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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

#131

Post by pram »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #106
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

Mojang had employees.

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

#132

Post by altacc »

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…

Yes, automation is nothing new and we're all still working. It changes the jobs and then typically the company can use the gain to expand and so needs to hire more.

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

#133

Post by achenet »

Brigand wrote: post #105
VictorPath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

any proof of that statement? from reading description of native american societies in Dawn of Everything, the opposite seems to be the case.

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

#134

Post by hrgten »

coldtea wrote: post #101
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...

Eliminating the middle class (except for those who directly serve the billionaires) and having a huge industrial reserve army (Marx) that does jobs that cannot be automated could work. It works for the super rich in Brazil.

This seems to be the trend in "Western" societies, and the middle class enthusiastically votes for those who pursue that agenda.

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

#135

Post by PaulWaldman »

This reflects increased maturity and thus the transition to more specialized labor. It is akin to early craftsmen assembling cars and transitioning to assembly lines.

Automation tools that provide APIs to allow founders to increase their leverage are produced by other developers who specialize in said tools.

Ideally, this allows the most efficient use of resources, everybody wins. Those who are great at building tools can do so and these tools can be used by many organizations. Pessimistically, there are some who get squeezed out of the production equation.

Should a startup develop their own accounting system? Unless they are in accounting, probably not. But there will hopefully become a point where a founder needs to bring in resources, internal or external, to manage the accounting system. This is a further extension of that.

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

#136

Post by TurboHaskal »

wittycardio wrote: post #33
robertlagrant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.

Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.

But what about the yet another distributed key store we built?

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

#137

Post by yetanotherforg »

clevergadget wrote: post #117
yetanotherforg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context? I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers. I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on abo…

Yeah no one has anything to say about this, probably they read it and run to check their agreements sweating buckets. That's messed up, sorry to hear it.

Many of my friends and colleagues became wealthy thanks to winning the YC lottery, some as founders some as employees. The way they changed afterwards drove me away from the pursuit of money entirely. I'm sure the me in this timeline would not like the me in an alternate timeline where I lasted there two more weeks and achieved wealth status.

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

#138

Post by MuffinFlavored »

rqtwteye wrote: post #87
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…

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.

> If somebody can make a nice living with their business, isn't that good enough?

I think the allure of being a billionaire is it's "one and done". As in, once you achieve it, you can live the craziest life possible filled with lots of grandeur and not need to run any kind of business whatsoever after.

It's mainly a fantasy for people who are tired, overworked, underpaid, under-appreciated (which is like 85% of America I'm guessing).

"Wouldn't it be nice..."

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

#139

Post by achenet »

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?

re-read the comment you're replying to: employees didn't create ALL the value. In other words, founders created some as well. :)

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

#140

Post by FpUser »

I have a company with my own product. I wrote software, rented servers, designed hardware and placed orders to a couple of small factories. I have partner but he mostly handles business matters. No employees. We do hire contractors every once in a while for particular sporadic jobs (like design pics for website, create campaign page, assemble hardware from parts etc. etc). So yes no employees thanks to technological advancements.
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