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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#841

Post by anamax »

anbende wrote: post #627
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…

The primary issue with this is the way shares and equity work. Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. He pays himself famously little. That net worth is, under our current system, tightly linked with his interest and control in his various enterprises. He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed, but he like the hypothetical fresh billionaire startup founder don’t have that m…

> He can borrow against it which gets around taxes and that should probably be addressed

Folks who lend money against stock insist on being repaid. (In fact, they typically have the right to sell the stock to be repaid.) The money to replay was taxed. (It comes from salaries and/or stock sales. Borrowing more to repay previous loans just kicks the can down the road.)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#842

Post by nearbuy »

cm11 wrote: post #746
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…

The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. He's said the "make something people want" thing before, his argument for billionaires doesn't seem to go much beyond it. It seems rather clear it's not all you need nor is it all it took for these people to get there. You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. Y…

You're not really engaging with PG's argument so much as nitpicking around the edges. Are people becoming billionaires primarily by cheating and stealing, or by making something people want? That's the core argument. Were GitLab, Dropbox and Stripe primarily cheating or offering a service people liked? Rather than cherry-picking one or two examples of what you deem the worst offenses, show that "you can't earn a billion dollars" without cheating or abusing others. PG isn't arguing that startups never do anything bad. He's just arguing that they can sometimes earn a billion dollars without cheating.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#843

Post by theParadox42 »

moralestapia wrote: post #757
mcmcmc wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is a joke, right?

If you start with $7.35464e-6 you’ll get to a trillion by the time you’re done!

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#844

Post by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe »

hammock wrote: post #701
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”

I'm very interested in details about this please.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#846

Post by giardini »

Grombobulous wrote: post #420
theptip wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the point, PG doesn’t actually engage with it. He just says “compound growth + build something that people love”. But the meat of the point is: if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years? Look, I’m a startup guy, I buy into the premise that it’s an intensely value-creating activity. But I think it’s self-defeating to pretend like the…

There are extremely good arguments for why the act of becoming and remaining a billionaire is immoral and bad alone, without any need for you to have directly wronged someone else. PG just completely misunderstands and hand-waves over this basic concept and makes the excuse that "hey we worked really hard and made an amazing product that people loved, we aren't harming anyone." For one thing, founders and employees d…

Pure envy.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#847

Post by nixon_why69 »

dismalaf wrote: post #840
hammock wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

The people on HN have changed. It used to be founders and people doing things. Founders of some now huge companies were on HN. Interesting and well known hackers too. Now it's SWEs who work in big tech, hate their jobs and are afraid of being laid off who just parrot politically expedient current talking points. x.com is more interesting these days, even for tech.

Tech has changed, back in the early 2000s it really felt very creative, the growing big companies were inventing new things and defining the web. They were also much smaller, more idealistic and in their "youthful vigor" stage.

These days, most people's experience at a big tech company is a political dystopia where everyone is optimizing for their promo packet.

That's going to get you 2 different audiences.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#848

Post by duped »

InterviewFrog wrote: post #771
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…

You saved $500k to buy a beautiful home. You don't know how to build a home. I do. I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees who put in 40 hours a week. I take home $50k. I earn $50k. Now, you like the home so much you tell all your friends about it. I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B. Market forces decide how much you "ear…

At what level do you think a business stops experiencing market forces and starts dictating them, to the detriment of competition, consumers, and employees?

Because I don't think you can build a billion dollar home construction empire where you profit $50k per home in perpetuity. You will have to lower your margins, cut others in on your profits to stop them from competing with you, or manipulate markets to never make a loss on a project.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#850

Post by guywithahat »

justincarter wrote: post #704
hammock wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's not talking about politics, he's talking about statups and growth rates, both of which are square in his domain, in fact one would argue that's the basis for his entire career. This article is a response to a politician making an incorrect statement to a topic he's an expert on
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