Users are effectively the employees often in these companies, they just get zero pay or huge fees on something they are forced to sell through the locked in platform.
Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
381–390 of 394 posts
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hunter-gatherer bands don't exactly survive without families to continue the cycle of reproduction, someone to take care of the children, someone to tend to the wounded and sick, someone to build the houses while the hunter-gatherers are out hunting, someone to grow crops when it's cold and food is harder to hunt for, someone to track how much food everyone is getting...
I did not read the original reply to mean that "hunter-gatherer band" only consists of hunters and gatherers. And while there is certainly division of labour as you describe it, it does not necessarily imply that these are distinct social classes (even today, we have different job roles in a single social class).
But it only takes one spark of someone thinking they "put more effort in than everyone else" to demand more food, and suddenly you have societal classes that drift further apart over time.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree here. Automation increased the productivity of employees, and drove down the price of goods. It never truly 'reduced' the size of the workforce. The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world.
> The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world. This is generally true, but also ignores a key difference. When processes first became mechanized and then industrialized, they we're fairly similar in their nature. Sure, they wer…
The economic term which is relevant here is under employment.
A factory foreman/skilled labor -> burger flipping/unskilled labor.
Retraining into entirely new skill sets is hard - even if you don’t have debt/ bills/ dependents.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree here. Automation increased the productivity of employees, and drove down the price of goods. It never truly 'reduced' the size of the workforce. The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world.
> The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world. This is generally true, but also ignores a key difference. When processes first became mechanized and then industrialized, they we're fairly similar in their nature. Sure, they wer…
> …the jump would be from a machine operator to a software engineer/automation engineer. While this are certainly all teachable skills, they require an extremely different skill profile than the ones they're replacing.
They're not though. You need higher intelligence to be a software engineer, compared to a machine operator in most manufacturing plants.
Certain jobs are simply out of reach for most people.
It's not controversial that in the 18-century logging wood was out of reach for some people for lack of strength. But somehow it's controversial to admit that certain modern jobs are out of reach because of lack of intelligence.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assembling and sending from home currently. 3PL too early in current volumes.
Manually assembling it yourself?
Yes every unit takes me around 20 minutes to assemble and pack, but it prepares me for when I can outsource it later. "Do things that don't scale"
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#386Earlier 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…
> I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all? > Founders really take far less risk than employees. If it would be true, why aren't you a founder? You know, blaming other people for wealth/startup/marriage or government/party/boss/partner is easy. But when it comes to actual execution, most of these people com…
> Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all?
Did you read the tweets, or just the headline?
> You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.
I have helped start 4 companies with 1 gracefully neutral exits, 1 sold, 1 gracefully neutral, and 2 nose dives. After every exit I walked into a job making more $$ than at the job I worked at before the previous startup. The only "risk" a startup founder takes is the potential for a below-market salary for a short period of time.
~20 years ago I failed at a music start-up, royally failed. We burned through $2.5m in about 11 months with nothing of value having been produced, then the dot bomb exploded while we were raising our A round. The same investors funded my next failed startup and offered to fund the one after that.
Once you get to say "I'm a founder and names you might know from vc insider have given me amounts of $$" you have a golden ticket.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#387Earlier 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?
It's just business in the USA, that's all.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps. Progress comes from all sorts of places. Scientific progress come from scientists. That doesn't result in things better in my life without a huge number of other people doing things well and efficiently. Both of which includes anything people will pay for, including b2b saas apps. Try having a pandemic lockdown without Amazon-level fulfil…
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.
> Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces.
Depends entirely upon the quality of the fart.
Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#389Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees
#390This 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…
Someone seeing automation tools and saying “cool! This will centralize wealth even more, and that’s a good thing” is quite revealing