Im a one person company, but I only make an average salary
Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
141–150 of 158 posts
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're going to forget that his girlfriend worked two jobs for 5 years to even support him being able to do that, yeah, he was "alone". Just like trust fund startup bros make it "alone" (with the 500k their parents gave them).
Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6 figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with it.
Lucky people. Most parents dont have 6 figures to give tho
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes this still counts as "alone". Stop diminishing hard work and talent. A lot of parents give their kids 6 figure amounts, almost all of them don't do anything with it.
Lucky people. Most parents dont have 6 figures to give tho
Most as in > Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.
If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#144Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#145Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B. Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI. Joe Rogan could fire all his staff and there would still be companies lining up around the block to buy his podcast for $1B+. There are many such examples of a person having something or being something that is worth a lot to someone else, to the tune of billions.…
I'm sure we're already there with musicians as well. If you take Taylor Swift's annual revenue and multiply it by 5-10, you'll easily cross a billion. But she does require tons of staff for the stadium shows that provide the bulk of the revenue, etc. Not literally one person, but it's a company with a bus factor of one.
Lebron James reportedly signed a billion dollar lifetime deal with Nike.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, who? Who has invested $1B+ in something they expected would lose money just to "prove a point"? And what was the point? And Musk buying Twitter doesn't count because he was forced to buy it after it became clear he would lose money. He did everything he could to get out of it.
Ok, so you're saying that there were not a single 1B+ valuation company out there that failed?
No, that has nothing to do at all with anything I said.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#147I guess it is not very likely but I would suggest a solo scientists/innovator as the best candidate... Near future AI systems, novel research methods and unique datasets (and a lot of luck) could let a single researcher make breakthrough advances. I am thinking of a room-temperature superconductor in materials science or a better transformer architecture in computer science, potentially yielding a billion-dollar pate…
It could even be some rando on HN with weird ideas about computer architecture and security.
But it's far more likely to be someone who contracts out a lot of things, except for one core competency, and some really strong business networks, trade secrets or intellectual property.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#148>Heather Cox Richardson ... could easily replace her two copy editors with Claude. I'd be surprised if she felt the same way.
yeah this is some insanely out of touch nonsense.. I have no idea who she is but the idea that any of the current crop of models could replace a copy editor is laughable. Just ask it how many times the letter b appears in blueberry.
LLMs are good at copy editing. They recognize when words are misspelled or grammar is poor very easily, despite not being able to see individual letters.
For understanding the guy's point it helps if you know anything about Heather Cox Richardson. Merely saying her copyeditors could be replaced by AI is a gross minimization, probably most of her own work could be too.
HCRs newsletter is popular because she delivers much purer, harder Trump Derangement Syndrome than anyone else on the market. That's it, that's the entire secret to her success. She delivers an ordinary and easily LLMable service (summarizing news), but ramps the Trump hate up orders of magnitude. Her competitive edge is she delivers to a market of liberals who find themselves disgusted with the mainstream journalism because, as they see it, it tries much too hard to be neutral and unbiased. It's sort of like how the Guardian makes millions off of donations by being a very openly left wing paper, except 1000x more extreme.
One might think US journalism is not particularly neutral, but they claim they are, so if you reject the whole notion that journalism should be unbiased as idiotic appeasement the market doesn't have much for you. Into this gap steps Heather Cox Richardson, a humanities academic who for a low low price will send you a daily news report that, every day, tells you how evil and bad Trump is and how good a person you are for realizing that.
Go read some of her reports and then tell us an LLM couldn't write them cold, I dare you. It probably wouldn't even need to be a big LLM. Summarization and rewrites are things they're really good at. She never even cites sources and hallucinations aren't the sort of thing her customer base are going to notice.
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time Technically. The reality is much closer to "Any piece of valuable software will get a crappy free version after some amount of time, and multiple paid copies"
Missing the feature of being free (as in libre) makes most paid-for software actually crappy in comparison. But maybe other things matter more to you, that is possible of course.
Which of course begs the question: which definition of free was being used in the comment I responded to?
Re: Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
#150One thing I want to point out about software is that its perpetually commoditized. Any piece of valuable software will get a free version after some amount of time. It happened to compilers, operating systems, and renderer. It's gradually happening to game engines. That's why the largest software companies are really just network effect monopolies. You only use it because other people use it or it relies on some sort…
> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly. To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.
Is this really true, though? Having a one-person unicorn doesn't preclude having multi-person company competitors. They might have found competitive axes where having multiple actual humans is an advantage.