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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

#191

Post by mikrl »

ryandrake wrote: post #174
memish wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you 100% and am not afraid of vocalizing similar things to a hyper capitalist audience.

However, I don’t see the way out unless the social safety net is strengthened (not gonna happen) or we just ban rich people from starting companies (lol, lmao even)

Edit: maybe there shouldn’t be a way out. Maybe the solution is just to educate and make transparent that rich founders have better odds and less to lose and bust conceptions around successful at business == higher quality individual.

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

#192

Post by nonrandomstring »

Founderless companies are the real future. Having to divide profits with founders, shareholders and other meat beings only weakens a company. Surely nobody supposes business knowledge is somehow immune to encoding in AI? And mistakes won't really matter when you can spawn a swarm of 300,000 "subsidiaries" from a single shellscript and have them coordinate via a darknet protocol to underwrite each other's losses.

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

#193

Post by yieldcrv »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #138
rqtwteye wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ameri…

or if you have something, the response is "must be nice"

I feel like this accelerates class segregation. like, going from talking about the new condo in a nice neighborhood changes from "must be nice" to "my friend lives there and says the Tesla charging stations are broken but I'll talk to the leasing office about it tomorrow", just immediately more depth that some groups of people can't contribute to and are dismissive about.

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

#194

Post by satvikpendem »

memish wrote: post #100

Paul Graham founded this site. How did it end up being so hostile to founders?

It's become a more general site for tech employees rather than founders. Notice how most of the comments are employees talking about how this kind of opinion affects them. To be honest, I don't know where founders reside these days, Indie Hackers was a good site but it has a lot of spam and people posting links with little discussion nowadays.

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

#195

Post by jmagoon »

hker999 wrote: post #79
yetanotherforg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I made this exact argument in the early 2000s when open source starting getting popular and many in the tech community thought I was ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project. It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave…

Open source software is often funded by big corporations once it hits critical mass because it's a nice way to stamp out competing small businesses who might be have been able to charge $ for a small chunk of software functionality.

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

#196

Post by 1MachineElf »

The barrier to entry for becoming a founder has been lowered, meaning more people can become founders. Sounds good to me. I hope this point isn't being overlooked here, although, I understand that with recent waves of layoffs across tech, taking away people's jobs is a sensitive topic.

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

#197

Post by bowsamic »

VictorPath wrote: post #91
tareqak wrote: post #42

https://twitter.com/IlariKaila/status/1600120645211201536 Ilari Kaila @IlariKaila · 1h Replying to @paulg Why did you delete this banger? | | | Paul Graham @paulg · 1h Replying to @IlariKaila I forgot that mentioning Marx attracts angry fools. Since I could make my point without mentioning him, I just reposted it without.

Actually Marx talked a lot about automation. Marx's prediction was this would lead to a lower rate of profit for invested capital which - mainstream establishment sources say is what has been happening.

Yes I have no idea why Paul would say this. I guess he realised he was wrong and thus he deleted it, but he won’t admit that. So many people online who make fun of Marx haven’t read any of Capital

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

#198

Post by jmagoon »

spicymaki wrote: post #114

Feudalism without the serfs. What is in it for the plebs? The idea that concentrated wealth is great for everyone and will trickle down has been pretty much debunked to the point where the wealthy are openly stating we don't need the masses anymore. The crypto dystopian nightmare of generating money with zero utility backed by quantitative easing demonstrates that you don't actually need many employees to generate we…

Massive social upheaval that the super wealthy think they are immune from, even when they are directly responsible for its creation.

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

#199

Post by eulers_secret »

zmxz wrote: post #177
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #173

Earlier 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…

The only sensible move is to payback investors and yourself first. So, as little as they will accept. If you can afford to (maybe) loose them, give them $0 extra.

Economy isn’t so hot anymore, folks with obligations will absolutely settle and take it on the chin. You have all the power here.

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

#200

Post by benjaminwootton »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #138
rqtwteye wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ameri…

You can do that with $10m or less. 4% safe withdrawal rate, $400k a year is a hell of a lifestyle in the vast majority of locations.
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