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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

#311

Post by Dracophoenix »

wittycardio wrote: post #19
yetanotherforg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers. In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.

Most progress has come from universities, defense and government funding. These losers build an app and proclaim themselves gurus on the future. It's insane that people fall for it.

Progress comes from individuals. MIT did not endow Claude Shannon with divine knowledge of Boolean algebra and information theory. He discovered it himself.

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

#312

Post by bluGill »

int0x2e wrote: post #205
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…

I am very far from being a billionaire, but as soon as I made it to upper-middle-class, I realized that the hedonistic treadmill would never end, even if I was a billionaire. It's a never ending fantasy world where everyone looks up and wants to be as rich as the next tier, even though that's rarely possible, and just like the scene in WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play".

While there is some of that, eventually you reach a point where you don't really know what to do with more money. That is you fly first class, and you see no reason to upgrade to the next level (shared jet, owned jet). Maybe you try a cruise and decide an inside cabin is just as good as the largest balcony room (or something inbetween) and are not interested in owning your own ship at all - perhaps a cruise isn't for you and you still prefer primitive camping in the backwoods with the minimum you can take with you.

Of course you can always spend more money. However I have known rich people who decided their mansion was too large and so they downsized (their master bedroom after the downsize was the size of my whole house!) Eventually what you need is time to enjoy what you have not more luxury. Fly coach or have a private jet on call - end the end you get there, and the jet only saves you a bit of time at the airport.

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

#313

Post by danenania »

danenania wrote: post #295
fnordpiglet wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His assertion is made worse by automation. Every skill the founder can automate they should. That’s efficiency. Every skill they can’t, that’s a crucial skill the founder depends on. The more crucial the skill, the more leverage the employee should have over the founder and the more incentive the founder has in sharing equity. This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the aut…

"This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the automation their business depends on" While that's true, I think it also pushes the profile of the ideal founder much more to the technical side than where it is now. Creating and maintaining automations is inherently difficult-to-impossible to fully automate, and will likely always require some level of engineering skill. Conver…

I'm curious why the downvotes? I'm a technical founder running a devtools/security startup. After experimenting with ChatGPT for a few hours, it's clear to me that given the right prompts and model tuning, it's already capable of doing the following tasks at an above average skill level:

- Writing cold emails and responding to questions asked in replies

- Writing a script for sales calls

- Writing a pitch deck

- Writing marketing page copy

- Writing ad copy

- Responding to customer support requests

- Writing promotional social media posts

I have more confidence in its ability to do these tasks given its current level of sophistication than to meaningfully contribute to engineering tasks (though it can certainly help there too).

I wouldn't trust it with accounting or administrative tasks yet, but it doesn't seem far off.

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

#314

Post by shadowfoxx »

lolinder wrote: post #232
shadowfoxx wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 meth…

I think people are largely arguing over whether or not the share of economic value is proportional to contributions and when they talk about that share they typically refer to profits. I think redefining/reframing what profit means in this conversation is intentionally misunderstanding/redirecting the argument.

Workers: "We should see more of the profits the company makes and we are making the case that collectively we produce a larger portion of the value we're asking for"

Poster: "Your pay is part of the profit, the more money you make the less that goes to the owner"

You're right. I shouldn't assume a framing is misleading just because its unorthodox, I'm attempting to make a case for the framing being misleading with supporting statements.

At best the parent comment isn't saying anything of substance at all (in response to ITS parent comment), and in my view, at worst its an attempt to redirect the concept of 'profit' to make the argument seem less credible.

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

#315

Post by testmasterflex »

highfrequency wrote: post #220
testmasterflex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://loodio.com - Hardware company - Solo founder - No employees and same here; I don't see the need for any in the forseeable future. Don't even need capital as my burn rate is ~$50/month except when I order new stock. Weird times.

Love the idea. Ballpark revenue/profit?

Thank you! Just launched last week so no numbers yet. :)

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

#316

Post by ivalm »

MattGaiser wrote: post #215
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…

> there goes their livelihood until they line up another job. This risk exists with any employment arrangement. So arguably the risk is merely the greater likelihood of the startup failing vs big corp laying you off.

For employees, there is employment risk, reduced compensation, potential increased difficulty of finding next job. For founders there is the first two but generally finding next job is easier (because you get lots of managing/etc experience potentially faster than you would normally).

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

#317

Post by ivalm »

CallMeJim wrote: post #296
overrun11 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%. Also, I don't see a substantial difference in risk between a founder and an early employee at all. Founders typically have little invested in the startup other than their own time but they compensate for that by paying themselves a salary with investor money.

It sounds like you're saying that early employees and founders have a similar level of rush, but vastly different levels of reward. Why would anyone ever be an early employee when they can be a founder instead?

Access to capital

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

#319

Post by overrun11 »

NhanH wrote: post #299
overrun11 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't we just back to rehashing vapid Marxist arguments? In your experiment a brilliant computer scientist working on a breakthrough invention will be forced to do menial tasks like data entry and accounting him/herself rather than split the profits evenly with a laborer. This is not going to work, a society where geniuses spend most of their days using Quickbooks, cleaning the bathroom etc, will be outcompeted by o…

> This is not going to work, a society where geniuses spend most of their days using Quickbooks, cleaning the bathroom etc, will be outcompeted by ones where they can specialize. Which is exactly why Marx makes his “vapid” argument: cleaners and other menial jobs contribute as much to society as any geniuses (evidently, as societies without those menial jobs got outcompeted). And the way society currently evaluate th…

> cleaners and other menial jobs contribute as much to society as any geniuses (evidently, as societies without those menial jobs got outcompeted)

Scarcity is clearly an important component of value. This is essentially the "why is gold more valuable than water when I need water to live." question. I don't see the point in rehashing this stuff as if it's new.

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

#320

Post by zmxz »

eulers_secret wrote: post #199
zmxz wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm asking. What does the "scaling" guy get? What's the fair distribution of wealth? I'm not placing any value on "scaling", I'm asking what it should be valued at. > Who wrote the rest For argument's sake, let's say there's 10 devs who wrote the rest. Let's say that in span of 12 months, after paying yearly gross salary of $150 000 to each person in equation (10 devs, 1 scaling/devops guy, 1 founder), $2…

The only sensible move is to payback investors and yourself first. So, as little as they will accept. If you can afford to (maybe) loose them, give them $0 extra. Economy isn’t so hot anymore, folks with obligations will absolutely settle and take it on the chin. You have all the power here.

What I'm trying to get for an answer is straight percentages, because there's always this latent hate towards founders or bosses so I'm trying to see what would be fair in the scenario I presented.

The "boss bad, worker good" is getting really boring and disgusting, just like not all bosses are evil - not all workers are good. I presented a scenario where there's no investors and where the founder did majority of the work.

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