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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

#251

Post by skinnymuch »

cal85 wrote: post #206
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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

There’s lots of people saying it and have said it. We just had tax cuts for the wealthy recently.

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

#253

Post by robertlagrant »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #35
robertlagrant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.

Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us. I think Keynes said "The worst form of capitalism is in which the public holds all the risk, and the private sector realizes all the rewards".

> Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

Focusing on the latter is fair enough. Thinking that a corporation having lots of money is bad seems completely pointless. That money ends up as dividends or higher salaries or lower prices. Tax the first two and celebrate all three.

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

#254

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

zacharyvoase wrote: post #248

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 tech…

Whoever has the algorithm is the founder

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

#255

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by overrun11 »

toast0 wrote: post #236
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

10M would give you a safe withdrawal rate somewhere between 300-400k a year. A fairly common household income for people on HN. It affords a very nice quality of life but you're certainly not living the lifestyle that most people think of as "rich."

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

#258

Post by mattjaynes »

Wow. There seems to be 2 main responses to this. 1) Sadness and depression or 2) Excitement and possibility

I really expected this thread to be more of #2 since historically Hacker News has been full of ambitious founders and founder-like engineers.

The great leaps in automation, especially with the recent AI developments is any founder's dream. To be able to go faster with less friction than ever to create something valuable for the world. Now this is within reach of even more people.

It's an amazing time - for those who choose to see the possibilities.

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

#259

Post by avidphantasm »

If it becomes possible for a solo founder to automate a $1B start-up, then it's not worth $1B dollars, because the barrier to entry for others to do the same is much lower. The whole startup thing would seem to implode because of this.

The argument they are making seems to be founded on the idea that founders are unique geniuses. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I guess we'll find out if there are no more such founders as IT automation advances.

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

#260

Post by memish »

throwaway-blaze wrote: post #242
ryandrake wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People who assume there's family money to fall back on are generally themselves in a privileged position. They are projecting that onto everyone else and it's an excuse to not build anything and discouraging anyone to do anything.
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