Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

“I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman

What I actually hear people saying (including at least one person from YC) is that founders need to share the potential wealth more fairly with early hires. With various rationales, including that execution is everything: having an idea and raising money for it isn't execution -- and the founders need the early hires to execute successfully.

> But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.

I'm not following the logic, but the initial assertion seems like it'd tend to be received sloppily, anyway. Whether founders deserve to be rich seems like a diversion from the usual question: why do founders with a successful exit get rich when employees get even less than they would've been guaranteed at a non-startup tech job.

> In the limit case, you're left with just the founders. And we're not far from it. Instagram had only 13 employees when it was sold for a billion dollars.

So share the wealth with those 13 employees. "I have an idea for site/app" and getting some funding isn't worth a billion dollars. Successful execution is.

> And a billion was if anything below market price. People mocked that deal at the time, but in retrospect it was a bargain.

Isn't part of the job of those founders to make sure the exit is at market value? Were the wealth spread around more evenly, so that everyone who made the success possible can get rich, the founders might have more motivation to get a good price. :)

(I suppose that an exception to this would be if a startup is actually closer to an investment scam, propped up by other startups in a portfolio as customers, and they expect all the workers involved to do only mechanical tasks in which individual creativity/ideas/brilliance/etc. doesn't significantly affect the success of the company.)

If you can build a factory that can build products more efficiently, it means you can sell them cheaper then your competitors, meaning you can move more volume and thus make more profit. So you are definitely not going to run that new shiny factory for only 3 days a week.

Eventually, competitors will notice your improved output and react with their own improved factory. If you sit still in your shiny new factory, you will eventually be outpaced by competitors as they catch up.

In the end though, the throughput per human is greatly increased as computers and machines do (most of) the work. This has increased prosperity greatly.

Unless you can accept living with less then the competition, you are not going to work less then your competitors.

I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project.

It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave it out willingly.

This sort of attitude has soured me to the entire open source community. They want to be able to give their work out for free, but then have a say in who uses it and how it's used, which is exactly the opposite of free and open.