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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#521

Post by edanm »

dmurvihill wrote: post #501
blfr wrote: post #23

But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a billion dollars which you can then sell if you choose so. And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment. Also, the most impo…

What's missing is that the billion-dollar value is based on the expectation of exploiting the employees/customers/environment to achieve profit in the future.

Missing cause it's not true.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#522

Post by sethev »

wtfHN26 wrote: post #457
epsteingpt wrote: post #238

Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand. Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard , doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G: If…

> 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. How do we determine that limit ? Most Americans ( middle class and above ) are richer than most people in the world. Way richer than most people in Africa or poorer parts of Asia can ever aspire to be. Consider that when competing for resources these poor people are competing with wealthy middle class Americans. Add to that the…

By legislation and policymaking - just like any other numbers we as a society end up picking (like the age to get a drivers license or buy alcohol or the income tax brackets).

Just like those cases, what other countries are doing would mostly be irrelevant - except, just like now, people may try to find arbitrage opportunities by getting creative about where they live.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#524

Post by ip26 »

rybosworld wrote: post #498

I read this and see two possibilities. 1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence. Or 2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves. The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x…

Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#525

Post by chipotle_coyote »

pipes wrote: post #509

The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the rest of their lives even if they stop working right then.

I don't know what the best solution to the problem of wealth inequality is, but I know that we need to collectively get over this "but if people think they will be limited to a mere hundred million dollars in wealth they will have no motivation whatsoever to work" nonsense. You know what the motivation is? It's still a hundred million dollars, that's what.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#527

Post by [deleted] »

rybosworld wrote: post #498

I read this and see two possibilities. 1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence. Or 2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves. The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x…

[deleted]

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#528

Post by wrsh07 »

rybosworld wrote: post #498

I read this and see two possibilities. 1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence. Or 2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves. The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x…

I'm somewhat confused by this. Many of the early startups are literally just the founders, and if they find product market fit without bringing anyone on, there's nobody else to give credit to.

I've talked to a lot of seed stage startups this past year, several of them have achieved PMF and have several large customers. None of them have more than five people. If the companies didn't exist, nobody else was going to build the things (most of them) are building.

Where should you assign credit in this case?

Some of them largely eschew AI programming assistance as well.

Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#529

Post by blast »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #483

Weird to see Graham take AOC's quote out of context: Graham: 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. Per his link in the article: AOC: there is a certain level of wealth and accumul…

What's inaccurate in how he quoted her? The context seems fully consistent with the quote.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#530

Post by tome »

ModernMech wrote: post #489
tome wrote: post #180

What AOC is trying to do here is shift the debate from extracting retribution on people who have violated specific laws (a fair and an honest way to enforce justice in a civil society) to extracting retribution on people who she insinuates "must have done something immoral" based on their net worth (a selfish, dishonest, envious and greedy way to run a society). It's a clever play, and unfortunately for the people of…

>There is enough of the population filled with envy and greed that they'll lap up whatever a politician tells them bogie man of the day is. Historically it's been the aristocracy, Jews, immigrants, but those don't work any more, so now it's generally "the rich". I love how the billionaires hoarding resources to entrench their own power are not the greedy ones in your telling.

Oh, I don't know any of those. The only billionaires I know of are those providing service to consumers or businesses that people can freely decide whether to pay for or not. I just subscribed to another thing on Amazon for far less in price than the value I get for it. Thanks Bezos!

The selfish people I know of are politicians and online commenters who think they're entitled to the wealth built by other people.

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