I think it's missing the outflow. Any startup could have a big growth rate, but founders who are empathetic will also have an outflow from their own resources to the resources they are managing, meaning to sustain the growth rate as the years pass more of the earned growth has to be distributed to increase the growth rate. In summary acquiring new customers costs more money the bigger you are.
How to earn a billion dollars
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How about we set a maximum wage instead of a minimum wage? But it's not a set number. It is a maximum multiple of the lowest paid employee at a company? 10x should do it. If the CEO wants a million each year then the lowest paid employee still gets 100k. I'm trying to think of why this wouldn't work.
The only reason it doesn't is the greed of folks who become billionaires.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The entity you're implicitly proposing should take the money doesn't have a good track record of spending it wisely. I'd much rather let the startup founders keep their money and build rockets with it, than spend another few trillion on building 100 meters of high-speed rail.
The whole problem with CalHSR is precisely that they can’t spend any real money… There were governmental barriers like CEQA and local NIMBYs but the primary cost culprit is that the legislature has continuously kicked fully funding the project down the tracks for the past two decades. Funding it fully with a 10-20 year construction timeline in the early 2010s would’ve far cheaper at this point.
Every American economic miracle has been precipitated by the government building basic infrastructure and doing basic research.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#744Everyone needs to hear this. Each dollar represents a favor exchanged between people. A billion dollars is a billion favors. A billionaire is someone who did a ton of favors for others.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been on HN for 15+ years I have found it fascinating to witness the fawning and adulation over pg blog posts completely reverse and everyone has turned on him now. It used to be if you criticized anything in his blogs you’d get downvoted to oblivion. Now criticism is the norm. As far as I can tell it’s less a change in pg’s viewpoints (though the topics have evolved, and he has gotten more transparent perhaps)…
I still like to read pg but he keeps writing about things outside of his domain. Here for example I trust him to talk about growth rates and how startups work. But I don’t trust him to talk about wealth inequality and how political leaders respond to it.
Growth rates are central to wealth inequality: the r>g observation (due to Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century) is that both historically and recently the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy. Trusting someone whose fortune was built on "r" and is staked on "r" to do anything other than cheer-lead his own balance sheet would be nuts. Hear him out, but please hear what Piketty (& fiends) have to say as well.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#746PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built.
You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. You market it and you distribute it and you do all the things normally associated with business. Your ability to do those things "well" has lots of room to cheat. Hasn't Uber and Lyft skirted a bunch of laws? Aren't there still a ton of drivers who feel cheated? Aren't there a bunch of share bikes and scooters lying around cities and landfills? Isn't it fairly standard to throw tons of investor money at your CAC to buy "love" and sabotage competitors? He mentioned Facebook, isn't its origin story connoted with theft? I can see angles where these don't count as cheating for some. I can see slivers where there's only so many degrees of separation you hold the billionaire responsible for what happens downstream. Even if not done intentionally, the accumulated wealth still resulted from some cheating though, no?
And there's the stock market. If he means the stock price when he's talking about things people want, then I might agree. You need to manage the thing people love, and by "the thing people love" I mean your product, and by your "product" I mean your stock price. Most of the billionaires became so because of their equity. We're well down normalizing that your product doesn't need to be profitable (where people love it enough to pay more than it costs to make) for the stock price to soar.
It doesn't count as engaging with the argument if he doesn't engage with it. I'm almost surprised he bothered to respond.
Edit: Interesting downvote situation going on throughout the comments.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#747PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...
What happens to the person who earns their income laying bricks when an automatic bricklaying machine is built? Is it unethical for them to earn that income because they are operating the machine? What about the person who finds them people who need bricks laid because the person who lays bricks finds it hard to get good clients who aren't a pain?
I really wish people weren't so easily seduced by the labor theory of value.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#748The 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.
> the alternative is too grim
The problem is, reality doesn't care whether you think it's grim or not.
I think the environmentalism movement faces this - it's easier to believe that everything is fine and we're not harming the planet and all is good, because the alternative is grim. But if the alternative is real then the fear of facing it is only going to make the reality even more grim.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#749How can someone so successful be so naïve? The statement, "impossible to earn a billion dollars," is not meant to be taken literally.
It is used to underscore the fact that founders (and early investors) are paid ridiculously disproportionately to their employees. There is no labor that a single person can do (without the help of their employees, family, friends, network) that justifies earning $1B.
Re: How to earn a billion dollars
#750PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
This is quite a lazy argument.