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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

#241

Post by thedorkknight »

FredPret wrote: post #54
bluelightning2k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some examples? Congratulations on your success implementing this stuff

Congratulate me when it finally works out! I’m still in stealth mode. My startup is super simple in concept - I gather a particular type of data, clean it, process it, and serve it to subscribers. Some of my data sources are free, some are paid API’s. All the processing is done in code. You would need an army of people to read all that text, a layer of bureaucracy to manage and check them.

Can I ask what your pricing model is?

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

#242

Post by throwaway-blaze »

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…

The straw man here is the family money you've assumed. I've done 6 startups as founder or early employee. I assure you I had no "family money" to fall back on. It's only my most recent company that had an exit that really put a cushion under me, and that's after more than 20yrs of startups.

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

#243

Post by zetazzed »

This attitude makes me so sad. When I started in tech, people were proud that this was one of the few industries that shared equity with a broad base of employees. Seeing a parking lot full of Porsches was celebrated, and people loved stories of the secretary (or mural painter in the Facebook case) who got rich off their options.

But PaulG seems excited about the days when the pie can be captured by fewer and fewer people, specifically those in the class to which he feels closest (founders). It's a very strange argument about perception too - people are consider billionaires undeserving of enormous wealth, but just wait until they share that wealth even less broadly! Then everyone will see how great they are and love them more, right?

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

#244

Post by civilized »

And automation is enabled by a massive web of technologies made possible by government-funded research. So it seems that, by Paul's argument, it is justified to have very high taxes on the incomes created by these founders with these technologies.

The people, via their government, invested in modernizing and automating the economy, and they deserve to now reap the rewards and redistribute them broadly to the people, who ultimately funded the government research.

Certainly the founders make some contribution as well, but since they are standing on the shoulders of giants, a progressively smaller cut, perhaps as little as 1-5% for incomes above say $10 million, would be very justifiable. Whether we actually enact marginal taxes of 95-99% above $10M would reduce to technocratic questions of incentives and who puts the money to the best use. Just desserts would be out of the question.

Right?

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

#245

Post by MuffinFlavored »

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…

> SWR

for anybody not familiar

safe-withdrawl rate

typically 1% of portfolio value a quarter = 4% a year i am guessing?

theory is if your portfolio is invested in funds (mutual or ETF) tracking a broad-market index (S&P500) aka equities, and these equities go up 8-10% a year (return before inflation) on average over the long term

and if you have a $2m portfolio basically 100% in equities

sell off 4% = $80k/yr worth pre-tax (only taxes would be... long-term capital gains?)

because your portfolio is appreciating 8-10% a year, it'll stay at $2m despite you sell off $80k/year because it's tracking the US stock market/"economy" which is supposed to be growing 8-10% a year and they "offset each other"

with $10m this becomes $10m * 0.04 = $400k/yr pre-tax

i too would like to have $10m so that I could live off $400k/yr and not need to work :)

heck, i might even settle for $5m!

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

#246

Post by Archelaos »

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.

This would only be true if the demand were capped. Other scenarios are also conceivable: For example, if the same workers in this sector can produce for a third of the price, demand may perhaps increase by more than three times and the number of workers would have to increase accordingly, not decrease.

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

#247

Post by onemoresoop »

zetazzed wrote: post #243

This attitude makes me so sad. When I started in tech, people were proud that this was one of the few industries that shared equity with a broad base of employees. Seeing a parking lot full of Porsches was celebrated, and people loved stories of the secretary (or mural painter in the Facebook case) who got rich off their options. But PaulG seems excited about the days when the pie can be captured by fewer and fewer p…

It is sad indeed and many of us feel used and discarded. But maybe this will have a different outcome than we envision. Maybe the capitalist class can be automated away too

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

#248

Post by zacharyvoase »

In a follow-up tweet: “ In the limit case, you're left with just the founders. And we're not far from it. Instagram had only 13 employees when it was sold for a billion dollars.”

Why stop at the founders? Why not just have an algorithm churn out ideas for companies, an AI to build them, and another to launch them? What will Paul Graham do when even his job, as investor and producer of thoughtless observations on technology, labor and capital, has been automated away by an AI capable of writing similarly valid-sounding but uninformed takes?

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

#249

Post by onemoresoop »

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…

> What happens when no one works and humans are removed from the value chain?

pitchforks?

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