Is it "bad" to hoard the money? As founder/CEO seeing insane growth, should she share some of it? How much can she hoard before it becomes bad?
How to earn a billion dollars
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#572I think Paul left out the fact that in order to grow that fast, you often need to commit crime. Airbnb/Bed Boat, Neighbor, Swimply, Uber/Lyft, Bird/Lime, BlackJet, Waymo/Cruise, Splacer/Peerspace, Zenefits, Tilt, Loomis/Stablecoins, Coinbase, Worldcoin, Stripe, AngelList/Sydecar, Polymarket, Uniswap Labs, Doordash/Instacart/Postmates, CloudKitchens, Shef, Done Health, Forward Health, Cerebral, Pacaso, Sonder, 23andMe…
> Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do? Surely these things are on a moral and ethical continuum and we need to look at them individually? Pretty much every person has broken some law at least once in their lives. I don’t disagree that moral ambivalence is often necessary to make billions, but I also don’t consider all laws sacrosanct, or that breaking the law is the primary…
So which laws are they allowed to break? All of them? You'll probably say "no, it's my own personal morals which they should abide by". To which someone else will say "no, your morals are crap, my morals should be the yardstick for corporate ethics". Then you might say "it should be the laws that most of us think are okay to break are optional",..... but at that point you're getting consensus on laws, and that's called governance, which you have representatives for. So then you might say "but our leaders don't represent us", at which point, your decision is probably to either 1) demand that your leaders proactively amend laws that the people find onerous (which brings up a whole nother can of worms re: democracy), or 2) let the companies do whatever they want because you can't be bothered. So we all just go with 2) and now it's easy to become a billionaire, just break the law.
That's a lot of leaps I just took, because it's honestly way too complex to get into litigating when people/companies should be allowed to break the law. The much simpler answer is to simply not let companies/people break the law, and fix the law when it needs fixing, and not just so one dude can become a billionaire real fast.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#573But 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…
It's pretty hard for someone to make something worth a billion dollars then sell it, because someone else could make the same thing and undercut you. We even have a word for the way around this: 'moat.' In the 2000s 'network effects' were the most common moat, and they seemed a little crappy but not outrightly evil. Now the most common scheme seems to be breaking law until your big enough for the rules to not apply. That's why people see it as cheating.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#574A true, but vapid speech. You can grow to be a quintillionaire if you start as a trillionaire and grow at 990% a month for X months, too. It's almost as though the devil is literally in the details? I don't even think it's wrong, it just says almost nothing about anything that isn't blindingly obvious.
Maybe the most interesting observation is a buried point near the end that the natural cap on this is market size. There's a much more interesting speech there about expanding the size of your market, both to governments and to businesses leaders. But this isn't that speech
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#575Great article by PG! Too bad he did not specify the play book, i.e. to enter the public market at highly unrealistic inflated valuations so that VCs and founders can make bank while the general public become bag holders for next 5-10 years. I got mine, up yours!
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#576The 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 re…
pg has an essay addressing exactly that: https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
The problem is that when you cap earnings to $100m, most investors lose motivation to invest in startups, because their investment isn’t likely to yield a reward. Unless you think all investments should be less than $100m, this kills large investment rounds. That would have killed OpenAI, for example, since their recent round was larger.
In other words, it’s fine to say “you can only earn a hundred million dollars.” The hard part is implementing it without killing the investment ecosystem. Every investor is chasing the big return that covers the 20 investments that didn’t pan out. If that big return is capped, there won’t be investment, and hence no startups.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#577> There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want? To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership? To have an exchange for cryptographic tokens that are us…
AirBnBs are not responsible for the housing crisis. Voters that vote to block development at the municipal level are responsible for the housing crisis.
> To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?
Note your parent's statement includes a critical qualifier “helped”. Your parent does never claim that Airbnb was a single cause.
Your theory about NIMBY voters on the other hand does claim a single reason.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#578It’s a shame Graham has failed to understand the point of the statement he’s trying to critique.
The argument isn’t that earning money is inherently immoral. The argument is that you can’t earn a billion dollars without assigning a higher percentage of revenue to yourself than is fair. I’m not going to argue that one way or another here, because I don’t think it’d be a useful discussion: I’m just pointing out that Graham doesn’t engage with the key premise.
He also might want to check his percentages a bit. Funding 30 startups which have produced billionaires is nice. It represents 1% of the world’s billionaire population. You know who really knows how to make new billionaires? The world’s richest families, that’s who.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#579Did he... totally miss the point of AOC?
She said that no amount of "work" can "earn" billion dollars. So you earn billions through capitalism by rent, through owning companies, and having other people work for you. And ultimately, it should be obvious that societies have to cap this
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#580But 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…
> 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. Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exp…
But there are many online stores, and Amazon is one of the worst? On line shopping was an innovation but Amazon, in particular, was just a cash grab from all the others.