How to earn a billion dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#601

Post by wat10000 » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

I remember when Facebook, I think it was, was going public. There was a ton of consternation about avoiding a “Google chef” situation. Google had a chef that got paid a bunch of equity as if they were an engineer, and they got filthy rich when Google went public. This was, of course, an outrage. A lowly chef getting rich from a startup IPO! We all know that the founders are supposed to get wealthy beyond all reason, regular engineers are supposed to get fairly rich depending on how early they started, and regular people aren’t supposed to get anything special.

As if the chef didn’t contribute. People have to eat!

We have weird ideas about who deserves the rewards. This idea that starting a company that gets big counts as “earning” a billion dollars makes some strong assumptions about who deserves what.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#602

Post by galenptacek » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

Someone told me it was impossible to become an avogadrillionaire (to have a net worth of one mole, or approximately 6.02 x 10^23 dollars.) Now there's this founder I know whose startup grew 93% last month. Let's be conservative and say she has 2 million dollars. Let's calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 301,100,000,000,000,000x.

The log base 1.93 of 301,100,000,000,000,000 is 61.2091. That's about 5 years and 35 days. Is it really impossible to grow 93% month over month for 5 consecutive years? I can imagine some startups that can.

There are two numbers that determine whether you can make one avogadrillion dollars. One is your growth rate, which doesn't matter at all. The other is the size of the available market. Simply identify a market that has on the order of 10^20 times the demand that is currently being met. Understand what your users want. Ask ChatGPT for advice.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#603

Post by bluedino » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525

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 re…

> 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.

Professional athletes and lottery winners prove otherwise.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#604

Post by old-gregg » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #593

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.

The post is patronizing as hell, it’s no wonder people respond to it negatively. Patting people on the head and saying “you moron, it’s just two numbers” isn’t a good way to make an argument.

Sam Harris often makes an argument that I both hate and kind of agree with. He says that exchanging arguments and having a debate only works when the two arguing parties share a foundation. The debate’s purpose is to reconcile a measurable difference of opinion.

In this case, I feel there’s no shared foundation. Half of the commenters here don’t seem to understand what money is or how it works. There's no soil in which to plant an argument, because there's no understanding of what a billion dollars represents. There’s no genuine desire to understand the counterparty either.

Very disturbing.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#605

Post by lumost » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525

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 re…

bear in mind, elon musk now has the wealth of 10k "100 millionaires" - we truly lack comprehension of how wealthy the wealthy have gotten.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#606

Post by Muromec » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

smallmancontrov wrote: post #3

In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked. This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi dri…

>Morally speaking, figuring out how to mitigate this toxic byproduct is part of our remit

What's hard to figure out here? You either pay taxes or you build cathedrals. While you are doing neither the communist tendencies keep growing, because people see they are squeezed. It's that communism has any answer to it really, but the tendencies will keep growing until something happens.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#607

Post by dh2022 » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

Extremely disappointing post from pg. conflating income with revenue, assuming one can extrapolate a week-on-week growth rate to any other week (never mind 9 consecutive months or 5 consecutive years), giving as positive examples Google and Facebook.

pg is way too smart to believe even half of this nonsense. I guess he thinks future UK politicians (the audience of his speech) are that stupid.

Or maybe that speech was just to vehicle to make himself heard spewing this nonsense. Heard by whom?

Very disappointing indeed.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#608

Post by Upvoter33 » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

You know, there seems to be a hidden thought here that it's either just (A) let the Founders do their thing and of course they will provide great value and happen to become billionaires as a result or (B) tax those crooked cheaters who are taking our wealth.

There could be alternatives. For example, laws that ensure ownership of said companies is more widely held, so that the wealth is more evenly distributed among those who created it, for instance.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#609

Post by wat10000 » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

Telemakhos wrote: post #227

owaiswiz wrote: post #163

> She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. I presume it's a company that just has co-founders then? Or everyone is getting an equal % of the share? In which case SHE's not…

Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it. If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistri…

The fact that everything is consensual doesn’t mean the rewards are earned. If I find gold on my land and dig it up and sell it, I haven’t done anything wrong, but I haven’t earned most of that money. I just got lucky.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#610

Post by robertnowell » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

the main concern here is what is needed to create and sustain that growth rate.

here are three potential issues:

1. there is a short term incentive for lying -- tricking people can get you a long way (e.g. delve)

2. there's a genuine long term incentive for selling products that have short term benefit but long term harm (e.g. gambling, cigarettes, etc).

3. there is a durable incentive to sell products that genuinely benefit for your customers but cause net harm to society -- this last one is a hard problem of capitalism, and imo it's the gov'ts job to make sure that such companies are not allowed to win.