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Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

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Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#41

Post by vasco »

jerrre wrote: post #36
ceronman wrote: post #16

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…

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

Also this is not about a dystopian village with one single employer that exploits workers that cannot move. Startup employees agree with free choice to work somewhere for the agreed upon profit share, be that % based or fixed, or mixed.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#42

Post by tareqak »

https://twitter.com/IlariKaila/status/1600120645211201536

Ilari Kaila

@IlariKaila

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1h

Replying to

@paulg

Why did you delete this banger?

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|

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Paul Graham

@paulg

·

1h

Replying to

@IlariKaila

I forgot that mentioning Marx attracts angry fools. Since I could make my point without mentioning him, I just reposted it without.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#43

Post by VictorPath »

It's a strawman argument for founders, but I am fairly sure it is made out of ignorance.

Let's say a sole founder buys $100,000 worth of Amazon Cloud, Nvidia cards, smartphones etc. Yes, one person is at the company, but others made those goods. The founder may not have directly exploited the person who made the smartphone they're using, but someone did.

Also, let's say I sell my small company which is well positioned in a fast growing market. The buyers are not buying based on what happened before, but on the future work and revenues that will be acquired from people working on the product.

At the end of the day there are people who work and create wealth and get a wage or salary, and there are idle class heir LPs who do not work or create wealth. The heirs survive on the wealth created in expropriated, unpaid surplus labor time of workers who do work. VCs front for the LPs, and founders deal with the VCs.

I don't think Graham even knows what he is arguing with. I'm not trying to make a convincing argument for the other side, but a clarifying one.

Incidentally, pretty much every economist up until the mid 19th century agreed with my view in some form - Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, David Ricardo - all the people who made economic arguments which economists still use. They said they studied political economy. It wasn't until the 1870s that arguments against new value being created by labor were started in full swing, although some of the ideas go back to the 1830s.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#44

Post by Msw242 »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #32
robertlagrant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does he mention open source? And using open source software is not standing on anyone's head.

Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.

Not every single startup.

It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#48

Post by tareqak »

swyx wrote: post #37

This is clear to anyone with freshman macroeconomics - The Cobb-Douglas function for factor productivity: Y = A * L^β * K^α Value of your work depends on how well you wield capital (K) and labor (L). Code, Cloud and AI have massively improved α while β is at generational lows.

Thank you for mentioning something new to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb–Douglas_production_functi... .

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#49

Post by the_optimist »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #5

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…

Stop stealing the internet bits from Claude Shannon. He did the work and deserves his cut.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#50

Post by HideousKojima »

varispeed wrote: post #39
jerrre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

Wage is a cost and profit comes after costs. If owner want's to share profit, they need to give company shares to the employees and pay dividends.

A cost that cuts into what would otherwise be profits. It's all fungible so you're quibbling about an accounting issue here. If an owner made a contract with an employee that they will pay them a $0 salary but will pay them a fixed annual dividend of $100,000 (broken up into convenient bi-weekly payments) would that fix your concern? I'm getting the impression that it wouldn't.
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