesis than PG's.
Every time I read one of PG's posts, it seems like he's working from a narrative that he's trying to conform facts to.
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#96I don't want to derail this too much with personal anecdotes, but I suspect you are much more likely to build wealth with the more established tech companies - and that wealth is "rich enough". Maybe I am just unlucky or unskilled, but I spent roughly 20 years working at startups or innovation labs. I was "close" to some big events where I could have made big $$ but made 0. Both at my own startup and being at early s…
Who's the tech guy in the life of Brian? As in, what part of the movie are you referring to?
I think he means he's the tech equivalent. As in, "he was near many historical events, but not the focus or beneficiary of them"
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#97>In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies
I'm not sure. I feel like the tech companies are just valued where they are currently based on "extracting natural resources" from willing investors and our privacy and sense of well-being. We need another downturn like in 2000 before we know what is worth what. Internet companies were worth a lot in 2000 too. Turns out a lot of those valuations were bunk.
US venture capital funding at 2000 levels again- http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11443.jpeg
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#98It's hard to take this article seriously. People get rich now from companies because multiples have been artificially pushed higher by low interest rates. If that weren't the case, the top 100 would still likely be dominated by heirs. All that's changed is the Fed is manipulating the market more now than before, and that's benefiting growth stocks and fund managers of growth stocks... among other things.
>If that weren't the case, the top 100 would still likely be dominated by heirs.
Do you believe that because you think that heirs are likely to hold their wealth in cash, bonds or in other assets that haven't been "artificially pushed higher by lower interest rates?"
It seems to me that if wealth of any kind is invested well, it's likely to generate exactly those same higher returns; the source of the wealth is kinda irrelevant, no?
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#99I don't think that the top 100 richest people is a good dataset. You can be extremely rich without making it anywhere near that list. While a lot of those top 100 people made it to that list by starting companies, I'm curious how many of them did so by leveraging family or inherited wealth.
To make it on that list, you have to have succeeded at such an extreme outlier level that almost by definition almost everything had to have gone perfectly. That takes a lot of luck and advantages, such as family advantages. I'm not saying that detracts from what they accomplished, but they can't take all the credit either and it's not reproducible.
I'd agree - I have seen a lot of wealthy family children completely underperform relative to this bar. I'd say it's the exception and far from the norm that wealthy families to produce exceptional children.
Exception to the statement being wealth taken from your countries people through corruption (like Putin, Jinping etc).
Re: How People Get Rich Now
#100How People Find Fulfillment Now
The post we actually need. I want to know about innovations in this space. Who has a disruptive way to bring fulfillment to lives at scale, using blockchain or whatever other buzzwords you need to attract investment. Because that's what's actually worth investing in. If you're starting a company to get rich, you're missing out on life.