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.
But if you cost the company $1m you still get your $90k.
More likely you get fired.
Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
211–220 of 394 posts
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> in the US a hunter gatherer band a century and a half ago provides for their own needs Such hunter gatherer band was much worse dystopia village. You were dependent with your life on the band and if you disagreed with others, you could not just switch bands as easily as you can switch employers today.
Such bands had very flat hierarchies. Your opinion was weighted on merit (i.e. the best hunter's word was trusted in that activity and the best farmer on theirs). Different bands absolutely exchanged people. Young people heading out to find their way and tribe was practically a right of passage.
If you said we have greater material comforts today, I couldn't disagree with you. If you said we're happier? I'm not so sure. There is something so damned compelling about a tight knit family and tribe.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#213Earlier 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.
in that case you should bet on yourself and start your own company. It comes down to risk and reward
I'm not implying that companies don't bring value by their nature. They absolutely do. I'm also not implying that I could generate this value on my own, though I have before.
I'm just saying, if I have an employee and he makes me $1m a year, I'm going to pay him well - I'll pay that employee what is fair in the context of what value we enable him to generate for us.
That usually means the employee is worth at least 50% of that in compensation, btw.
This is why if you bring a deal to a company as a sales person commissions are around that number (50% of profit).
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#214Earlier 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.
But if you cost the company $1m you still get your $90k.
Hopefully you do not have many employees that are costing you $1m a year...
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#215Earlier 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…
> there goes their livelihood until they line up another job.
This risk exists with any employment arrangement. So arguably the risk is merely the greater likelihood of the startup failing vs big corp laying you off.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I am pretty sure among hunters there was a very strict pecking order and I am glad to live in the system we have today.
They really didn't. Hunter gatherer societies were the most democratic and egalitarian that we've ever had. Graeber's work on this is fantastic.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#217As a founder, it's true, if I can run a solo operation, I want to do that for as long as possible. New automatons like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT enable that so they're great for me. Just the other day I asked ChatGPT to solve a particular programming problem for me and it did, all the while explaining what and why each line of code existed.
There seems to me to be a lot of moral panic in this thread, I don't think it's necessarily justified simply because people are annoyed at PG as a person or what he said specifically (about Marx or otherwise) or the way he phrased it, because the general idea he's writing about is completely true in my experience.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#218Feudalism 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?
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Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#219Earlier 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.
If you can convincingly demonstrate that you singlehandedly generate $1m revenue for a company, then I'm confident that you have the negotiating power to demand a share. The problem is that in most cases you can't do that. You might have been the person who made the last push to make the revenue possible, but you were building on the work of everyone else who was working for that company and you were leveraging someo…
Well, sure. But people are not programmed like that.
Sales people often can get up to or more than 50% of the profits (after all expenses) as commission. I've seen up to 80 or 90 percent for companies with extreme growth focus.
Programmers don't generate value directly the same way, but often you can attribute value to products they create and compensate them fairly.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you give some examples? Congratulations on your success implementing this stuff
https://loodio.com - Hardware company - Solo founder - No employees and same here; I don't see the need for any in the forseeable future. Don't even need capital as my burn rate is ~$50/month except when I order new stock. Weird times.
Love the idea. Ballpark revenue/profit?