101–110 of 1001 posts
This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise. Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of…
> I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have
Since it's a post about math, let's do it.
6500 companies with 2 founders each - 13000 founders.
30 of them became billionaires - 0.2% of them.
So being a tech founder at the most famous startup accelerator in the world give you about 0.2% chance of becoming a billionaire.
Or put another way, only 1 out of every 500 YC-combinator founded startup makes one of it's founders a billionaire.
Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
It’s appalling that it is at the top of the front page. (Edit: At the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/classic , at present.)
Playing devils advocate here: Maybe the politicians position is that the whole system is based on cheating and everyone who partakes is acting immorally? Is it fair that the founder got education and some money to start his company while other people are living on the street or have to care for relatives? If they come from a relatively privileged position and manage to build a company that ends up being successful, d…
If the only viable alternative is that nobody gets to start their business rather than some idealized best case of everyone getting a chance of it, then yes, it's probably fair.
This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise. Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of…
Worse, it's just a long post trying to show that doing math with a calculator somehow disproves real-life ethics.
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. "Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel. It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably g…
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. "Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel. It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably g…
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. "Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel. It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably g…
You’re suggesting that selling others’ talent isn’t legitimate “earning”? Why?
"But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues."
What could possibly be false in a two-parameter model of reality?
I don't disagree with the essay, but is there any benefit to being a billionaire? Almost anything I could possibly want could be satisfied by being a humble multi-millionaire.
With nearly all the billionaire PG mentions the money is the company valuation rather than cash in the bank.