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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

#171

Post by rbanffy »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #145
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…

His assertion is made worse by automation. Every skill the founder can automate they should. That’s efficiency. Every skill they can’t, that’s a crucial skill the founder depends on. The more crucial the skill, the more leverage the employee should have over the founder and the more incentive the founder has in sharing equity. This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the aut…

> The more crucial the skill, the more leverage the employee should have over the founder and the more incentive the founder has in sharing equity

Unless the providers of said ability have to compete for business on price. One should not underestimate how hard it is to replace them.

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

#172

Post by thundergolfer »

not_gpt4 wrote: post #143

As Peter Thiel has pointed out, the reality is that founders take on incredible amounts of risk and put in long hours to build and grow their companies. American exceptionalism is founded on the principle of rewarding hard work and entrepreneurship, and founders who succeed in building successful companies should be celebrated, not demonized.

> on incredible amounts of risk

These days 9/10 founders only take on opportunity risk. In real terms, they take on a tiny amount of risk. Undocumented immigrants on the other hand, that's risk. Astronauts, yep, an incredible amount of risk. Founders, no, just hard work.

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

#173

Post by JustSomeNobody »

zmxz wrote: post #122
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 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 salari…

How much value do you place on "scaling"?

You wrote 80% of the code (who wrote the rest?) and you got it deployed. You're making a decent living on 15.000 users. "Scaling" guy comes in and "scales" you to 150.000 users. Do they get an order of magnitude more profit than you?

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

#174

Post by ryandrake »

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…

> 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.

Is this always true though? I've worked with a grand total of one company where, if the company went bust, it would mean the end of the founders' life savings. Every other startup/company I've seen, the founder was already very well off. Yes, they put a big chunk of capital and/or time into the start-up. Yes, they were highly motivated to make it succeed. But if it failed, they would... be sad, fall back to family money for a while, and then later do another start-up (or go back to their previous career in Investment Banking). I think this idea that the founder must be singularly taking a huge amount of "risk" is a romantic, stereotypical take, not always true.

Start-up employees, however are shouldering risk. They are by and large not already wealthy so if the start-up fails, there goes their livelihood until they line up another job. I think we should stop thinking that "risk" is exactly the same as "how much of the company's raw dollar equity did you contribute".

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

#175

Post by moolcool »

thundergolfer wrote: post #168
moolcool wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He did, in a now deleted tweet. He verifies the screenshots veracity in the replies. https://twitter.com/IlariKaila/status/1600120645211201536

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

#176

Post by LeonM »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #94
LeonM wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the competitive nature of business (and humans). 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 impro…

> So you are definitely not going to run that new shiny factory for only 3 days a week. 3/8 is a thing in factories, so you could have just hired more employees part/lower time. It’s a cultural artefact that we work 40 hours a week.

Again, it is due to competitive nature.

Nobody is forcing you to work a 40h week, but because 40 hours is about the average of how many hours people work, you'll need to match that to stay 'competitive'. It's a very primitive instinct in natural selection.

For people earning average wage, they often cannot afford to work less hours, as prices of commodities (housing, food, energy) are naturally regulated by what people can afford. Because most of their peers work 40 hours, they need to do the same in order to be able to pay their bills.

Those that make more than average wage could afford to work less, yet most people chose not to do that. Because now that you make a lot of money, you could still work 40 hours and get a bigger house then your neighbor! And a faster car! You could impress a potential partner with that, which increases your chance of reproduction and creating (w/h)ealthy offspring.

No amount of automation, computers, machines or whatever technology will prevent people from staying competitive.

edit: replaced 'minimum wage' with 'average wage', because cost of living is highly location dependent.

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

#177

Post by zmxz »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #173
zmxz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 salari…

How much value do you place on "scaling"? You wrote 80% of the code (who wrote the rest?) and you got it deployed. You're making a decent living on 15.000 users. "Scaling" guy comes in and "scales" you to 150.000 users. Do they get an order of magnitude more profit than you?

That's what I'm asking. What does the "scaling" guy get? What's the fair distribution of wealth?

I'm not placing any value on "scaling", I'm asking what it should be valued at.

> Who wrote the rest

For argument's sake, let's say there's 10 devs who wrote the rest.

Let's say that in span of 12 months, after paying yearly gross salary of $150 000 to each person in equation (10 devs, 1 scaling/devops guy, 1 founder), $2 800 000 is left and we're dividing it.

How much goes to each of the 12 people in the equation?

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

#178

Post by mbesto »

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…

> But if they do, share your profits fairly.

How do you determine how much profit an employed CTO makes versus a customer service rep? What's fair there? My estimated guess: you have no idea.

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

#180

Post by throwaway74829 »

beardyw wrote: post #26
dandanua wrote: post #7

It's frightening that people "at the top" write those things without even realizing how it sounds for ordinary people. I think this delusion is on par with Marie Antoinette and her "eat cakes if you don't have bread".

What happened to the future, a 3 day week for all as computers/machines did the work.

How would that stoke the egos of all godless psycopaths?
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