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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

#201

Post by bokohut »

As a serial entrepreneur and founder in the technology realm my past matches his claim exactly.

The first founded iteration was spent observing and learning what not to do and over time grew to around 100 employees at peak. The second founded iteration I re-architected and re-coded the entire platform in about four years automating out all possible employees before going live which peaked at 7 employees under my ownership. And as they say "Third time's a charm". ;)

From my own personal past experiences, and YMMV, people are the problem. Computers only make mistakes that the software allows which comes from the human writing the code of course until GPT3 starts coding:) Computers do not know of opinions, politics, emotions, illness, image, etc and if businesses were to track and quantify this as to the impact of said business then many eye opening considerations would occur. Just because "It has always been this way" does not make it correct or, from my direct experiences, efficient. Per Edison: "There is always a better way."

I am the exception however as I have been doing real hands-on work since about age seven and have always been the first person to jump into anything to get my hands dirty learning whether that involves ICE engines, electricity, plumbing, digging, and of course anything tech related. I love to learn and have a passion for solving the hard problems which is my downfall but I don't do it for the money since that cannot buy health nor happiness.

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

#202

Post by dgudkov »

I have a feeling that PG doesn't understand automation. Automation is just a tool to increase work productivity (and, consequentially, profits and salaries). Automation doesn't change the nature of relationship between an employer and employees. The fact that a founder might need fewer employees due to automation only means that the moment when the founder will need to hire more people is shifted later in time (when the company grows) and the salaries of the employees will be higher because they will be required to work with automation tools and their work productivity will be higher.

Also, the more automation we have, the more people will work in the automation industry. In other words, people will still be hired, just from the side of automation supplier, not automation consumer. If a single founder can run a billion-dollar company, it means that the automation industry that enabled this remarkable achievement has grown big and gave work to many people.

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

#203

Post by wing-_-nuts »

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…

The thing is, this is achievable even at 10M.

Hell, one can support the median household income at a reasonable SWR on ~ 2M.

Underlying all of this seems to be paulg's assertion that billionaire founders 'deserve' their wealth and therefore our inequality and their relatively small contribution to the public purse is justified.

I have no problem with founders being rich, but once you're earning 1%er income? You should be paying a hefty amount of taxes to support social spending. Think ~ 2/3rds, like it used to be before the regans and thatchers of the world gutted the social contract in the 80s.

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

#204

Post by eulers_secret »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #153
lancesells wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people here have simpler jobs than 10-20 years ago due to automation? I work in marketing and I all I see is more apps and more complexity no matter how "automated" things get.

I'm a developer and honestly ChatGPT and GitHub copilot handle 90 percent of the frontend/templates and 40 percent of my code is now somehow enriched by ai. It's remarkable and has helped cut way back on burnout.

Exactly! These tools are force multipliers. 1 dev can do the work of 3.

If this is the case, a business should absolutely lay off 2/3 of their eng staff. If they don’t, their competitors will and then will eat their lunch!

No more lazy devs, they should be at their desks working all 8 required hours as they agreed to in their contract. If they’re not: you have too many staff.

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

#205

Post by int0x2e »

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…

I am very far from being a billionaire, but as soon as I made it to upper-middle-class, I realized that the hedonistic treadmill would never end, even if I was a billionaire. It's a never ending fantasy world where everyone looks up and wants to be as rich as the next tier, even though that's rarely possible, and just like the scene in WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play".

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

#206

Post by cal85 »

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…

> The idea that concentrated wealth is great for everyone and will trickle down has been pretty much debunked

Can you point to an example of someone claiming that concentrated wealth is great for everyone and will trickle down?

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

#207

Post by ryandrake »

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…

It can be helpful to think of the USA as a giant factory that produces billionaires. Dollars and workers go into the factory as inputs, billionaires (and defects, millionaires) come out on the assembly line, and the system's waste product that gets discarded is the lives and livelihoods of working and middle-class people. So the system is working and producing what it is supposed to produce.

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

#208

Post by jmagoon »

These blue check VCs on twitter are on such a gnarly anti-human bent these days. They are targeting a capitalist maximalism where a few people are very wealthy and everyone else does nothing (except...consume SaaS products? where do they think customers come from?). They are so absolutely caught up in AI development speed that they have traveled all the way to techno-eugenics, totally eliding the problem that there are a bunch of humans in the world that can't just be "disrupted" without their nightmarish little automation empires being seized by force.

If these were far leftists talking about the need to reduce human capability because of the climate they would be rightly derided as being eco-terrorists, and that's precisely what we should see these people as. Ultra-libertarian terrorists whose primary, unabashed goal is to enrich themselves at the cost of human society.

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

#209

Post by roflyear »

ricksunny wrote: post #113
roflyear wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not really. If I generate $1m of value for a company and they pay me $90k a year that isn't really sharing profit.

Not disagreeing; but for clarity you'd want to refer to generating surplus value rather than value , i.e. net of costs. i.e. if my work can be construed as having created $1M of revenue, but $990,000 of cost (say some low-commission dropship affiliate sales structure, or online payments with a small transaction fee), I've only created $10,000 of surplus value, out of which I can make a case for a different distributi…

Sure, yeah. Agreed.

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

#210

Post by timmytokyo »

wittycardio wrote: post #9
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…

Pretty clear that these are people who want to fuck you over. Silicon Valley elites have accumulated enough power to come mask off. Entitled dirtbags who profited off government funded science and technology who've never created an ounce of value in their lives.

It does seem a bit tone-deaf for pg to be making this argument at the precise moment tens of thousands of people are being laid off in the tech industry. Definitely a "mask off" moment. Either that, or he has a large equity stake in a manufacturer of pitchforks.
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