21–30 of 394 posts
" John Hammond: You're right. You're absolutely right. Hiring Nedry was a mistake, that's obvious. We're over-dependent on automation. I can see that now. Now, the next time, everything is correctible... "
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I don't follow? Lots of technical founders create their own automations.
His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed. 1920s robber baron bs. Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on t…
> those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave
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Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers. In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.
Most progress has come from universities, defense and government funding. These losers build an app and proclaim themselves gurus on the future. It's insane that people fall for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed. 1920s robber baron bs. Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on t…
> those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave I fixed that for you.
Saying that they do not exist is just inviting being blind-sided by movements in that automation beyond your control.
It's frightening that people "at the top" write those things without even realizing how it sounds for ordinary people. I think this delusion is on par with Marie Antoinette and her "eat cakes if you don't have bread".
It is important to point out that this is only possible for the consumer app economy or a self-service type of software app or digital marketplace (like craigslist). Everything else requires more headcount (could be outsourced to 3rd parties or consultants). And in the whole economy this is a sliver of companies. This is a great business of course but there are not many of them given the scale of the whole economy. B…
I wholly disagree. SaaS are similar to automations for end customers. The CapEx spend of tens/hundreds of engineers that built the SaaS is offset by 1 company to remove the needed engineers from each company. Companies used to: build their own authentication layers, databases, infrastructure, code repositories,etc, etc. What starts in consumer always moves to Enterprise. So will AI and automations.
I should have also mentioned hedge funds who manage billions with relatively few head count and they use automation tools extensively starting with the spreadsheet in the 1980s.
He is implying that founders can create a lot of value without employees, and that the claim that employees also create value is false. If that's true, then what about a social experiment: If you are a solo founder, you get all your profits for yourself. But if you have employees, you have to share your profits with your employees. If employees don't produce any value, easy, fire them all, you get everything. But if…
Based on his argument: Fewer people are doing a lot more thanks to being good at automation. It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. The past three years, the YC crowd has really tried hard to justify wealth disparities, gentrification and generally treating employees like garbage, as part of their Objectivist agenda. Paul, employees do the automation, n…
> It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. That's like saying anyone who thinks hammers are a good idea is really saying a hammer makes a builder successful, not the builder. It's just a tool, and he's saying tools mean one person can do more. You don't need to straw man a philosophy on to it to then have something to argue against. > employees do the aut…
I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers.
I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on about $75 million from a YC start-up when an unnamed higher-up told them to fire me two weeks before my first vesting, because I had the most amount of non-founder stock in the company (a compensation for which I took a 66% salary cut).
(edit, typos and turned 100s into 1,00s)