Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

Progress comes from all sorts of places. Scientific progress come from scientists. That doesn't result in things better in my life without a huge number of other people doing things well and efficiently. Both of which includes anything people will pay for, including b2b saas apps. Try having a pandemic lockdown without Amazon-level fulfillment in place. Thankfully we didn't have to.

Can we NOT pretend that the people pg is talking are saying the former? It’s so disingenuous.

When founders start, unless they're hands-off directors, they'll be CEO/CTO/etc, which are employee positions. They'll get a salary, because they're employees.

> I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth.

I don't see why. It makes more sense to focus on founders if he's talking early stage, where you can string a load of systems together to produce a business process. As you get bigger you'll probably regress to the mean of driving processes through admin and management staff, unless you stay laser-focused on keep automation around.

Leaving aside the connective tissue between creating value, creating market cap, how these translate to reward/money... What's left?

The subsequent discussion about dividing loot is one discussion. The discussion about making more unicorns might be totally unrelated. The latter is theoretically empirical, but in practice pretty speculative.

My take on these is usually about bottlenecks. A screw holding together a $100bn f35 is still usually cheap. Its importance doesn't determine price, because without scarcity it cannot be a limiting factor. A patent protected screw could, in theory, be priced to reflects value to the buyer/aircraft. A custom designed screw might also be expensive... perhaps reflecting the time value or negotiating power of it's custom maker.

In all cases the plane does not work without the screw.

If we're reviewing costs and such, the above thoughts on "value" might have value. They may even hold clues to cost efficiency more broadly. They may not be too relevant to a discussion about aviation mechanics.

I (respectfully) think pg's pov is too abstract, as is the proverbial opposing pov that he's responding too.

Look... Investors tend to think the bottleneck is "great founders," the modern version of investment opportunity. A lot of founders tend to think that it's investors. Perhaps the bottleneck is corporate and government procurement. Military people and other tribes tend to think the bottleneck is leaders. Economists think bottlenecks are institutional. All convenient viewpoints for the people who hold them.

I don't really understand how automation relates. Unless we're talking about founder-only companies... Why is this points in favour of founder contribution, relative to the (now fewer) employees? Maybe it means that capital's value has risen. Automation is "capital" technically. You might even claim that the public is responsible for more of the value, considering the importance of public domains to technology.

Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all?

> Founders really take far less risk than employees.

If it would be true, why aren't you a founder? You know, blaming other people for wealth/startup/marriage or government/party/boss/partner is easy. But when it comes to actual execution, most of these people come up blank.

You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.