One important thing to know, is knowledge sharing actually creates value. But yes, a company will increase its value internally if it has culture of sharing.
Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
181–190 of 394 posts
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#182This is specific to startups. If you can define a business model that is somewhat unique and successful, you can scale really quickly and hopefully exit before your expenses catch up to you, like Instagram and WhatsApp did.
Expenses eventually catch up with you, because business is adversarial. Any technology available cheaply to you to scale your business is also available cheaply to your competitors. Once other smart people start going after your market share, you will need to spend more to defend it and continue to grow.
Expensive things: invention, sales, marketing, customer service, compliance, content moderation, etc. These all have to be done by humans. A lot of companies who scaled their revenue rapidly with low head count, have then had to scale their headcount to maintain their business. (Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc)
The founder with no employees is for sure an attractive fantasy. It's basically the core of the superhero myth: a person who has a big effect on society without depending on anyone else. Superman doesn't need help because he is invulnerable and strong. Even superheroes who ostensibly depend on large teams, like Batman or Iron Man, are never shown that way. If you go back to the beginning of the MCU, Tony Stark is alway shown alone with his technology. It's the bad guys who bark at subordinates and run around in groups.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peop…
People making minimum wage typically have to work well above 40 hours, and even then often find their earnings difficult to live off of. See also: all the calls for paying low-level employees a "living wage".
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They get what they negotiate for, no? I worked for startups before and I would press for more equity, but I wasn't under any delusion that if there were 4 employees and I was just joining that I'd get 20% equity. They were there first, had to take on the risk, etc.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow? Lots of technical founders create their own automations.
His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed. 1920s robber baron bs. Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on t…
OSS creators can choose their license. If I make something MIT licensed, I can't then complain that people are "stealing" my work. Just make proprietary software at that point.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#186He 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.
> The compensation for created value is based on market rate for both work and capital.
This equivalence doesn't make much sense unless there's a widespread phenomenon of businesses "firing" owners in favor of other capital-providers who will accept lower returns.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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
Yeh I just saw it screenshotted on Twitter. Damn, so dumb. Graham once again getting too high on his own thought-leadership.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#188I’m creating a startup. I’m the first and only employee, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. What would have taken an army of clerks in the past is now a (lot) of code. Whole departments are replaced by API’s that cost less than $100/month. It’s really incredible.
Could you give some examples? Congratulations on your success implementing this stuff
The book The Million-Dollar One-Person Business goes into a lot more examples. It's usually people who build software that can scale.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#189This 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".
>keeps declining
Where? It's highest in the history in Poland, Germany, Italy and very close to the top in UK. US is the outlier, even there, it kept increasing after 2015 and just the pandemic dropped it. Even then it's higher than before 70s. Even in aging Japan it's very close to top.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
And chasing down purchase orders and higher expectations for customer support and, once you have direct sales, you need training for sales, and you have to generate qualified leads for them, and you have to respond to RFPs...
Thanks for the response. I upvoted because your comment added value.
Just so you know, you don't have to mention that you upvoted, it's actually recommended that people don't do that here, so that we don't get tons of comments like "thanks" which can make it frustrating for others to wade through such comments for the value added ones, as you mention.