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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#721

Post by mcmcmc »

galenptacek wrote: post #602

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 61.209…

> Is it really impossible to grow 93% month over month for 5 consecutive years? I can imagine some startups that can.

Sure, if they have a monopoly. Any market seeing that kind of growth will instantly have competitors and eventually the TAM runs out.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#722

Post by themafia »

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.

Just because you managed to get a billion dollars of value attributed to your name does not mean that you know how to earn a billion dollars or that you have the first worthwhile clue to share to anyone else how they should do it. It's the blind trap of the successful. They lose situational awareness and can no longer accurately map their actions onto the world they actually live in.

Which is probably why this immediately devolves into a bunch of silly math and equally silly proclamations that don't seem rooted in any actual defined course of action. This is less than worthless, it's actively harmful.

> I've got kids

And this requires _a billion_ dollars? Perhaps an intentionally narrowed scope would be good for some of the HN audience.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#723

Post by kashunstva »

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.

> I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

I also have kids. I want them to live in a just society where billionaires, whom Mr. Graham proudly grooms, according to his telling of the matter, don’t actively undermine the ability of ordinary citizens to earn a living wage, to have a say in self-governance, and to enjoy universal healthcare.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#724

Post by YZF »

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)…

There is a real shift I think plus maybe a new generation.

I blame the pandemic and social media.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#725

Post by YZF »

johnea wrote: post #719
oatmeal1 wrote: post #716

PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…

I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...

So if I'm a brick layer and I decide to innovate and build a machine that can lay bricks faster and cheaper, and I hire people to help me do that, suddenly I've not actually earned anything? If I'm a farmer and I use a horse and a plow to plow my field instead of with my bare hands then I've not earned anything? Putting your capital towards these things is absolutely "earning" and the modern economy is just a generalization of that which enables capital and need to find each other more readily.

We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers? Or how do you propose this is going to work?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#726

Post by Glyptodon »

twoodfin wrote: post #237
tim333 wrote: post #158

Technically if you look at AOC's statement he mentions >AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that” there's some truth there in that PG is talking about capital gains as the owner of…

Putting the scale of dollars and the startup world aside, AOC’s comments read that way would suggest a farmer who gets a series of loans from the bank to help him expand his family farm from a $200K sole proprietorship to a $10M sole proprietorship didn’t “earn” it either. I don’t think a definition of “earn” that excludes cases like that captures the generally understood meaning.

Getting loans seems definitionally and literally very much not something that involves earning.

"Earning" is a subtle word with a variety of usages. One usage is limited to wages or return on labor or effort, and in that sense can refer to anything where a reward is due and proportionate to an effort, like a treat after a hard workout, buying a car after saving for years, or wages. Another usage focuses on profit. When AOC talks in the zone of this first sense, it should be understood that there is only an implied fair reward for sweat and tears, and that past a certain point it's really entirely unrelated to wages or effort.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#727

Post by protocolture »

johnea wrote: post #719
oatmeal1 wrote: post #716

PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…

I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...

>Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not.

How does this follow? Is the management effort in organising a brick laying company not count as work? Does the RND effort of a bricklaying company not count as work?

I would have used housing speculation as my example tbh.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#728

Post by protocolture »

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #678
tim333 wrote: post #158

Technically if you look at AOC's statement he mentions >AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that” there's some truth there in that PG is talking about capital gains as the owner of…

they keep moving goal posts. Show me an entrepreneur making 10M AOC says fairly earned it.

Probably herself.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#729

Post by grok22 »

ElProlactin wrote: post #427

> A couple days later I was talking to the founder of a startup I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. This is such a weird statement to see. The idea that a startup founder whose company is growing at 93% m…

> This is such a weird statement to see. The idea that a startup founder whose company is growing at 93% month-over-month has a net worth growing at the same rate is just so logically wrong that it's bizarre to see someone stating this.

Exactly, kind-of weird for pg to be conflating these things...and very few comments engage with this part of the "incorrectness" of what pg said.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#730

Post by epsteingpt »

vannevar wrote: post #348
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…

>1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard, doable and rewarding and depends on factors outside your control. This last is a critical caveat, and really the crux of the argument. It's not about cheating, but the limits of predictability in complex dynamic systems.

Exactly. The rewards need to make the toil worth it. Many started social networks and search engines in the late 90s / early 2000s. Many failed. My guess is some are broke.

You can't predict these systems at all!

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