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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#541

Post by neilv »

> There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want?

To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?

To have an exchange for cryptographic tokens that are used almost entirely for financial scams and organized crime payment infrastructure?

To have an online forum that made so many long-time contributors who built the content and appeal feel so betrayed, that often the top solution to a posted problem (you find in search) has been deleted in protest?

To have a non-profit spun off, ostensibly for the benefit of humanity, and attract talent and funding that way, then coup and rug pulled?

Other big successes?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#542

Post by titzer »

How astonishingly tone deaf. Per Paul Graham, you become a billionaire by working really hard for 9 months with the growth rate is jacked at 93%. Or you work five years to keep a growth rate jacked to 15%. Literally nothing else to it. He literally says that exponential growth is like magic.

Yeah, no kidding. A mathematical formula where the magic of speculative markets and a stupendous amount of money floating in the stock market can just float right up your alley. Just take your place on the top of a pyramid of growth and stay there!

How does one write this with a straight face?

Most people work linear jobs, with linear creation. The amount of work that they actually do in a day is what they can accomplish with their hands, their minds, their intellect. Whether it's laying bricks or polishing gemstones or cleaning toilets, or teaching kids for that matter...most people cannot just become a billionaire. They can't just growth it real hard. They have to first escape the very real linearity of making a living wage, providing for a family etc. They don't have the luxury of throwing around capital they don't have. They can't just issue their own cryptocurrency or stock and get the market to start funneling it all to them. Hell, their limited investments in stock will only get them piddly millions if they're lucky.

It shows how absolutely broken the system is that people will just say this in a straight face and expect us to not just guffaw at it.

Paul, I hope you read stuff here because growthism is exactly why the system is so fucked up right now, and enshittification is the proof positive of how little all the oversized monsters out there give a shit about how anything works in reality.

Just 93% growth your way there. Good idea, thanks for the tip, Paul.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#543

Post by mahogany »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #313
changoplatanero wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what she would say about professional athletes. Some of the top stars have made near a billion dollars in lifetime wages, as unionized employees. Hard for me to see who the sports stars are exploiting to get their wealth.

Nozick has a very interesting thought experiment about this. It poses a completely egalitarian world in which everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who's really good at dunking basketballs, and starts charging 5c to watch him dunk. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everybody does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody el…

I think the answer to your question depends on what you mean by a “completely egalitarian world”. Depending on the answer, I would ask: why does the kid desire to charge people to earn money in a society like that in the first place?

But yes, I think a lot of people would say there should be a cap on how much more wealth someone has compared to the median, for many reasons, such as the amount of political power it would yield him. The thought experiment uses a harmless activity for earning the wealth, but criticism of wealth inequality is often based on what happens _after_ the wealth is earned too. If in this example you will claim the world remains perfectly (socially) egalitarian and the kid will be benevolent, then maybe we can let him keep his wealth in the thought experiment. But that’s not the world we live in, and possibly never will be.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#544

Post by ModernMech »

ralfd wrote: post #106
ceejayoz wrote: post #95

> 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. "Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel. It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably g…

Paul Graham is the skating coach himself, as from 6000 startups financed by y combinator quite a few were unicorns. it is olympian level, but it there is a system to it.

It's not a reliable system if out of 6000 tries over 20 years there are only 30 instances. That looks more like gambling.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#545

Post by scubbo »

A deeply repugnant man, carrying out painfully-obvious sleight-of-hand to obfuscate the clear gaps in a cancerous philosophy. I'm pleasantly surprised to see the comments being so critical.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#546

Post by titzer »

ModernMech wrote: post #123
proofofcontempt wrote: post #71

The pursuit of everlasting growth that pg describes inevitably results in cheating. At a certain point the market reaches a saturation point and if you're capitalising on every possible opportunity to retain your high growth rate, that will include hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections.

The hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections is just the start of it. Eventually it becomes rational to start buying politicians, and subsequently laws. The next obvious avenue is to then control entire government agencies like the FAA or the FCC and just write favorable laws and regulations they don't even have to circumvent. But even that isn't the end because they're growing too fast, they actuall…

Oh, this is already the case. As they say, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

What's broken is accountability. No one will hold those in power accountable, so instead they mutate into criminals because they can. Then they attract the rest of the criminals and it becomes a critical mass of maniacs, kakistocracy.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#547

Post by Geniuzz »

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…

> But those founders be content with merely making a hundred million?

What does this mean? Without some insane wealth tax this is literally impossible. No founder chooses to become a billionaire. They just keep growing a business that is solving a billion dollar problem.

The only other was is if after 100M they start turning down customers or restricting services.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#548

Post by pj_mukh »

neilv wrote: post #541

> There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want? To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership? To have an exchange for cryptographic tokens that are us…

"To have illegal hotels that then help keep a generation out of home ownership?"

To solve this, New York City (basically) banned Airbnb's and home ownership is now famously more accessible in the City? I am not even asking for home ownership + rentals to be solved, I am asking whether it got even slightly better because of this ban?

Meanwhile, I can't visit my sister because the regulation cartel..I mean Hotel Lobby has spiked pricing to the high heavens.

Maaaybe we need to revisit some of these easy assumptions on your list?

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#549

Post by rayiner »

blfr wrote: post #23

But the accounting difference is real. It is virtually impossible to earn a billion dollars. What is possible but still difficult is to create something worth a billion dollars which you can then sell if you choose so. And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment. Also, the most impo…

> And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.

Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product.

In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#550

Post by yieldcrv »

last time I waded into this discussion with my own examples, the "billionaires exploit people" maximalists kept moving the goal post indefinitely

I had asked "what about a fund manager earning the carry"

management fee and performance fee, employees not entirely necessary.

the main result was a brief back and forth to understand that role, because this class of people are completely separated from all the exceptions that break their argument, and then a brief moment of acceptance, before focusing on the prevalence of this kind of billionaire amongst all billionaires. Which I thought was funny because there are not many billionaires to begin with. 20 fund managers on the list would be a large percentage of billionaires.

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