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How People Get Rich Now

paulgraham.com

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Re: How People Get Rich Now

#751

Post by jdgoesmarching »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #727
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Maybe unpopular opinion, but entrepreneur insights from CEOs are rarely valuable because no individual contribution outweighs sheer luck. Every day millions of people make smart decisions, take good risks, and work hard without significantly improving their conditions. It is pure survivorship bias to think individuals are capable of more than slightly nudging the cosmic needle if it happens to land near the r…

> It makes people uncomfortable to think that success is mostly a matter of luck. I constantly hear this sentiment and don't think it makes people uncomfortable at all. If anything it is the opposite, people cling to this idea to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own situation. What makes people far more uncomfortable is the nagging feeling that success isn't mostly a matter of luck. Success is a choice…

Yes, this is my point. You are the people who want to believe that all it takes to be comfortable in life is to “follow some basic rules.” Putting aside that the circumstances of your birth are already a huge matter of luck, I’ll point to the entire US working class and unemployed college graduates as evidence to the contrary.

At some point those of us who have grown up in this economy stopped believing in fairy tales and bootstraps. There were a million points from my upbringing to now that could have diverted me from the middle class, so I’m not looking down on my underemployed peers as inferior beings for their struggles.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#752

Post by boringg »

alexgmcm wrote: post #387
boringg wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much of your paycheck to landlords goes to the bank to pay off the mortgage

But except for the interest that is still money going to the landlord as they have the property itself.

Interest, capital expenditures, maintenance, insurance, potential lawsuits (hopefully not), time spent managing the properties. Don't disagree with you - it pays off the principal also goes towards other things. For some people not owning, having to take care of a property or put significant amounts of capital into a property is an asset. Not everyone for sure, but some people. For example myself until my late 30s was a happy renter - would I prefer the money going elsewhere? Yes. Would I have been able to afford the same lifestyle in the city? Absolutely not.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#753

Post by mike00632 »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #611
qzw wrote: post #464

I'm rather disappointed PG would think that the Forbes wealth list could support any kind of conclusion whatsoever. One of the biggest reasons that the top of the list is filled with tech billionaires is that their wealth is relatively transparent, being mostly in the form of stock holdings in publicly traded companies and often directly disclosed. This makes it much easier for Forbes to estimate their net worth with…

Genuinely curious: Do you have any more background on this? Who are these rich people that are not listed in Forbes?

This is an ongoing curiosity of mine. One really cool example is Mubarak of Egypt who became wealthy from corruption. When he lost power he had some wealth exposed and he was richer than any known person in the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/04/11/egyptia...

It's very likely that the richest person in the world right now is Vladimir Putin.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#754

Post by WalterBright »

dfxm12 wrote: post #585
WalterBright wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get a CEO without offering a golden parachute. This is because you're not hire a loser CEO, you're going to hire a winner, and you'll need to attract him away from his current lucrative position. It's the same thing as top athletes getting contracts paying them millions of dollars whether or not they continue to win games.

Athletes aren't comparable to the CEO in this situation. Athlete pay (at least for athletes who are paid by an owner and not mostly from prize money) isn't really tied to winning or losing, but is largely defined by collectively bargained negotiations, based on how much the league brings in. You also have guys like Bryce Harper who, even when he goes 0-for-3, will earn their keep in other ways, like getting people to…

I must say I'm amused by the notion that people running around a field holding a ball are worth megabucks while people managing a company that provides jobs to 100,000 people and valuable services/products to millions ain't.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#755

Post by intricatedetail »

benzor wrote: post #324

There's some nuggets of truth in here, but I am disappointed that this article sidesteps what I feel is the most important reason for startup success in 2020: easy and abundant access to cheap capital. - Interest rates are at all time lows, borrowing is cheap - The Fed's balance sheet is at an all-time high. The economy is flush with cash, particularly the investor / VC class - This excess cash creates an (arguably a…

Isn't that in a way a ponzi scheme? Companies that don't bring value and need a supply of investors... that does ring a bell. Why regulator doesn't look into it?

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#756

Post by lanstin »

paulmd wrote: post #654
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually? Please ... That's called insider trading and those who do that ends up in jail or at best have to hide in the sun for the rest of their life.

A recent example would be Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich dumping as much stock as he could after learning about Meltdown and before the news went public. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/intel... The article also cites Equifax's CEO selling before the news of their data breach went public. And that's just the ones that are prominent enough that everybody knows about it.

Even just the routine sell off ten percent a year or whatever a financial planner would advise is something one can't do with your 401k.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#757

Post by SeanAppleby »

Balgair wrote: post #506
benzor wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for some hastily chosen examples. I think the point still stands if you consider the following companies: WeWork, Lyft, Snapchat, Pinterest, Dropbox, Slack, Casper, Lime, Peloton, Beyond Meat, Wayfair, Zillow. More generally speaking, take a look at Goldman Sachs' Non-Profitable Technology Index: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsRVCiMXIAE7xlA.png

Are the fake-meat companies tech companies? I thought they are more like contract manufacturers, brewers, or other industrial foodstuffs. No doubts on the access to cheap debt, though.

I think it depends purely on your definition of "tech".

Impossible engineering soybeans to produce more heme to make fake meat behave more like meat is a technology, in that it is a novel innovation applied to solve a real world problem.

But in modern common parlance "tech" tends to mean either that a company's offering is either entirely or heavily augmented by new software, or that the company has ties to a specific network of talent/investors/etc, or that the company has very low incremental costs per user. In those cases, they might not be a tech company.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#758

Post by shlep21 »

adwn wrote: post #577
sillysaurusx wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm? That paragraph is accurate. When you're free to work flat-out – as hard as you can, as much as you want – you can make a lot more progress than if you were paid to do the same thing for someone else. 36x may not be the exact multiple, but it's correct within a power of two.

> Hm? That paragraph is accurate. No, the assumptions in it are ridiculous in context: 1) "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee" : Okay, maybe you can "work" 80 hours a week, as in "be in the office 80 hours per week". 2) "if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour" : No. You can't stay focused for 11.5 hours a day, especially not 7 days in a row, especially e…

No. You can't stay focused for 11.5 hours a day, especially not 7 days in a row, especially especially not week after week after week.

I'm a former software engineer. The best engineers absolutely, genuinely can work very long hours and remain productive. 80 hrs/week might be a bit high, but 65 hours a week at 3x average-programmer-productivity is definitely something that exists in the real world, and although it is rare, it is not vanishingly rare.

Hacker News is in denial about this extremely simple fact, even though you can easily verify it by e.g. working at FAANG for a couple years. Probably because lots of Hacker News readers are kids who have not gotten to work with a broad cross-section of programmers; and because the rest of us are literally slacking as we post here, and want to believe our slacking is some kind of biological necessity.

I agree with your broader point that PG's line of reasoning is, at best, a gross simplification of the real world (although I still enjoy it as an intellectual exercise).

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#759

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

aerosmile wrote: post #670
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this position is its naivety. Are you going to say with a straight face that all potential founders are equally likely to be funded by investors purely on their probability of success, and not via false signals and stereotyping if not straight up bigotry? That there aren't credentials that can be effectively bought to gain access to that? Markets are just markets, not oracles of unbiased merit. Makin…

That argument sounds familiar, but it's not reflected in the latest YC stats (32% of founders come from underrepresented groups). I feel good knowing that one of the fastest career paths in the history of the world has a 32% admission rate to practically anyone anywhere in the world (again, if you're feeling down about your chances as a US citizen, spend a minute talking to one of the Nigerians in YC and your perspec…

It's simultaneously possible for YC to perpetuate the problem while having better stats than typical.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#760

Post by [deleted] »

qzw wrote: post #464

I'm rather disappointed PG would think that the Forbes wealth list could support any kind of conclusion whatsoever. One of the biggest reasons that the top of the list is filled with tech billionaires is that their wealth is relatively transparent, being mostly in the form of stock holdings in publicly traded companies and often directly disclosed. This makes it much easier for Forbes to estimate their net worth with…

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