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Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B

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Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B

#51
post #42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a word: automation. The promise of automation is that you can trade labor costs for capital costs. In other words, the promise of automation is plugging the "leak" of trickle-down economics. Now, we've got weird rich entrepreneurs spending their money on weird shit made by [computer programs commissioned by] other weird rich entrepreneurs (Yo), and poor laborers wondering where all the money and work is. The answe…

Interesting bright side you have there. I wonder if us startup heads are just early adopters and in the future everyone is an entrepreneur. I wonder if it could even get as weird as everyone raising rounds. So you graduate from college and raise seed capital and this is just the normal middle class path, like getting your first salaried job. Or maybe you would work "gigs" for a while, but this would be prep and appre…

>I wonder if us startup heads are just early adopters

If you are in software, late to the party seems to me unless you managed to get your company going before Microsoft did. After that everyone had an example to follow.

>you would work "gigs" for a while, but this would be prep and apprenticeship for your own launch not your ultimate career path.

I thought this was obvious since the late '60's.

>In that future those stuck in "jobs" in the conventional sense would be the lower classes.

Not lower class but a type of working class who is not lower in recognition or financial compensation than independent entrepreneurs. For the most part since most small businessmen don't earn more than they would if otherwise employed, but being independent has a huge upside for the few who get capital compared to the upside at most employers. Like today.

>You'd also probably have a ton of people on welfare of various kinds.

You do! You do!

Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B

#52
post #24

My amusing thought experiment is that two startups could easily give themselves billion dollar revenue as follows: 1. Startup A sells 2 twin puppies to startup B at $500M each. 2. Startup B sells 4 hand-drawn logos to startup A for $250M each. Each books $1B in revenue and each also books $1B in expenses so as to avoid tax.

This reminds me of the old joke about the two economists and the pile of dog poop: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000466.html

Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B

#53
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I know (and I am not a finance professional), the hot-airiest phase of the dot.com bubble sort of looked like this. You had a ton of startups selling each other things and advertising with each other. It was not planned, but unplanned "emergent" bubbles are the most effective since nobody really realizes what's going on until the bubble is far enough along to keep rising out of greed and inertia. As for wha…

> From what I know (and I am not a finance professional), the hot-airiest phase of the dot.com bubble sort of looked like this. You had a ton of startups selling each other things and advertising with each other. It was not planned, but unplanned "emergent" bubbles are the most effective since nobody really realizes what's going on until the bubble is far enough along to keep rising out of greed and inertia. Yup. Sea…

Plenty were planned. They were organized by VCs, who pushed this scheme on their portfolio companies. Heady times...
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