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?
Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
331–340 of 394 posts
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
No not all work is equal. Progress is a rare thing. Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces. That's not valuable work. Neither is building shitty apps.
Scientist's work is not necessarily valuable either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize Who would you like to appoint as an arbiter for what "valuable work is"? If certain people enjoy and pay women to fart in their faces - would you like to ban that? How about other "useless" activities that humans enjoy like video games or massages or fashion or fancy restaurants - would you like to ban those as well?
Who's saying anything needs to be banned. We're talking about who can reasonably claim to be contributing to the progress of society. Go ahead and smell the farts my friend
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It isn't even limited to high profile cases like those. Same goes for a lot of hiring (in junior positions especially), it often takes some time for the employee to learn the ropes, during which time their cost (both in terms of direct costs like salary, benefits and equipment and indirect costs like the time of the people bringing them up to speed) is almost definitely higher than the value they're bringing to the b…
Definitely: I was just putting out obvious extreme cases to illustrate the point.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#334He 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…
Seems like he took the red pill right after elno.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#335Earlier 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.
US labor force participation rate has been dropping for at least 20 years. Lower birth rates means this is inevitable basically everywhere.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#336Wow. 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…
HN suffers from a higher than average amounts of narcissism when it comes to being "Temporarily depressed millionaires" when thinking they will be the ones at the top of the pyramid. The few here that are near the top of the pyramid seem to forget that their high position tend to forget that position is supported by the base below them and if they don't perform maintenance on the base the entire thing collapses.
Humanity is built on societies and we must treat it so by ensuring we produce wealth and distribute, not extract wealth and horde it.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#337Who pays for the infrastructure? I can drive 10 times faster with good roads because a public sector maintain and build road infrastructure. If that enables me to earn 100 times more am I then entitles to the entire profits? Or should I pay some of it forward to the infrastructure. I like the idea that innovation advantages should spill over to the rest of the society with the speed of inflation. Given an inflation o…
"Well you see after I become a billionaire I'm going to pull up the ladder behind me and move to a private island. Good luck everybody else."
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 - Writ…
Adding to that ChatGPT can also generate working function code for many different programming languages given the right description in your prompt
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I have to remind myself that there are people comfortable with such a 'wild and crazy' lifestyle. While I wouldn't mind being very well off, I have a visceral gut reaction to any of the sort of flashy spending that draws attention to myself. I also find that it isolates you from the experience of the common man, and life is lonely enough as it is.
it's interesting that it's very common to have a disdain / discomfort with showing that you have that money, but no such corresponding problem with just having it. if you're not going to give the money away, i don't see how there's any benefit to not spending. you're still way richer.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#340Feudalism 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…
i don't think anyone is claiming it's going to trickle down