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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

#221

Post by stackbutterflow »

spicymaki wrote: post #114

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 we…

What happens when the mass is struggling and has a lot of free time because everything has been automated? The billionaires seem to not have planned more than one step ahead.

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

#222

Post by timmytokyo »

thundergolfer wrote: post #168
moolcool wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more social/political/financial power possessed by the individual threatened by AI, the more resistance there will be to them being disrupted by it. Like look at tech's smug responses to truckers concerned about self driving, and contrast that to the perspective this tweet has toward everybody in tech except for founders. He's literally just insulating a ruling class. This class dynamic is so deeply ironi…

> "automation is inductive proof that Marx was wrong" He really said that? Plugging it into Google yields no results. That's a really dumb thing to say, a very tech billionaire misunderstanding of Marx.

Which is hilarious, because one of Marxism's core tenets is that new technologies and industrialization lead to the deskilling of workers, resulting in the need for fewer of them.

Probably why PG deleted his original tweet and rewrote it.

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

#223

Post by WitCanStain »

PinguTS wrote: post #80

This is this thinking of "Automation reduces workforce". The next argument then is always "We need Basic Income" because of this. But this is ignoring the fact that automation never replaced workforce as such. It moved the focus of the workforce. At the end more automation even required more workforce. The thing is, you cannot engineer the process to be automated. You need to keep maintaining the automation. This inc…

We could eventually replace (parts of) the workforce if we were happy with the current standards of living (and prevented a small group from hoarding all the wealth). If we were satisfied with a 1850s standard of living, only a small portion of the modern workforce would need to work. What automation enables is greater productivity with the same amount of human effort/time. But because we seek to improve out living standards, we need to keep the same portion of people employed and productive. So I say, once we bring everyone to a decent standard of life, we can just stop and gradually liberate people from the shackles of work until society runs on a bunch of robots and a small core of maintainers.

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

#224

Post by [deleted] »

yetanotherforg wrote: post #137
clevergadget wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many of my friends and colleagues became wealthy thanks to winning the YC lottery, some as founders some as employees. The way they changed afterwards drove me away from the pursuit of money entirely. I'm sure the me in this timeline would not like the me in an alternate timeline where I lasted there two more weeks and achieved wealth status.

[deleted]

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

#225

Post by oblivious7 »

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.

Check paulg’s tweet history. A few weeks ago he lamented how fake things are in the US, pointing at things like Kraft singles.

I don’t have a Twitter account but almost went to sign up to reply “billionaires whose wealth is based on mathematical inference not possession of tens of billions of real dollars.”

I say let’s automate away book smart, street stupid easily deluded normal humans who end up optimizing for themselves while roleplaying something more egalitarian is afoot with their games.

Letting a minority monopolize agency is not a greater good as there are no greater goods. It’s typical political corruption.

Automate away politicians, VCs, C*O level; organizing life in line with religious traditions is not sacrosanct. Why is organizing life under the prior 60-70 years so special? Ooh right; cause that cohort is where all the wealth is captured. Silly me.

Looks like it’s time to revisit Reagan’s policy of expropriating retirement for the youth to invest.

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

#226

Post by Sharlin »

oblio wrote: post #141
rqtwteye wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/ -> https://www.ycombinator.com/ -> > Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. > Twice a year we invest $500,000 per company in a large number of startups. > We work inten…

So is the premise that Y Combinator is only for billionaire-wannabes?

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

#227

Post by JamesBarney »

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…

> He is implying that founders can create a lot of value without employees, and that the claim that employees also create value is false.

It seems like he definitely believes founders create a lot of value, but I don't think he is making the second claim that employees don't create value. Just making the argument that the outsized return to founders is fair because they are creating far more value as evidenced by automation.

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

#228

Post by moolcool »

timmytokyo wrote: post #222
thundergolfer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "automation is inductive proof that Marx was wrong" He really said that? Plugging it into Google yields no results. That's a really dumb thing to say, a very tech billionaire misunderstanding of Marx.

Which is hilarious, because one of Marxism's core tenets is that new technologies and industrialization lead to the deskilling of workers, resulting in the need for fewer of them. Probably why PG deleted his original tweet and rewrote it.

He said he deleted it because mentioning Marx “attracts angry fools”, so if you’re right, his attempt to save face is hilarious.

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

#229

Post by coldtea »

hrgten wrote: post #134
coldtea wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better: let's see how many billioaire entrepreneurs will appear in a society where few or no people are there to buy their products and services, because they've made redundant and are out of jobs or in new lower-paying forced careers...

Eliminating the middle class (except for those who directly serve the billionaires) and having a huge industrial reserve army (Marx) that does jobs that cannot be automated could work. It works for the super rich in Brazil. This seems to be the trend in "Western" societies, and the middle class enthusiastically votes for those who pursue that agenda.

>It works for the super rich in Brazil

I guess that could be the vision for the US to: a developing country style society, with utral-nice fenced areas for the rich, a supporting 10-20% class, and "skid-row lite" welfare land for the rest, with crumbling infrastructure...

And if things end up worse, the rich have already bought houses in New Zealand and elsewhere anyway...

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

#230

Post by JamesBarney »

ryandrake wrote: post #174
memish wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not implying that employees don't create value. Startups share equity with employees. The earlier you are there, the more you get, in part because of the inherent risk. This is why founders get the most equity and the most upside if it succeeds. They took on the most risk and it wouldn't otherwise exist. If the company ends up being valued at 100B dollars, guess what, the founder and maybe some early employees a…

> This is why founders get the most equity and the most upside if it succeeds. They took on the most risk and it wouldn't otherwise exist. Is this always true though? I've worked with a grand total of one company where, if the company went bust, it would mean the end of the founders' life savings. Every other startup/company I've seen, the founder was already very well off. Yes, they put a big chunk of capital and/or…

When they talk about risk they mean capital risk, not personal risk.

So someone with 10 million dollars who puts up 1 million has put more capital at risk than someone who puts up 100,000 even if that is everything they own.

And paying out on personal risk doesn't make sense. Imagine doing a seed round and the share of equity each investor gets is not related to how much they invest but what % of their networth they invest.

Also in every startup I've worked for(3) the founders were not rich before starting the company.

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