Are founders really 1000x more valuable than their employees? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are founders really 1000x more valuable than their employees?

#121

Post by code_duck » Sun, Feb 20, 2011, 9:56 PM UTC

ojbyrne wrote: post #117

code_duck wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reflects on their future prospects of being a startup founder, though. I think the founder of a company like Friendster could still get a job working at Twitter or Zynga or whatever as an engineer, and the notoriety in their past would actually be a benefit.

Engineer? Jonathan Abrams, since Friendster, has been a CEO, owns a bar, is an angel investor and an advisor to other companies ( http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jonathan-abrams ) . He probably was able to "take money off the table."

Right, so in this case it wasn't some failed attempt that harmed his prospects. I think the real risk is that you'll fail and end up bankrupt, not that you'll sell the company for millions but carry the ignominy of not becoming Facebook.

Re: Are founders really 1000x more valuable than their employees?

#122

Post by pyre » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 4:43 AM UTC

gregpilling wrote: post #119

pyre wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter if you write the most beautiful program ever, > the reality is there has to be a way to monetize that program if > you want to run a business off of it (and obviously, your > employer does) On the other hand, you could have all the charisma in the world, but you'll have a hard time selling something that doesn't exist (unless you want to cross onto the wrong side of the law and dabble in fraud / b…

Its actually easier to sell vaporware than a real product. Vaporware never has any bugs or problems. Or as one of my colleagues during my equipment selling days said "The brochure never fails to boot up". We were selling Pentium100 based equipment at the time.

At some point you do actually have to deliver something. You can pitch vaporware and get people interested. You might even get some people to give you money, but at some point you do have to deliver something. People pitching vaporware and never delivering can't be said to be a 'good' thing for the economy.

Re: Are founders really 1000x more valuable than their employees?

#123

Post by laf2019 » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 7:11 AM UTC

I think it is true in certain cases. A successful founder has that 100% commitment to the idea / company. He or she will do anything it takes for it to succeed and will hustle it until it does. Sure, employees can write the code that makes the company run but they don't have that extra drive to have made it a success on their own. On the flip side, some founders are just super-well connected people that just get oodles of money and hire a team to make their idea come to life and have no real ability beyond that.

Re: Are founders really 1000x more valuable than their employees?

#124

Post by swombat » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 3:29 PM UTC

antihero wrote: post #103

gamble wrote: post #67

People are over-moralizing this. Why do CEOs get paid so much? Why are salesmen often better paid than engineers? Does a ditch-digger deserve less money than a lawyer? The market is basically amoral. People get what they can get, not what they 'deserve'. Founders get more money because they have ownership, and in a capitalistic system profits accrue to capital. There's no point in constructing an elaborate moral arch…

> The market is basically amoral. Yet people support it and sleep at night. The world is not fair, people are unfair, and it's a damn good cause to try to make it fairer. Sure I expect there's a serious correlation between putting effort in, but a huge part of how valuable your efforts are to your life is decided by where you were born, who your family are, who fucks you over and how you are parented. I'm sure there…

Amoral does not mean immoral. I think you're confusing the two.

Nature is amoral too. That means it does not have any sense of morality, it functions based on a different set of rules. Immoral is against morality. Amoral is without morality.

The market isn't unfair, or fair - it's neither.