Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 394 posts

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

#101

Post by coldtea »

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…

Even better: let's see how many billioaire entrepreneurs will appear in a society where few or no people are there to buy their products and services, because they've made redundant and are out of jobs or in new lower-paying forced careers...

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

#102

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

I will admit that I assumed a lot before I read the whole thing ( I was kinda hoping it will be more about automation ), but I guess it goes back to the opening statement:

I don't hear that a lot. I see 'Eat the rich memes', guillotine pics popping up on various community sites. PG may be very limited in his view to VC-land only ( and if that is all he is talking about, he may well be right ), but if he is making a statement intended for general public, lets talk about not getting the current mood. The argument itself seems off, but I am having a harder time finding where it fails.

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

#103

Post by chinchilla2020 »

PinguTS wrote: post #80

This is this thinking of "Automation reduces workforce". The next argument then is always "We need Basic Income" because of this. But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. It moved the focus of the workforce. At the end more automation even required more workforce. The thing is, you cannot engineer the process to be automated. You need to keep maintaining the automation. This inc…

I have to agree here.

Automation increased the productivity of employees, and drove down the price of goods. It never truly 'reduced' the size of the workforce. The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world.

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

#104

Post by ausbah »

automation only scales to a certain point though? after a certain point of scale it makes sense to do something in house & save money at the margin right?

automation seems great for small companies & solo founders, but kind of an open question if that gets you to unicorn status

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

#105

Post by Brigand »

VictorPath wrote: post #68
vasco wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I am pretty sure among hunters there was a very strict pecking order and I am glad to live in the system we have today.

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

#106

Post by ThePhysicist »

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…

Isn't Notch [1] a solo billionaire? Not sure if he had help running Minecraft (I guess so), but you could say he created a billion-dollar company single-handedly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson

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

#107

Post by pyb »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #64
jtgi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, negating “employees created all the value” does not mean, “founders create all the value”. It means employees didn’t.

So who is the magical missing third party that created value?

Who said anything about a third party?

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

#108

Post by paxys »

It's easy to make any argument sound valid when you tout the extreme outliers (Instagram & WhatsApp in this case). What about the average case? What percentage of founders have grown their company to $100M+ revenue or $1B+ valuation on the backs of "automation" (whatever that is)?

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

#110

Post by clevergadget »

osigurdson wrote: post #78
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…

I think it could happen. AI and automation have the tendency of amplifying ability. The ideal company has zero employees. Similarity, the ideal world has zero employees and everyone does want they want. If that scares you, give your head a shake.

Yeah if work was so great you wouldn't have to pay people to do it
Post reply on HN