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

161–170 of 394 posts

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

#161

Post by shadowfoxx »

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.

This is a fun semantic game but Profits are not the cost of doing business. When you have an employee sign a contract for $X dollars per year, that's a cost. Conflating Revenue and Profit for the sake of an argument is bad faith.

My Assumption here is that the common usage of profit is, "Money after all expenses paid", which employee compensation is clearly outside of that definition.

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

#162

Post by sidlls »

HideousKojima wrote: post #50
varispeed wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage is a cost and profit comes after costs. If owner want's to share profit, they need to give company shares to the employees and pay dividends.

A cost that cuts into what would otherwise be profits. It's all fungible so you're quibbling about an accounting issue here. If an owner made a contract with an employee that they will pay them a $0 salary but will pay them a fixed annual dividend of $100,000 (broken up into convenient bi-weekly payments) would that fix your concern? I'm getting the impression that it wouldn't.

This is disingenuous. Money is fungible but the flow of money is not. My buying weekly groceries is not the same as my putting a down payment on a new car: they're two different activities that use the same fungible source as a medium of exchange. Likewise, if I run a business, paying a fixed wage to an employee is not the same as distributing profit in the form of dividends to shareholders: the fungible medium of exchange is weighted differently, comes from different sources, and is used for different purposes.

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

#163

Post by musingsole »

yobbo wrote: post #125
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…

> 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".

Source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Workforce Participation (a per capita metric) decreased. Starting from 2002 with a participation of 66%, the US employed ~192 million. But in 2022 at a participation of 62%, the US employed ~203 million.

Absolute employment is up. Between that and productivity gains, more work is being done today than ever before.

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

#166

Post by fleddr »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #5

Based on his argument: Fewer people are doing a lot more thanks to being good at automation. It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. The past three years, the YC crowd has really tried hard to justify wealth disparities, gentrification and generally treating employees like garbage, as part of their Objectivist agenda. Paul, employees do the automation, n…

The idea that the fruits of automation should be awarded to the single guy on top is ridiculous, and that's not communist thinking.

The idea of automation is that we should advance as society. The very point of it is that we need to work less, but it never turns out that way because the benefits of automation are seized by the few.

Hence, we forcefully invent new labor regardless of purpose. Half of our economy is keeping each other busy with bullshit to keep this going.

And if that wasn't perverted enough, now the message is: actually, we don't need you. At all.

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

#167

Post by rojobuffalo »

memish wrote: post #142
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…

He's not implying that employees don't create value. Startups share equity with employees. The earlier you are there, the more you get, in part because of the inherent risk. This is why founders get the most equity and the most upside if it succeeds. They took on the most risk and it wouldn't otherwise exist. If the company ends up being valued at 100B dollars, guess what, the founder and maybe some early employees a…

Maybe there is an imbalance of risk taken or value added among founders and early employees. I think that's debatable, but assume it's true. It's never reasonably accounted for in the equity distribution.

It would be one thing for a founder to have 3x the equity of an early hire, but it is commonly more like 60x or 300x. Instead of a dozen people being able to cash out and support their families for the rest of their lives, one or maybe two people get to have many multiples of that and the rest barely make progress towards retirement.

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

#168

Post by thundergolfer »

moolcool wrote: post #85
adamsmith143 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not go all the way and replace the fallible, gullible, arrogant human VCs with much smarter AI VCs who can determine which AI generated companies are likely to succeed with higher fidelity?

I think the more social/political/financial power possessed by the individual threatened by AI, the more resistance there will be to them being disrupted by it. Like look at tech's smug responses to truckers concerned about self driving, and contrast that to the perspective this tweet has toward everybody in tech except for founders. He's literally just insulating a ruling class. This class dynamic is so deeply ironi…

> "automation is inductive proof that Marx was wrong"

He really said that? Plugging it into Google yields no results.

That's a really dumb thing to say, a very tech billionaire misunderstanding of Marx.

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

#169

Post by welshwelsh »

HideousKojima wrote: post #50
varispeed wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage is a cost and profit comes after costs. If owner want's to share profit, they need to give company shares to the employees and pay dividends.

A cost that cuts into what would otherwise be profits. It's all fungible so you're quibbling about an accounting issue here. If an owner made a contract with an employee that they will pay them a $0 salary but will pay them a fixed annual dividend of $100,000 (broken up into convenient bi-weekly payments) would that fix your concern? I'm getting the impression that it wouldn't.

You're right, that wouldn't fix it.

Fixing the problem would mean that instead of the 'owner' hiring an 'employee,' they instead form an equal partnership as co-owners. Because the business serves the interest of the owners, it will seek to maximize their compensation as the ultimate goal, rather than to minimize their salary as a way of reducing expenses.

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

#170

Post by jmyeet »

judge2020 wrote: post #115
jmyeet wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with "debt bondage"? Technically, the brick kiln workers of India and Pakistan are paid a wage [1]. Closer to home, Amazin warehouse workers probably wouldn't consider themselves as sharing in Amazon's profits. Let me summarize: 1. Debt is built into your existence (student, medical, housing, etc); 2. The system is designed to extract (exploit) value from labor; and 3. There is no value without labor…

What is your point? OP's comment was about how revenue - (other employees wages) = profit, not the actual details surrounding working for a wage.

And that revenue wouldn’t exist without labor. That’s the point. So offering to “share” that in the form of mostly fixed wages both betrays a presumption of ownership and gives a false appearance of charity or benevolence.
Post reply on HN