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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

#231

Post by treis »

bokohut wrote: post #201

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 owne…

He's right about automation being good but misses the dichotomy between capturing value and creating value. Instagram was worth billions because they won in a market that is lucrative and tends towards winner take all. To use a somewhat bad analogy, you don't create a billion dollars of value by winning the powerball lottery.

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

#232

Post by lolinder »

shadowfoxx wrote: post #161
jerrre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

This is a fun semantic game but Profits are not the cost of doing business. When you have an employee sign a contract for $X dollars per year, that's a cost. Conflating Revenue and Profit for the sake of an argument is bad faith. My Assumption here is that the common usage of profit is, "Money after all expenses paid", which employee compensation is clearly outside of that definition.

Don't assume bad faith: that their framing is unorthodox doesn't make it misleading.

Money is fungible and what we identify as "expenses" versus "profit shared" is arbitrary. Economic value is created by the enterprise, and that value is then split between the owner, the employees, the suppliers, and the customers.

We can argue about whether the distribution is fair, but complaining about the specific accounting method by which the value is distributed is myopic. Either you're getting a fair share of the economic value or you aren't—whether your share comes of the pre- or post-tax portion of the pie is the government's concern, not yours.

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

#233

Post by iso1631 »

Sharlin wrote: post #226
oblio wrote: post #141

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/ -> https://www.ycombinator.com/ -> > Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. > Twice a year we invest $500,000 per company in a large number of startups. > We work inten…

So is the premise that Y Combinator is only for billionaire-wannabes?

The irony is the only person I personally know who founded a startup (he's the CTO) which is valued at more than $1b never looks at HN.

So I guess yes, it's the wannabes.

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

#234

Post by necovek »

judge2020 wrote: post #121
VictorPath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Hunter-gatherer bands don't exactly survive without families to continue the cycle of reproduction, someone to take care of the children, someone to tend to the wounded and sick, someone to build the houses while the hunter-gatherers are out hunting, someone to grow crops when it's cold and food is harder to hunt for, someone to track how much food everyone is getting...

I did not read the original reply to mean that "hunter-gatherer band" only consists of hunters and gatherers.

And while there is certainly division of labour as you describe it, it does not necessarily imply that these are distinct social classes (even today, we have different job roles in a single social class).

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

#236

Post by toast0 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #203
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shoul…

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

$10M does get you a nice time, and you would never have to say no to any reasonable expense, but it's also definitely possible to overspend. There's some higher threshold where you really can be 'wild and crazy' and the only way to run out of money would be through bad investments.

There's a difference between always flying first class, always flying on a jetshare, and always having your plane fueled up and ready to go. Also, between driving yourself to the airport, taking a car service, having your driver take you, or having your helicopter pick you up.

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

#237

Post by lolinder »

roflyear wrote: post #219
lolinder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I don't envy the salespeople their commission-based compensation. Having my compensation directly tied to demonstrable value created would be overly stressful for me.

The bargain I've made instead is that I get a very good base salary and call it a day. When the company grows because of my contributions, I negotiate a higher salary, but I don't have to think about it from month to month.

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

#238

Post by yamazakiwi »

eulers_secret wrote: post #204
gremlinsinc wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm assuming you sit at your desk and work 8 hours under supervision? Many great devs I know work more hours than 8 per day.

Why do you have a bone to pick with Devs providing value disproportionate to time spent?

You sound pretty happy that devs will have it worse in your proposal.

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

#239

Post by chubot »

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…

FWIW the reply by the founder of repl.it explicitly takes the other side of the bet

I expect $1B solo founder startups to become normal pretty soon

https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1600143003607105537

(I honestly don't know -- not my area of expertise, just putting it up for discussion)

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

#240

Post by iamdbtoo »

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.

While employees at startups don't take on the exact same risks as the founder, they do take on personal risks when joining one and I think the reason founders are demonized is because they regulary ignore this fact, especially when it comes time to divvy up the cash.
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