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Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

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Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#111

Post by layer8 »

rqtwteye wrote: post #87
ceronman wrote: post #16

He is implying that founders can create a lot of value without employees, and that the claim that employees also create value is false. If that's true, then what about a social experiment: If you are a solo founder, you get all your profits for yourself. But if you have employees, you have to share your profits with your employees. If employees don't produce any value, easy, fire them all, you get everything. But if…

What's with that obsession about "billionaires"? If somebody can make a nice living with their business, isn't that good enough? Personally I think we are perfectly fine without billionaires.

Unfortunately they still crop up, with increasing frequency.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#112

Post by jstanley »

roflyear wrote: post #76
jerrre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

No not really. If I generate $1m of value for a company and they pay me $90k a year that isn't really sharing profit.

But if you cost the company $1m you still get your $90k.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#113

Post by ricksunny »

roflyear wrote: post #76
jerrre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

No not really. If I generate $1m of value for a company and they pay me $90k a year that isn't really sharing profit.

Not disagreeing; but for clarity you'd want to refer to generating surplus value rather than value, i.e. net of costs. i.e. if my work can be construed as having created $1M of revenue, but $990,000 of cost (say some low-commission dropship affiliate sales structure, or online payments with a small transaction fee), I've only created $10,000 of surplus value, out of which I can make a case for a different distribution scheme based on an update (read: agitation) of normative values.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#114

Post by spicymaki »

Feudalism without the serfs. What is in it for the plebs?

The idea that concentrated wealth is great for everyone and will trickle down has been pretty much debunked to the point where the wealthy are openly stating we don't need the masses anymore.

The crypto dystopian nightmare of generating money with zero utility backed by quantitative easing demonstrates that you don't actually need many employees to generate wealth. You don't even need commerce, financial engineering will suffice.

Employment is a social contract. Business owners and investors (who control capital) are supposed to provide a means for the masses to live in comfort, the employees give there labor and time in return. The wealthy get to live in their mansions, vacation on their yachts, etc. We get to buy our homes in the suburbs, raise our families, etc.

What happens when no one works and humans are removed from the value chain?

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#115

Post by judge2020 »

jmyeet wrote: post #89
jerrre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

Are you familiar with "debt bondage"? Technically, the brick kiln workers of India and Pakistan are paid a wage [1]. Closer to home, Amazin warehouse workers probably wouldn't consider themselves as sharing in Amazon's profits. Let me summarize: 1. Debt is built into your existence (student, medical, housing, etc); 2. The system is designed to extract (exploit) value from labor; and 3. There is no value without labor…

What is your point? OP's comment was about how revenue - (other employees wages) = profit, not the actual details surrounding working for a wage.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#116

Post by lolinder »

roflyear wrote: post #76
jerrre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying a wage = sharing your profits, just not on a % base, but a fixed amount. But in the end it's still: less profits for the founder, and more profit for the employee.

No not really. If I generate $1m of value for a company and they pay me $90k a year that isn't really sharing profit.

If you can convincingly demonstrate that you singlehandedly generate $1m revenue for a company, then I'm confident that you have the negotiating power to demand a share.

The problem is that in most cases you can't do that. You might have been the person who made the last push to make the revenue possible, but you were building on the work of everyone else who was working for that company and you were leveraging someone else's resources to make it happen.

We have to have some way to agree what portion of that profit can reasonably be attributed to you. To avoid complicated math and guesswork every quarter, most of us agree to a fixed salary as a reasonable estimate for a fair share of the value we're creating.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#117

Post by clevergadget »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #29
robertlagrant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. That's like saying anyone who thinks hammers are a good idea is really saying a hammer makes a builder successful, not the builder. It's just a tool, and he's saying tools mean one person can do more. You don't need to straw man a philosophy on to it to then have something to argue against. > employees do the aut…

Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context? I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers. I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on abo…

Yeah no one has anything to say about this, probably they read it and run to check their agreements sweating buckets. That's messed up, sorry to hear it.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#118

Post by [deleted] »

rqtwteye wrote: post #87
ceronman wrote: post #16

He is implying that founders can create a lot of value without employees, and that the claim that employees also create value is false. If that's true, then what about a social experiment: If you are a solo founder, you get all your profits for yourself. But if you have employees, you have to share your profits with your employees. If employees don't produce any value, easy, fire them all, you get everything. But if…

What's with that obsession about "billionaires"? If somebody can make a nice living with their business, isn't that good enough? Personally I think we are perfectly fine without billionaires.

[deleted]

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#119

Post by dandanua »

fvdessen wrote: post #47

That’s a very short term vision. The founders and VCs are not any less automatable than their employees. I guess we’ll se how dearly they hold those beliefs when the AIs will own all the wealth

In the limit case, you're left with just the automated founders.

Re: Automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees

#120

Post by tartoran »

neilv wrote: post #75

> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. What I actually hear people saying (including at least one person from YC) is that founders need to share the potential wealth more fairly with early hires. With various rationales, including that execution is everything: having an idea and raising money for it isn't execution -- and the…

> why do founders with a successful exit get rich when employees get even less than they would've been guaranteed at a non-startup tech job

This is the question that if addressed would fix the whole startup scammyness and exploitation. But then it may as well kill startups.

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