If rich people are so great, why do founders not want to work for them?
Billionaires Build
21–30 of 957 posts
Re: Billionaires Build
#22off-topic: I have been actively participating in HN since 2010, and recently I started seeing prominent tech people on twitter backlash against pg. Not sure if It was there before, or if I'm barely noticing this. i.e. many of them show screenshots of getting banned by pg on twitter. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1329094570056032264
pg has fallen out of touch. The world is very different for the young ones. I’m not old but my tech career started back around 2007. It was very different. Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won. Tech is to 2020 what finance was to 1980. And VCs are seen as the big baddies. People don’t join this industry for the love o…
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 marketplaces. It seems like tech is where greedy people go nowadays, not ambitious people in any greater sense of ambition in the world at large.
Re: Billionaires Build
#23> The crucial feature of the initial market is that it exist.
Should "exist" be replaced with "exists" in this sentence? If you wanted to use "exist" I think you'd have to use a helper verb like "should [exist]". Is there a name for the grammatical feature where someone omits the "should" and uses the conjugation that would go with it?
Re: Billionaires Build
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airbnb feels like a very bad example. It’s rich people renting out their homes to other rich people. You’re saying that’s more exploitative than rich people renting out those same homes to poor people? How do you think that really pans out?
No. Residential areas are different from commercial areas in good parts of the world for a reason. This is not a bad example. Many people took loans to buy airbnb to aggressively rent them. Criminal activity go through roof with tourists in the neighborhood. You don't know who your neighbors are because they keep changing. It doesn't feel safe to let your 10 year old son out for many. Drugs, garbage on the road, covi…
Would you say this collection of things you’re describing is, “AirBnb is exploiting someone?”
Anyway, there’s basically no evidence for any of what you’re saying, especially the crime part. The one not-yet-peer reviewed paper trying to show Airbnb’s causal effect on rents found a $9/yr increase (1), which is laughably, hilariously small - it could not possibly be playing a significant role in rent pricing in the biggest markets, and the researchers specifically excluded the possibility of AirBnb reducing supply. And this factual criticism is the one you actually omitted!
(1) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832
Re: Billionaires Build
#25> that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Any statement that has the word "only" in it is guaranteed to be wrong. I wonder if PG worded it this way intentionally (straw man fallacy). Most people agree early employees should get more equity. This doesn't address whether startup founders are hoarding equity for themselves and their investors instead of fairly rewarding early employees.
Isn't that true though? A millionaire? Sure there are a lot of ways to get there. A Billionaire? There are only 2000~. Are there any notable ones who got there without exploiting people or building/aided in building a business that does?
Re: Billionaires Build
#26off-topic: I have been actively participating in HN since 2010, and recently I started seeing prominent tech people on twitter backlash against pg. Not sure if It was there before, or if I'm barely noticing this. i.e. many of them show screenshots of getting banned by pg on twitter. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1329094570056032264
pg has fallen out of touch. The world is very different for the young ones. I’m not old but my tech career started back around 2007. It was very different. Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won. Tech is to 2020 what finance was to 1980. And VCs are seen as the big baddies. People don’t join this industry for the love o…
Die a hero or live long enough to become the villain right?
Re: Billionaires Build
#27> that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Any statement that has the word "only" in it is guaranteed to be wrong. I wonder if PG worded it this way intentionally (straw man fallacy). Most people agree early employees should get more equity. This doesn't address whether startup founders are hoarding equity for themselves and their investors instead of fairly rewarding early employees.
I wouldn't say this is a straw man. Every billionaire being exploitative/criminal is a real political position among the American Left, see e.g. this tweet [0] by Robert Reich. He was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, so not some extremist weirdo.
Re: Billionaires Build
#28For 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 billionares. It's that their focus on their goal allows exploitation to happen as a by product. It's not that Uber set out to exploit drivers, it's just that get their business to scale they had to lure drivers in with big incentives, and then in order to make their business viable they had to then force their costs down to the point where drivers are paid less than the cost of vehicle maintenance.
It's just a bizarre primary school understanding or morality where there's a group of "Good" people and "Bad" people.
Re: Billionaires Build
#29Billionaire can also be framed as succeeding at creating a power differential at scale. The trick is that you can't achieve scale without using power differentials, and iphones are the fruit of scale. Idea: what you kind of want is for the power difference to decay at scale, so that way you don't have amazon workers pissing in water bottles. Remember: "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value" [1] – I wonder if PG has read that? [1] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
Re: Billionaires Build
#30From experience, this rings very, very true. For many, this is a hard pill to swallow. Here's one way to judge it more objectively. Replace "billionaire", with something more neutral: "pro basketball player", "amazing musician", "prolific writer". The arguments tend to make a lot of sense in other categories, but our natural inclination rebels on Billionaire. This is a great sign that something is off
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.