Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How People Get Rich Now

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 941 posts

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#281

Post by cblconfederate »

CivBase wrote: post #177

> There were no fund managers among the 100 richest Americans in 1982. Hedge funds and private equity firms existed in 1982, but none of their founders were rich enough yet to make it into the top 100. Two things changed: fund managers discovered new ways to generate high returns, and more investors were willing to trust them with their money. PG brushes past this to talk about tech company founders, but I thought th…

> What's stopping hedge fund management firms from racing to the bottom by competing for customers?

Regulatory capture.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#282

Post by simonebrunozzi »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #120
nindalf wrote: post #71

It's a classic PG article. Many true facts in there, lots of good analysis with just a few questionable claims thrown in here and there. At the end, there's a massive claim that isn't fully stated but implied. "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem". Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth. That isn't stated clearly. Secondly, there's absol…

Paul Graham's articles always shoot immediately up to the top of HN, but I agree with you, they're generally cursory and pithy thoughts which don't convince my skeptical mind. I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular? Think of all the amazing writers across our civilization whose work is linkable, and we're worshipping these decent but not amazing blog posts?

Because he's famous (especially among the HN crowd), he's certainly smart, and it appeals to the bubble of internet startuppers that lurk in HN.

Paul, and to a similar or even larger extent Sam Altman, and others, seem detached from reality, in the sense of the common man.

Perhaps each one of us lives in a bubble of sort. His is immediately apparent to me, despite I kind of belong to the same crowd he preaches to.

I don't think his intent is evil nor bad. I think he genuinely enjoys writing and thinking about deep stuff, and I am grateful that he shares his thoughts with the world.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#283

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

> The tech companies behind the top 100 fortunes also form a well-differentiated group in the sense that they're all companies that venture capitalists would readily invest in, and the others mostly not. And there's a reason why: these are mostly companies that win by having better technology, rather than just a CEO who's really driven and good at making deals.

I'm sorry, but this is utter bullshit, told to one's self to feel better about the real facts on the ground. What we're seeing in "tech," over and over, is NOT an effort to come up with "better technology," but the play to capitalize on some particular niche, and then MONOPOLIZE it. This is key.

It's not good enough to provide nice co-working spaces; the goal is to own every rentable building in a city. It's not good enough to provide a ride sharing solution; the goal is to run taxis out of business, and own the ONLY ride share in town. It's not good enough to run a respectable social media site; you have to be the only one that people use for a particular purpose.

VC's are NOT looking for the next big idea; they're looking for the next MONOPOLY. That's where all the money is going. It's what our government and society has now optimized for. Other companies (like the latest $20B Microsoft gobble) are scrambling to own a monopoly vertical workflow stack of their own, but it's all the same idea in play.

We're heading directly for the cyberpunk, citizens-of-multinational-corporations future that people have been writing about for decades.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#284

Post by freewilly1040 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #120
nindalf wrote: post #71

It's a classic PG article. Many true facts in there, lots of good analysis with just a few questionable claims thrown in here and there. At the end, there's a massive claim that isn't fully stated but implied. "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem". Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth. That isn't stated clearly. Secondly, there's absol…

Paul Graham's articles always shoot immediately up to the top of HN, but I agree with you, they're generally cursory and pithy thoughts which don't convince my skeptical mind. I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular? Think of all the amazing writers across our civilization whose work is linkable, and we're worshipping these decent but not amazing blog posts?

There's a bias some people hold that people who are very wealthy must also be very wise.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#285

Post by dnautics »

prostoalex wrote: post #164
nindalf wrote: post #71

It's a classic PG article. Many true facts in there, lots of good analysis with just a few questionable claims thrown in here and there. At the end, there's a massive claim that isn't fully stated but implied. "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem". Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth. That isn't stated clearly. Secondly, there's absol…

> "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem". The book "The Great Leveler" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31951505-the-great-level... is probably the most comprehensive dive into history of inequality, and arrives at a fairly unexciting conclusion that periods of great inequality are correlated with significant economic growth (usually related to advances…

there are some very real counterexamples. It's hard to argue that the US did not undergo both decreasing inequality and growth between 1860 and 1900. Decreasing inequality (well a good chunk of the population was no longer chattel slavery, if nothing else), and the US went from "utterly destroyed by a civil war" to "nascent superpower"

more quantitative measures of inequality between 1860-1900 (that probably doesn't take into account slaves) https://voxeu.org/article/american-growth-and-inequality-170...

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#286

Post by hardwaregeek »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #120
nindalf wrote: post #71

It's a classic PG article. Many true facts in there, lots of good analysis with just a few questionable claims thrown in here and there. At the end, there's a massive claim that isn't fully stated but implied. "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem". Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth. That isn't stated clearly. Secondly, there's absol…

Paul Graham's articles always shoot immediately up to the top of HN, but I agree with you, they're generally cursory and pithy thoughts which don't convince my skeptical mind. I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular? Think of all the amazing writers across our civilization whose work is linkable, and we're worshipping these decent but not amazing blog posts?

There's a cycle with blogs. The author starts a blog and they have a distinct, somewhat original voice with distinct, somewhat original views. In PG's case, the startup advice about building stuff that doesn't scale, not worrying about competitors, Lisp, etc. were quite fresh, at least to me. The author's blog becomes successful and their ideas become well understood throughout a community. But a person's ideas don't evolve that quickly. They start repeating themselves. The posts become variations on a theme. Maybe the author goes outside their area of expertise (No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics). By the end people are wondering what you're wondering. Why are we listening to this person?

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#287

Post by gonehome »

notacoward wrote: post #137
harshaw wrote: post #32

I 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…

Likewise, even down to being in the Boston area. I did OK at a couple of the eleven startups I worked at, but still made even more over just a couple of years at a FAANG. Many of my former colleagues on both sides have had similar trajectories. The vast majority of the "merely rich" in tech got that way by working at companies that had already broken away from the pack. Speaking of breaking away from the pack, that b…

I think this is true in the common case, but I thought Bezos was raised by a single mom who had him at 17 and his step father was a cuban immigrant?

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/statement...

There's also the donut king: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25241898

I'm not trying to just pick rare counter examples, but I'm skeptical of the claim that there's little demographic distance or the implication that it's a prerequisite. One of the reasons people like the US is an immigrant can come here and they themselves (or their children) can become the richest person in the world (or the vice president).

I'd agree there's a randomness element, but it's less lottery and more placing bets with odds that are hard to determine. Some people have better initial odds, but that's only one part of it.

If anything - I'd hypothesize that extreme outliers share something other personality trait more relevant than demographics, willingness to take huge risks. You could argue that someone who has more of a safety net is in a better position to do so, but someone who has nothing to lose may also find the tradeoff easier. It's possible that most people in a relatively comfortable position would be less likely to take the big kind of risks that outlier payoffs require (I'd guess this is one reason why we have few people like Elon Musk).

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#288

Post by rossdavidh »

I like reading PG's essays, but...I read a book on pretty much the same phenomenon ("Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty) a few months ago. It took a lot longer to cover the same ground, but it also covered it a lot better, and a lot more persuasively. Not unsurprisingly, it is also a lot less sanguine about the impact of recent wealth trends.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#289

Post by snicker7 »

nindalf wrote: post #71

It's a classic PG article. Many true facts in there, lots of good analysis with just a few questionable claims thrown in here and there. At the end, there's a massive claim that isn't fully stated but implied. "Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing" translated means "income inequality is not a problem". Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth. That isn't stated clearly. Secondly, there's absol…

> Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth.

The Gini coefficient can be applied to any statistical distribution, including wealth.

From Wiki:

> The Gini index or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or wealth inequality within a nation or any other group of people

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#290

Post by VRay »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #163
harshaw wrote: post #32

I 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…

Yep, I wouldn't say I've had as much startup experience as you but I did work as employee #4 at one and then after that at a startup that got acquired by Google and while I did get a windfall out of that it certainly didn't make me rich and I've made a lot more money in the years since just taking in my regular FAANG compensation. FAANG compensations can be quite high. Arguably they are that high precisely to siphon…

Regarding the "escape velocity", it really isn't that tough IMO to save enough to retire when you're making 5-10x the median household US income, even if you're wasting $3500/month on rent. Yeah, milk and gas cost about twice what they do in the rest of the USA, but since I moved to the Bay Area I've been saving over a third of my income without even trying despite having a kid, eating out every day, and buying every gadget and gizmo I hear about

~5 years of savings can buy you a house out in the outside world so you can take a stab at building a ramen-profitable startup

~15 years' worth can probably cover regular old retirement at a level that'd be comfortable for people from https://old.reddit.com/r/FinancialIndependence

Post reply on HN