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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#701

Post by hammock »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #637

It's clear to me that in order to get a billion, you have to swidle a lot of people out of their fair share of the billion. As soon as the person that has "The Idea" keeps their 60% stake of the company while the army of minions are working their assess off to get that idea to a billion dollar valuations are given crumbs or no stake at all, you know who is swindling who.

> It's clear to me that in order to get a billion, you have to swidle a lot of people out of their fair share of the billion.

For those who are sympathetic to this idea, look no further than China. They have a very good system (superior to US-style taxes) for ensuring that no one gets “too rich” and that excess returns are captured and redistributed “fairly”

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#702

Post by kpw94 »

Muromec wrote: post #606
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.

> What's hard to figure out here?

Negative externalities are hard to figure out.

Since parent mentions "toxic byproduct": Say you're the company that invented Teflon pans. you made billions. You saved billions in time for all the users of the pans... A true entrepreneurial success.

But, by how many billions did you fuck up the environment, people's health etc with the spread of PFAS everywhere?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#703

Post by tim333 »

hammock wrote: post #690
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.

Having been on HN for 15+ years I have found it fascinating to witness the fawning and adulation over pg blog posts completely reverse and everyone has turned on him now. It used to be if you criticized anything in his blogs you’d get downvoted to oblivion. Now criticism is the norm. As far as I can tell it’s less a change in pg’s viewpoints (though the topics have evolved, and he has gotten more transparent perhaps)…

One thing I noticed is on HN where PG no longer hangs out the comments have gone negative whereas on twitter/x where he posts people are positive (https://x.com/paulg/status/2066124279448559907 on earn $1bn). I guess people who like him follow there.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#704

Post by justincarter »

hammock wrote: post #690
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.

Having been on HN for 15+ years I have found it fascinating to witness the fawning and adulation over pg blog posts completely reverse and everyone has turned on him now. It used to be if you criticized anything in his blogs you’d get downvoted to oblivion. Now criticism is the norm. As far as I can tell it’s less a change in pg’s viewpoints (though the topics have evolved, and he has gotten more transparent perhaps)…

I still like to read pg but he keeps writing about things outside of his domain. Here for example I trust him to talk about growth rates and how startups work. But I don’t trust him to talk about wealth inequality and how political leaders respond to it.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#705

Post by lyu07282 »

MinimalAction wrote: post #301

First question: why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? PG made it seem like that's the ultimate goal somehow. Also, why only a billion dollars, PG? You see your infinite cancerous growth machine doesn't stop? This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.

> why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars?

The once was a time where everybody reached similar questions, like "why does our monarch deserve to own all this wealth?" and "why does this plantation owner deserve to own these people?" Today it is the myth of meritocracy, they worked harder, or were smarter, and that's why they deserve it. Its all the same moral sickness. The future is socialism or barbarism, everyone get your heads out of your asses and choose.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#706

Post by auggierose »

If pg doesn't understand that the way he uses the way "earn" is very different from the way that AOC uses "earn", then I guess he is just not that smart.

AOC also doesn't say anything about "moral", etc. You can behave perfectly morally in US society and "earn" a billion dollars. It is just that, no matter what exactly you did, you didn't actually "earn" it.

Of course pg is smart enough to understand that there are two different meanings of "earn" at play here. It is just that he chooses to ignore the second one, because the second one is hard to define exactly, and it puts him out of his comfort zone. He likes being right more than finding the truth (like most of us), and so ignoring the second meaning is the easy way out.

The trouble is, just because something is difficult to define, doesn't mean it isn't essential, or important.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#707

Post by bluecheese452 »

Geniuzz wrote: post #547
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But those founders be content with merely making a hundred million? What does this mean? Without some insane wealth tax this is literally impossible. No founder chooses to become a billionaire. They just keep growing a business that is solving a billion dollar problem. The only other was is if after 100M they start turning down customers or restricting services.

Taxes. So insane.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#708

Post by overgard »

Here's a fun exercise, go look at the current tech billionaires and tell me which guys (it's basically all guys) you're super stoked about having a billion dollars because they're using it to do so much good for the world?

Because as far as I can tell they're just creating a massive surveilance state while engaging in naked class warfare. Whether you can "earn" a billion dollars, I'm not convinced those people should have a billion dollars.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#709

Post by w10-1 »

What differentiates the thing me and my friends want from a scaling business is the whole business. I know young people excited about making fantasy figurines or simplifying 10 minutes of daily administrivia, but that’s not going to fly.

Aristotle describes four causes, and pg has given two; not because he doesn’t know the rest, but because this post is not intended to guide people, but to tamp down the demonizing of success, lest it usher in a Cold War on Capitalism.

There’s much to criticize, but today politicians are desperately herding outrage to make up for their ineffectual performance, so instead of criticism resulting in field-leveling regulation, we’re just seeing haircuts that send the rats scurrying off the boat and fuel for the fires consuming it.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#710

Post by flipgimble »

Doing a quick search in comments, and I see the prefix “enshit” used 5 times so far. That is telling.

For most of my adult life technology was associated with unquestionable improvement and progress. We got used to a series of “revolutions” where you felt that your quality of life improved, even if a few ruthless and amoral business people amassed all the resulting wealth. We assumed that is just how the system works.

But now technology is just as likely to be associated with scams, rug-pulls and using investor capital to capture a market and destroy competition. We are being trained to assume trickery with every software update, forced terms of service change, or company acquisition. Not to mention the absurd corruption when tech billionaires collude with incompetent politicians. It’s just a trend in sentiment I’m seeing that goes against the “just build anything and the world will give you billions” cheerleading from 2000s.

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