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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

#341

Post by lolinder »

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…

> He is implying that founders can create a lot of value without employees, and that the claim that employees also create value is false.

I agree that Paul is severely overstating his case here (as is his wont), but only the first half of your summary is true to his tweet. He's saying that founders create a lot of (even most of) the value in a company, but he is not saying that employees create no value.

His argument is essentially this: If employee jobs can in theory all be automated away while a company still produces value, that means the startup founder's role must produce a huge amount of the value in any company.

This is a pretty fragile argument that has a lot wrong with it (that a job can be automated today doesn't mean it wasn't extremely valuable yesterday), so there isn't really a need to erect a straw man.

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

#342

Post by type-r »

theturtletalks wrote: post #70
ThePhysicist wrote: post #34

Given the current market I'd say you have to achieve some basic success before hiring anyone, at least if you're bootstrapping. From my experience it's quite difficult to find early-stage employees that are both affordable and good enough to handle the breadth of technical tasks needed in the early phase of a business. So, yeah, automation can take away a lot of pain, and how far you can get really depends on how wel…

I automated my e-commerce business and turned that into a SaaS. Found customers organically and have become my own “customer” multiple times. Solo founders like me are on the rise and you’d be surprised how far a little automation can take a business.

> Solo founders like me are on the rise

source?

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

#343

Post by type-r »

choeger wrote: post #328

Instagram the software has no intrinsic value. The whole thing could be reproduced in no time. It's the network effect that matters and getting that effect is essentially a hack. Yes, the author's prime example is a hack of society. That's not automation, it's an example for the fact that software can be copied for zero cost. Compare that to a company with an intrinsic value, like Tesla. How far could Elon (I know he…

so if something can be reproduced in no time it has no intrinsic value?

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

#344

Post by danenania »

jijji wrote: post #338
danenania wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's true, but while it is definitely helpful and can accelerate development, I don't generally see writing working functions to do simple, discreet tasks as a bottleneck to engineering in the context of a nontrivial system. But writing quality cold emails tailored to each prospect is definitely a bottleneck to sales--they are time consuming/tedious to write, and you usually need to write tons of them to get results. Same story with marketing copy, ads, social media posts, etc. having the time and energy to produce this content on an ongoing basis is a major bottleneck to marketing.

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

#345

Post by friedman23 »

pixl97 wrote: post #336
mattjaynes wrote: post #258

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…

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. Huma…

[flagged]

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

#346

Post by Axsuul »

zetazzed wrote: post #243

This attitude makes me so sad. When I started in tech, people were proud that this was one of the few industries that shared equity with a broad base of employees. Seeing a parking lot full of Porsches was celebrated, and people loved stories of the secretary (or mural painter in the Facebook case) who got rich off their options. But PaulG seems excited about the days when the pie can be captured by fewer and fewer p…

It's not a zero-sum game here. Being able to do more with less is a huge win — this enables individuals and small teams to tackle niche problems that would've otherwise been ignored. But there will always be an endless stream of universe-scale problems that require massive hordes of people to solve.

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

#347

Post by wittycardio »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #311
wittycardio wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Claude Shannon was able to do what he was able to do because of the ample research funding and the academic environment. I have great respect for people like Claude Shannon but they require an ecosystem to be able to do their work.

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

#348

Post by shadowfoxx »

lolinder wrote: post #329
shadowfoxx wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't agree that jerrre isn't saying anything of substance. It could have been fleshed out better, but what they say is a reasonable counter to their parent's argument. ceronman's thought experiment was "if you have employees, you have to share your profits ... If [they] don't produce any value, easy, fire them all, you get everything." jerrre's response, which I think is fair, is that we're already running this ex…

I disagree with your interpretation of ceronman's experiment and the premise that we're already conducting it.

I believe they were making the case that Employees need the company as much as the company needs the employees. The experiment is to split the profits evenly amongst those who created the value in the first place - The people that work inside the company. If they can't produce the value, get rid of them (And if that's the case there's more profit for everyone right?)

They could also mean that the profits are distributed amongst the employees based on individual contribution when they conclude that there wouldn't be any self-made billionaires because no single individual produces that much value.

I still disagree with the conflation of wages/cost of business and profits, even though more mages means less profit - Profit is still surplus after all has been paid. The distinction is important for more than just the scope of this conversation.

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

#349

Post by lanstin »

type-r wrote: post #339
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it changes your experience in such a way that you will not fit in as well with your fellow humans, something many of us conscipusly enjoy and most of us somewhat need.

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

#350

Post by threeseed »

fleddr wrote: post #158

Graham will always defend founders "deserving" their wealth, as if it is some technical argument rather than a political one. It's an entirely subjective point. If a solo founder with some very powerful machinery (cloud, AI) produces a lot of economical value, it's quite questionable to attribute that value solely to the human being pushing the button. Even more so when that human has exclusive access to the key inpu…

Graham only seems to defend the successful founders.

He doesn’t seem to care very much about employees who have their own side projects or aspiring founders.

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