Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by varispeed » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

HideousKojima wrote: post #50

varispeed wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage is a cost and profit comes after costs. If owner want's to share profit, they need to give company shares to the employees and pay dividends.

A cost that cuts into what would otherwise be profits. It's all fungible so you're quibbling about an accounting issue here. If an owner made a contract with an employee that they will pay them a $0 salary but will pay them a fixed annual dividend of $100,000 (broken up into convenient bi-weekly payments) would that fix your concern? I'm getting the impression that it wouldn't.

That would be illegal in my country. Dividend is considered an unearned income and is taxed differently as well.

They could perhaps give the worker a minimum wage and the rest pay in dividends, but mind that dividends need to be distributed among all the shareholders equally, so you can't say you would pay $100,000 unless you allocate shares so that when dividend pay out is decided, worker's shares will yield that exact amount.

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

#362

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

friedman23 wrote: post #345

pixl97 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

"no thanks I'm actually going to go produce something of value"

I mean, being a janitor and cleaning the restroom is something of value, though by your attitude I highly doubt you're going to be that useful.

There is a high possibly of me being correct if I was thinking your 'something of value' was "Producing a product and then funding ever increasing lobbying to increase profitable rent seeking behaviors"

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

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Post by kbos87 » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

This whole notion seems to be based on a bunch of seemingly logical conclusions, but it’s also a very narrow view of the reality.

Let’s just think for a minute about a single potentially confounding factor - every company has competitors. Those competitors are looking for every opportunity to climb past you, and they’ll be willing to hire humans to do anything a machine can’t.

For example… a lot of people still prefer to talk to a human when they need help with something. (Not me and I’m guessing not many people on HN, but we’re the outliers here.) Yes, you can try to use automation to solve for that… but if your competitor offers a better experience through human intervention, you are essentially forced to match their move and hire a support team.

Yes, automation is getting better, and who knows, maybe in a few years GPT3 will be having support conversations with customers. But the pressure to find a competitive advantage is often going to lead to hiring large numbers of people. That’s how we got to where we are today.

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

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Post by jordanbeiber » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

dotnet00 wrote: post #303

jordanbeiber wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been toying with an idea where blockchain actually is interesting: imagine all currency is on the ledger - all of it. And every coin had an (rather short) expiry! You need to create value continously or fall back to UBI. Just something to play around with. :)

So... the role (controlled) inflation plays in an economy?

Good point. I guess this need to be expanded with limits on other types assets as well.

Basically we’ll end up in a totalitarian society governed by an AI.

That train of thought escalated quickly.

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

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Post by Oxidation » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #313

danenania wrote: post #295

Earlier 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…

It really appears to have a default style or bland, corporate nothing-speak to it. It can write perfect emails crammed with every platitude and all in completely sterility, unless prompted otherwise.

It can already write better HR-friendly pap than I ever could, and it can churn it out by the thousands of words.

I'm very impressed by the power of "mere statistics" to construct dead-eyed language like the aliens in Blindsight. But, more than that, I'm grateful that I'm not employed to write such text in the first place. While there's an incoming boon for slackers who can just fire off a prompt email with a little bit of proofreading, there's a long run pinch on people who are employed just to talk nothings all day. Those who remain will have to watch over hundreds of thousands of words spraying out per day.

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

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Post by Oxidation » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #344

jijji wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 result…

On the receiving end, being able to rip though thousands of words of AI drivel and pick out the actual content (if any) is going to become a major skill in itself. Not that skim reading and summarisation isn't a skill now, but the noise floor is about to rise by many decibels.

Probably there will be AI tools to de-AI messages, like reverse semantic companders[1], coming soon.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding

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

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Post by neonate » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

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…

> and that the claim that employees also create value is false

The claim he says is false is "their employees created all the value".

Replacing "all" with "also" produces almost the opposite statement. I don't mean to be pedantic but that's an extreme misinterpretation.

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

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Post by dang » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

yetanotherforg wrote: post #5

Based on his argument: Fewer people are doing a lot more thanks to being good at automation. It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. The past three years, the YC crowd has really tried hard to justify wealth disparities, gentrification and generally treating employees like garbage, as part of their Objectivist agenda. Paul, employees do the automation, n…

I've been around YC for 80% of its existence and have never observed anything that could remotely be described as an "Objectivist agenda". I'd remember it too, if I had.

As for "treating employees like garbage", that's just a baseless smear.

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

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Post by fleddr » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #350

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.

Of course he doesn't, he's a billionaire venture capitalist. No billionaire cares about fair value contributed because that idea is incompatible with the idea of being a billionaire.

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

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Post by thedorkknight » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

testmasterflex wrote: post #359

riskable wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get the devices made and shipped to customers? Do you ship them yourself or are you paying someone for that too? Asking because I might start selling hardware soon too and the prospect of turning my garage into a customer fulfillment center doesn't sound fun.

Assembling and sending from home currently. 3PL too early in current volumes.

Manually assembling it yourself?