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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

#281

Post by diob »

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…

It's funny because so many acquisitions are built around getting the employees.

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

#282

Post by marstall »

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.

another way of looking at it: writing software becomes cheaper, so software becomes more accessible in more parts of the world - leading to more demand for more kinds of software, and more developers needed.

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

#283

Post by yobbo »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #189
yobbo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. But it actually did. "Workforce participation", which might be the closest metric of what we actually mean here, keeps declining. In addition to that, we have the era of "bullshit jobs".

>keeps declining Where? It's highest in the history in Poland, Germany, Italy and very close to the top in UK. US is the outlier, even there, it kept increasing after 2015 and just the pandemic dropped it. Even then it's higher than before 70s. Even in aging Japan it's very close to top.

https://data.oecd.org/chart/6UQi

It doesn't look as bad as I thought, but I suspect some national statistics are using evermore generous definitions of "participation". For example, people in higher education being included. That group is increasing as proportion of the population, especially in some European countries with laughably high official statistics.

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

#284

Post by jahewson »

thundergolfer wrote: post #172
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.

> on incredible amounts of risk These days 9/10 founders only take on opportunity risk. In real terms, they take on a tiny amount of risk. Undocumented immigrants on the other hand, that's risk. Astronauts, yep, an incredible amount of risk. Founders, no, just hard work.

We’re talking about financials here so it’s referring to financial risk. A highly-qualified and skilled founder is forgoing the guaranteed opportunity to make $1m+ in the time they choose instead to work on their startup. They also risk harming their future earning potential and career prospects if they don’t already have a track record of success. A low-paid worker in this imaginary situation isn’t risking much of anything financially as they’ll (hopefully) get minimum wage either way.

(In practice a lot of small businesses owners use debt and that is where the financial risk lies for them).

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

#285

Post by ryanSrich »

7thaccount wrote: post #150
yetanotherforg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context? I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers. I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on abo…

Is that legal? Were you able to file a lawsuit or just ate all of the loss?

In most US states employees can be fired at any point without cause. What happened to OP is horrible, but not illegal.

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

#286

Post by necovek »

roflyear wrote: post #214
jstanley wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Look at the cost of Zuckerberg's metaverse push to Meta, and Musk's work to Twitter: sure, that's currently sitting at a lot more than that, but they are hoping to turn that around in a number of years.

Which is to say that cost/value proposition is never simple. I've been at companies where people were paid simply not to jump to competitors.

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

#287

Post by necovek »

pr337h4m wrote: post #277
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…

>I'm curious to see how many solo billionaires will appear. My estimated guess: zero. Satoshi Nakamoto is (most probably) a solo billionaire

Not unless they start converting their bitcoins into actual money, when lots of it might go down in value. If they even have access to secret keys that control these funds.

And obviously, even if they were a billionare, their ultimate goal was not to develop a business where they become one, but they were probably supporting their idea by being an early miner.

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

#288

Post by Msw242 »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #65
Msw242 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every single startup. It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability

Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir. I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.

I'm not an engineer, so it's possible there are engineers in my company copying and pasting from stack overflow

Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit

But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial

I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package

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

#289

Post by jahewson »

You still occasionally hear people saying that VCs don't deserve to be rich, because founders created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables VCs to grow funds with fewer and fewer founders.

/s

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