Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by CrimsonRain » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

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…

And I'm curious to know, in your model, if the employees are willing to work without salary and bear the cost of running the company?

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

#52

Post by ghaff » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

notlukesky wrote: post #27

czbond wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it wasn't clear but I was referring to low-touch SaaS as well with "self-service type of software app". There are low-touch SaaS apps and offerings serving the developer and some "enterprise" market segments. The problem with certain enterprise SaaS is that they are high-touch by the very nature of the sales process involving big-ticket items. Once you are in the territory of high ACV there are many sales "gate…

And chasing down purchase orders and higher expectations for customer support and, once you have direct sales, you need training for sales, and you have to generate qualified leads for them, and you have to respond to RFPs...

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

#53

Post by HideousKojima » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

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.

Unless that code is under the AGPL specifically and the software isn't cloud-based (and the vast majority of start-ups these days are doing SaaS) then there's no license violation there.

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

#54

Post by FredPret » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

bluelightning2k wrote: post #12

FredPret wrote: post #3

I’m creating a startup. I’m the first and only employee, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. What would have taken an army of clerks in the past is now a (lot) of code. Whole departments are replaced by API’s that cost less than $100/month. It’s really incredible.

Could you give some examples? Congratulations on your success implementing this stuff

Congratulate me when it finally works out!

I’m still in stealth mode. My startup is super simple in concept - I gather a particular type of data, clean it, process it, and serve it to subscribers. Some of my data sources are free, some are paid API’s.

All the processing is done in code. You would need an army of people to read all that text, a layer of bureaucracy to manage and check them.

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

#55

Post by VictorPath » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

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.

The argument he is arguing against is that the workers create the wealth, and profit is that unpaid surplus labor time that the LPs/VCs/founders expropriate from the workers creating wealth. You can't "share" profits with workers when workers are creating all the wealth, the LPs/VCs etc. expropriate profits from workers.

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

#56

Post by bmitc » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

yetanotherforg wrote: post #14

wittycardio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty clear that these are people who want to fuck you over. Silicon Valley elites have accumulated enough power to come mask off. Entitled dirtbags who profited off government funded science and technology who've never created an ounce of value in their lives.

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.

> Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars.

Not that anyone listens to him, but Noam Chomsky has been saying this for his whole career.

https://youtu.be/a4ZIhW5ZpaE

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

#57

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #40

Hmm, so his example is Instagram. But Instagram was sold to FB, sorry Meta!, in 2012. Where are the new examples of that kind of startup? 13 employees selling for 1bn USD.

Musical.ly to Bytedance? And Qualcomm buying Nuvia?

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

#58

Post by milicat » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

A capitalist fever dream to justify how valuable he is to society. Of course, he completely ignores the labour going into the entire supply chain that enables this level of automation. It's full of underpaid workers likely including some living under slavery-like conditions or in authoritarian dictatorships that don't even live up to his free-market ideals.

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

#59

Post by japanuspus » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

dandanua wrote: post #7

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".

This is the question I see way too few people asking: how do we want end-game capitalism to look. Should it be Banks' "The Culture", or should it be neo-feudal with the populace at large acting as serf to capital.

Without discussing the vision, discussing the strategy becomes sort of meaningless.

(Edit: typo)

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

#60

Post by Slavaqua » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

Totally, you still hear that feudals didn't deserve to be rich, because serfs created all the value. But the falsity of this claim become obvious as enclosures enabled feudals to use fewer and fewer serfs on their land.