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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#531

Post by twothreeone »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #483

Weird to see Graham take AOC's quote out of context: Graham: So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. Per his link in the article: AOC: there is a certain level of wealth and accumul…

Yeah he weirdly dodges it. Completely unnecessary too, because he could've just said something like "the average american male yields roughly 90k hours of labor over their lifetime before retirement, so earning a billion dollars only requires an hourly rate of about $12k - It's hard, but it's not impossible".

Of course when you put it like that it sounds completely ridiculous :)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#532

Post by wrsh07 »

3uler wrote: post #183

I don’t know if this take is just naive or dishonest… building something people love can make you a billionaire, but most billionaires did not build something people love, and most people who’ve built something people love are not billionaires.

> most people who’ve built something people love are not billionaires

I don't think his advice was simply "build something people love." In fact, he specifically spends a lot of time trying to make it extremely clear that a necessary ingredient is compounding of an extremely high growth rate.

So I'm not sure if your take is intentionally misleading or if perhaps we read different essays

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#533

Post by PunchTornado »

blast wrote: post #529
ElijahLynn wrote: post #483

Weird to see Graham take AOC's quote out of context: Graham: So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. Per his link in the article: AOC: there is a certain level of wealth and accumul…

What's inaccurate in how he quoted her? The context seems fully consistent with the quote.

because "earning" meant something different in AOC' speech.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#535

Post by rybosworld »

wrsh07 wrote: post #528
rybosworld wrote: post #498

I read this and see two possibilities. 1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence. Or 2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves. The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x…

I'm somewhat confused by this. Many of the early startups are literally just the founders, and if they find product market fit without bringing anyone on, there's nobody else to give credit to. I've talked to a lot of seed stage startups this past year, several of them have achieved PMF and have several large customers. None of them have more than five people. If the companies didn't exist, nobody else was going to b…

> Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?

It seems disingenuous to imply that this is what I meant.

If you can scale a startup to a billion dollar valuation on your own, that's a unique example - and I'd be surprised if anyone is against that. I actually am not sure there are any real examples of this happening, though.

The point is that there's a ceiling to how much wealth a person can create on their own. Corporate ownership structures are the only thing that allow for a person to reach hundreds of billions of dollars.

I know one of the common follow up questions is "well what is the exact number that someone should be allowed to make?" And plainly: there isn't one. That's not what these discussions are ever about. The discussion is really about attribution of credit - and that the ownership class disproportionately benefits for things that they could not have built on their own.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#536

Post by jarjoura »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #483

Weird to see Graham take AOC's quote out of context: Graham: So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. Per his link in the article: AOC: there is a certain level of wealth and accumul…

That billion dollars had to come from somewhere, and it definitely didn't happen from a single individual's hard work. A lot of people were involved in that over a long period of time. It's also weird to attach an emotional term like "earned" to that. You can say someone passively earned income, or an investor earned a return on their investment. That's clearly not the same meaning AOC implies when she uses it. So, yea. I'm pretty sure Graham and AOC are both talking past each other.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#537

Post by hparadiz »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525
pipes wrote: post #509

The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the re…

[flagged]

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#538

Post by Bratmon »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #353
zozbot234 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no resource destruction involved in displacing taxi drivers. Taxi medallions are a rent-seeking scheme, there's no real scarcity involved. Most other instances of "creative destruction" are like that, the capital simply gets repurposed at negligible social cost and only excess profits disappear.

Please look up Uber's business practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber

As opposed to taxi companies, who are famously efficient, honest, and not creeps.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#539

Post by paulhebert »

AdamN wrote: post #124

She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…

Yeah he responded to a philosophical and moral argument with a math problem.

And an overly simplistic view of the math problem too. (Surely going from 1000 to 2000 customers is as easy as going from 10 to 20, right?)

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#540

Post by photon_lines »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #525
pipes wrote: post #509

The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.

What if -- bear with me here -- it's possible for bright, motivated founders to create startups that your kids can work in, but those founders could be content with merely making a hundred million dollars? Because, and I don't know if you know this so you may have to take it on faith, that is still so much money that said founder and their family and very likely their descendants can live in extreme luxury for the re…

There is an alternative: 1) limit how much descendants can inherit. Allow them only a maximum amount of let's say: 10 million and make sure that either the founder finds a way to redistribute his/her wealth to the rest of the world, or make the government find ways of redistributing this money. 2) make it mandatory for corporations to share their wealth (income) with the employees -- as an example make it mandatory to redistribute 50% of the income generated to the employees working for the company rather than paying CEOs insane amounts of money to return 'shareholder value'. The whole motto of maximising shareholder value has poisoned capitalism: the goal of a company should not be to become a cancerous growth -- but to serve as a net good for humanity. 3) seal the tax loopholes that make it easy for the rich to avoid paying taxes. There is no reason why the poor and middle class pay a disproportionate amount in taxes compared to the rich.
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