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Billionaires Build

paulgraham.com

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Re: Billionaires Build

#131

Post by troughway »

nsp wrote: post #114
troughway wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is certainly a newer-ish theme. I am not sure where the bitterness comes, and to be honest, I would like to know. We are reading the same essays. More and more I am starting to think that people who are decrying pg's writing should come clean and say whether or not they've started a business, and if so, what was the outcome. The outcome isn't as relevant, but I bet there are very few people out there who have re…

I've started a business, we were recently acquired for a nine figure sum, and I think PG is increasingly out of touch. My best guess is that he's been rich too long, but I feel the bitterness and have been quite successful in my tech career starting companies.

>I feel the bitterness

Elaborate on it then.

Re: Billionaires Build

#132

Post by travisjungroth »

jariel wrote: post #52
travisjungroth wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three are of your examples are wildly different in that they’re top-tier individual contributors. Of course you can become a prolific writer without exploiting anyone. A more fair comparison would be something like politician.

"All three are of your examples are wildly different in that they’re top-tier individual contributors" And founders are not? Some founders are at that level, and frankly, more important to society than most athletes or musicians. MLB pitchers make $10's of millions of dollars a year, far more than most of our top talent.

My challenge is on the individual contributor part, not the top-tier part. A founder is not an IC, at least not past a certain point.

Re: Billionaires Build

#133

Post by Benjammer »

birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #117
Benjammer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm even less old, my career started in 2009. My personal experience was that people back then were both more nerdy and more ambitious, not a tradeoff. And now people are "ambitious" but it's a personal ambition to play the game and earn more money than their peers. The people I worked with in 2009 were ambitious in the sense of building products and teams and companies to succeed in the marketplace, or creating new…

Where can one find the ambitious people of 2009 to build products and teams and companies? Asking for a friend.

If I look back at the company I was thinking of when I wrote that, the "top half" of the people there are VPs/MDs in fintech, staff engineers at companies like Twitter, ~2-3 mildly successful founders, CTOs at startups, and several have one-person-consulting-shop lifestyle businesses. The other half are mostly engineering managers at (boring, non-FAANG) larger companies. I've bounced around doing greenfield projects / new products at several B2B companies. I just find interesting projects I want to work on and then leave after a few years once the politics become overwhelming for me.

Our recruiting/interviewing process would be criticized nowadays as completely bias-ridden. We sent teams of just-graduated first-year people back to their school's career fairs, built relationships with career offices at those schools, and just basically would have people walk around and be outgoing and try to just chat with interesting students and see if they wanted to join a cool tech company in NYC with cool people. Our interviews were mostly gut-feel after talking to someone about whatever and doing a very simple many-to-many-linking-table exercise to see if they could visualize simple data relations in their head. We didn't even test coding skills, for the most part.

I dunno if it would surprise anyone, but those teams actually were, by far, the most diverse teams I've worked on in my career in terms of age, gender, and race (not to mention socio-eco background). We invested heavily in training people on the job and building culture together internally. We ended up being merged into a larger entity by our parent company and the culture was utterly demolished, and everyone quit around the same time.

I just don't see what context would attract these sorts of people back together at a tech company nowadays. If you find something that isn't a startup founded by rich brats trying to completely fleece slightly-above-average engineers in secondary-market cities with 10-yr-old market rate salaries, and isn't a big tech company ruining society, completely driven by political-insider-donors-- ahem, sorry, I mean investors -- please let me know also!

Re: Billionaires Build

#134

Post by travisjungroth »

stopachka wrote: post #40
travisjungroth wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three are of your examples are wildly different in that they’re top-tier individual contributors. Of course you can become a prolific writer without exploiting anyone. A more fair comparison would be something like politician.

I think billionaires are much closer to what I mentioned than to politicians. You can tell this by the fact that most billionaires have engineering degrees or were tinkerers. One defining quality is that billionaires need to scale work that often involves management. In this case consider prolific basketball coaches, or generals in war. The reason I shy away from including politicians, is because their m.o is starkly…

Sure, coaches and generals are also much better comparison.

Either way, I think your argument is weak. “Sure you feel this away about billionaires. But change ‘billionaire’ to something different and your feelings change.”

Well, duh. That’s not even an analogy. You’re just literally changing the subject of the sentence. Billionaires are super different than writers in ways that are relevant to this discussion.

Re: Billionaires Build

#135

Post by maram »

Traster wrote: post #28

For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. It's a massive blind spot that PG fails to address is that it's the exact same sense of mission that he sees in start ups that creates the permission structure to exploit people. It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become bil…

>For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view.

Why is it frustrating? PG discussed an important topic I found to be very relevant in the business world to this day. Being exploitive is praised in most if not all business schools! Cut throat, shark, shrewd, it’s even depicted in movies Wolf of Wall Street, the Founder (McDonald’s), greed is good...

No self made billionaire, at least in the last 100 years, was ever portrayed fairly in movies or history books!

Even Carnegie Mellon!!

Re: Billionaires Build

#136

Post by [deleted] »

yetanothermonk wrote: post #75

It’s so strange the YC comments and some Twitter comments are so focused on the billionaire part. The real part is to deeply understand your users, no? And the focus on YC interviews is reminiscent of media is the massage—-the hubbub places YC as a thing to pass but if you understand your users deeply, you won’t even need YC. In a way all the YC interview prep stuff is written for the wrong people (for YC, and this i…

[deleted]

Re: Billionaires Build

#137

Post by johndevor »

dustingetz wrote: post #124
Emphere wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good, something I have been thinking about as well. Inequality is bad because of the massive power differentials. How do you propose we "solve" that while still being able to reap the benefits of scale? Any pointers or books to read about this topic? Admittedly I haven't looked too hard.

Idea for the solution is to get everyone together to opt-in to a value system that demonizes excess accumulation. That sounds crazy/impossible today, but on lets say, a 2000 year timespan could we get there? 2000 years ago, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was a seminal idea, eventually resulting in the world today where killing is demonized and this is existence proof of a solution. We can then abstract to the general class of…

Define "excess"

I'm glad people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates have billions of dollars - they're solving some of the world's hardest challenges right now with their wealth.

Re: Billionaires Build

#140

Post by ac2u »

treis wrote: post #125
postingpals wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He starts his entire essay with a faulty premise, that in order to be a billionaire you have to be exploitative, and then goes on to argue why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. Look, not even 'prole defenders' agree with this. You don't have to be exploitative to be a billionaire, it's simply a byproduct. There are only several thousand billionaires on earth and you…

>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a posi…

>Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet.

Are you sure you didn't just come up with that example yourself to suit the narrative? Until you know what all selected companies chose as an answer for that, aren't we just guessing as to what quality they were looking for?

To be clear, I'm not accusing you of making it up, as my memory of it is dim too, I just can't remember examples being given like lying on a resume.

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