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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

#121
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.

Hunter-gatherer bands don't exactly survive without families to continue the cycle of reproduction, someone to take care of the children, someone to tend to the wounded and sick, someone to build the houses while the hunter-gatherers are out hunting, someone to grow crops when it's cold and food is harder to hunt for, someone to track how much food everyone is getting...

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

#122

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…

What if I'm a founder who's also a developer, I have the idea, customer base and I've done ~80% of the code of the product but I need help with deploying and scaling the product.

How much of the profit do I share with the employees? What does the society deem fair in the case where founder comes up with the product, identifies the problem and works with the customer to configure the product? Do I get to take 5 salaries or 1 salary?

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

#123

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…

While it's true he's saying that founders can create a lot of value without employees, he's certainly not suggesting employees don't also create value. Obviously they do, or founders wouldn't hire anyone.

> if you have employees, you have to share your profits with your employees

Needless to say, this already happens via equity and options. There's a reasonable debate to be had over what constitutes "fair" profit-sharing. But the market clears where it clears, and individual tech employees definitely have meaningful leverage even under current macro conditions.

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

#124
If his example is Instagram then the lesson is that you didn't use to need many employees to get rich via venture capital and buy out, which are the main goals of many tech founders. Instagram and tech in the early 2010s is not a company or sector that represents the wider economy.

Instagram in 2012 had 30 million active users and zero revenue. That's $0 value earned per employee; these days it's just under $2 million per employee. The scale is vastly different and they couldn't still be running with so few employees. And let's not forget that Instagram was bought as it was seen as a threat to facebook. That it was seen as worth a billion dollars is exactly the problem that many people are referring to about creating overnight billionaires but overvaluing digital companies, which would be worth much less if they were brick & mortar companies.

That said, there are a lot of great tools out that that allow people to run companies with off the shelf software and no code applications, which I think have the potential to make a bigger impact on software development than AI. Companies using new technology to become more efficient is nothing new, it's as old as work itself. The steam engine automated a lot of work but still required workers, just like automation tools require another company's employees to build. Growth creates more employment and automation moves those roles elsewhere. The problem is more that those employees that the enriched founder does need working for them are disrespected and paid badly as they are seen as just cogs in the machine who should be happy for the breadcrumbs tossed to them. Doesn't matter how many employees you have, if the founder is getting rich they can afford to pay their staff well.

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

#125
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…

> But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such.

But it actually did. "Workforce participation", which might be the closest metric of what we actually mean here, keeps declining. In addition to that, we have the era of "bullshit jobs".

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand their intentions. “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

Did Richard Feynman struggle to pay rent?

Wasn't his work funded by the government?

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

#127

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…

What's with that obsession about "billionaires"? If somebody can make a nice living with their business, isn't that good enough? Personally I think we are perfectly fine without billionaires.

a "nice living" is actually quite hard for small businesses. competition is brutal, all sorts of risks can be fatal etc. the "billionaire adoration" phenomenon is actually putting lipstick on oligopolistic market arrangements and pretending they are still entrepreneurial

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

#129

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…

For value creation, you need both workers and capital (provided by founders and investors). The value is created by both together, not each independently. The compensation for created value is based on market rate for both work and capital.
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