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How People Get Rich Now

paulgraham.com

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Re: How People Get Rich Now

#341

Post by VRay »

eloff wrote: post #45
aqme28 wrote: post #11

I 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.

haha, this reminds me of World of Warcraft

Third-party sites post rankings showing the best player performance on various metrics worldwide across thousands of boss fights

There's often some choice you can make for your character where it works out like "10% chance of doing 5x as well, 90% chance of doing half as well", and the entire leaderboard is filled with people who lucked out

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#342

Post by DC1350 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #262
dudeman13 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Janitors had better living conditions 50 years ago than $150k earners do today Utter bullshit. >$150k is not even enough to buy a small home near your workplace in a lot of cities Live within your means for 5 years, invest the 70k/y excess money into index funds. You can live of dividends anywhere in the world that isn't a capital in a first world country. Without even losing money. Literally the 1% pretending to be…

It's utterly amazing to me how far up the wealth pyramid you can go and find people saying "Me? No, no, no, I'm not wealthy - it's the people above me who are the wealthy ones." Perhaps it stops at like $500k/yr?

> Perhaps it stops at like $500k/yr?

It stops once somebody’s net worth is already so high that their annual income is irrelevant. Those are the real wealthy people.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#343

Post by N00bN00b »

true_religion wrote: post #272
lolive wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like RMS is highly respected at the FSF :)

I understand the comparison, but the FSF can exist without RMS. PG on the other hand solely supports HN, I doubt he would continue to pay for a site that vilified him.

This site is mainly supported by its volunteer moderators. I doubt it cost more than a few thousand a year at most to run.

So the fact that PG pays for it doesn't mean much. If the community decided to no longer be under his care, they could easily find a replacement model or benefactor and they're more than capable to arrange such an uprising/migration.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#344

Post by mattmanser »

iur12 wrote: post #195
cryptoz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG's recent articles have changed from what they used to be. Recently (last few years) there is a dramatic change towards defending riches, logical fallacies to explain why being rich is okay, a lot of focus on wealth and how to get it and why it's okay. A lot less technically interesting than he used to post. I used to send Startup=Growth to everyone I knew. I think people are used to high-quality content from PG an…

This isn’t a surprise. The religion that formed here hanging off his every word subscribed to it to get rich, just like he started YC to get rich. Now he’s happily rich, barely even looks in the mirror at these adherents that he left behind, and is writing for his new friends who are also rich. It was always pointless snake oil but the Sand Hill Greed here made everyone overlook that because maybe, just maybe, the ke…

I don't think it's at all fair to say he started YC to get rich.

His own thoughts about are here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html

Whether you believe that or not is up to you, but back then there was no guarantee it would work. To look with hindsight and say it was just greed is easy for you to hurl, but not at all what it looked like at the beginning.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#345

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #180
WhompingWindows wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

PG is apropos for this forum, but beyond that he is plainly a good writer. I don't know who you consider 'amazing writers across our civilization' -- but whether it is Gracian or Scott Alexander, PG shares one thing with them, namely that his works will be quoted beyond the lifespan of his contemporary readers.

He's good at rhetoric. The writing is simple with one point per paragraph and requires a low reading age.

It has a single and consistently repeated/implied message without any deviations or uncertainties.

All of that makes it persuasive.

But factually it's mostly wrong.

I'm not going to through it point by point to pick all the inaccuracies about the continuing influence of inherited wealth on success, or the unrealistically rosy implication of small business riches.

I'll just suggest everyone should research for themselves the real survival rates for small businesses, the small business sectors with the best long-term viability, the age group most active in creating new businesses, and the number of tech startups that makes any return at all to investors.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#346

Post by sjg007 »

api wrote: post #22
aqme28 wrote: post #11

I 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.

I'd be more interested in a study of how people move from lower classes to at least upper middle class.

There are studies. The bay area is one of the best places for that to happen. New York as well I think.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#347

Post by waterhouse »

joshuamorton wrote: post #278
closeparen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political messaging has also changed from “people in poverty have specific material needs that we need money to fix” (war on poverty) to “actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality). The war on poverty can be waged with a modest tax on the PGs of the world. The war on inequality is different. Venture capital always seeks to create wealth that will flow to…

> actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality). This is a misrepresentation though. There isn't anything inherently wrong with people having or making different amounts of money. The complaint, as I see it usually, is that the degree of inequality is unacceptable. That is, millionares aren't inherently unethical, heck people who make millions annually aren't in…

> The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society ... How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?

What do you think the billionaires' billions are doing? Sitting in a bank account? I think the majority of their wealth is invested, i.e. it is funding industry, which is a good thing. If we assume for illustration that billionaires will spend $1B on things like private jets and invest the rest, then if we have $1T divided among 10 billionaires, we'll have $10B spent on jets and $990B invested, while if we have $1T divided among 1000 billionaires, we'll have $1T spent on jets and $0 invested. Given that, at least for the concern of "how it's being spent", it's actually best to have the megawealth concentrated among a relative few.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#348

Post by Retric »

gonehome wrote: post #287
notacoward wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

The point about the demographic similarities doesn’t go away when you include outliers. Their are vastly more people with poor backgrounds so having them underrepresented doesn’t go away with a few exceptions sprinkled in.

People talk about America as a meritocracy yet, the US has had vastly more presidents closely related to previous presidents than say Black, Hispanic, and or Female presidents combined. That’s to put it bluntly not he outcome of random chance even if you’re limiting things to just white men it’s obvious something else is involved.

https://www.factmonster.com/us/government/executive-branch/u...

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#349

Post by zdragnar »

runarberg wrote: post #257
zdragnar wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of Airbnb seems odd to me. People around the world use it because they don't like the alternatives. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do business?

I think the problem here is the consolidation of an entire industry around a single Silicon Valley company. In any other time in history this would be called a monopoly, and that is a problem. If AirBnB was just an aggregator, say a cooperative standard where hotels and guesthouses could post their services and the profits of AirBnB would go back to the industry, that would be fine. But it is not, the profits go to s…

There are competitors- VRBO, for example. AirBnB have a significant share, but hardly a monopoly.

If Airbnb were just an aggregator, it'd be pretty worthless. For myself and my wife, finding superhosts on Airbnb is one of the indicators we use to feel comfortable that we probably aren't getting ripped off.

The relatively simple interface for scheduling, requesting changes, paying, seeing up front what taxes and surcharges will be applied etc. are all things the hotel industry has had decades to implement, and they didn't.

In fact, they still haven't. If hotels and guesthouses formed such a cooperative with all the same features, I would use it- especially if they didn't add on their own service charge like Airbnb.

The boom of renting rooms and houses may have come with its downsides, but from the consumer point of view, AirBnB has been a godsend for those of us who don't like hotels, travel with pets, and go to out-of-the-way places that don't otherwise tend to attract a lot of online presence.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#350

Post by kkoncevicius »

thegrimmest wrote: post #316
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…

Can I ask a related question? Why all the focus on income/wealth "inequality"? Shouldn't we be looking at the absolute baseline quality of life? Hasn't it been increasing dramatically despite increasing inequality? Due to technological advances, hasn't the baseline quality of healthcare, education, sanitation, nutrition, shelter, comfort, convenience, etc. significantly improved from the 60s or the 80s? If so, why be…

Social status is by comparison, that's why. I assume the vast majority of people would choose to be in the aristocracy somewhere in 1300 Europe, compared to middle class today. Even if objectively the middle class has better quality of life.
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