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How to earn a billion dollars

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#811

Post by MitziMoto »

aabajian wrote: post #749

How 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.

It's crazy to me that someone as distinguished as PG, as well as so many of the comments here on HN, completely missed this point.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#812

Post by not_kurt_godel »

auggierose wrote: post #706

If pg doesn't understand that the way he uses the way "earn" is very different from the way that AOC uses "earn", then I guess he is just not that smart. AOC also doesn't say anything about "moral", etc. You can behave perfectly morally in US society and "earn" a billion dollars. It is just that, no matter what exactly you did, you didn't actually "earn" it. Of course pg is smart enough to understand that there are t…

And putting aside the definition of "earn", extreme wealth inequality is objectively bad for society regardless of how it arose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_economic_inequality

> Effects of income inequality, researchers have found, include higher rates of health and social problems, and lower rates of social goods,[1] a lower population-wide satisfaction and happiness[2][3] and even a lower level of economic growth when human capital is neglected for high-end consumption.[4] For the top 21 industrialised countries, counting each person equally, life expectancy is lower in more unequal countries (r = -.907).[5] A similar relationship exists among US states (r = -.620).[6]

> 2013 Economics Nobel prize winner Robert J. Shiller said that rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the most important problem.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#813

Post by ericd »

peab wrote: post #794
PowerElectronix wrote: post #637

It's clear to me that in order to get a billion, you have to swidle a lot of people out of their fair share of the billion. As soon as the person that has "The Idea" keeps their 60% stake of the company while the army of minions are working their assess off to get that idea to a billion dollar valuations are given crumbs or no stake at all, you know who is swindling who.

incredible to see this opinion on hacker news.

Ehh I think many here would agree that first hire onward get at least a little screwed with normal market equity grants. I really like Andrew Mason's (Groupon founder's) Progressive Equity for this. First hire is basically the worst risk/reward tradeoff - almost as much risk as the founders, much much less upside.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#814

Post by rjbwork »

alvah wrote: post #800
hammock wrote: post #690

Earlier 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)…

The HN readership has changed massively in that timeframe, from the earlier Hackers and Painters / libertarian ideology to a much more socialist outlook. I could speculate about the reasons for this, but my theories would probably attract even more downvotes than just pointing out the obvious change in tone will.

I'm interested in hearing your reasons, tbqh.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#815

Post by Boxxed »

galenptacek wrote: post #602

Someone told me it was impossible to become an avogadrillionaire (to have a net worth of one mole, or approximately 6.02 x 10^23 dollars.) Now there's this founder I know whose startup grew 93% last month. Let's be conservative and say she has 2 million dollars. Let's calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 301,100,000,000,000,000x. The log base 1.93 of 301,100,000,000,000,000 is 61.209…

Yes, it is impossible? If you owned everything on earth you still would not be an avogadrillion-aire.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#816

Post by crote »

pdonis wrote: post #731
johnea wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. No, we can't say that at all, because most businesses are small businesses, owned by the people who run them, and capital gains are the owners' income from running the business. The money startup founders make, from building something as PG describes, is also capital gains. So again, no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned.

That's simply not true. No CEO is going to accept zero salary, just because the value of his stocks will increase - especially not with small companies which aren't publicly traded.

In fact, in some countries not paying yourself a fair-market-value salary is illegal!

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#817

Post by usernametaken29 »

I think it’s astounding that the author can’t see that individual goodness or badness doesn’t necessarily mean you will not cause societal harm. He lists AirBnB and Facebook as successful billion dollar companies, in which likely the CEO did not have malicious intentions, but these companies are harming society at humongous scale unlike we have ever seen before (addiction and housing crisis). Given that this post reads like a really bad contradictory hyperbole that neglects real world consequences pretty much entirely.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#818

Post by jojobas »

dodu_ wrote: post #775
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.

>No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here So the exact same thing PG is guilty of in the article? He disagrees with the opposing statement, gives a lazy counterexample with 0 evidence that introduces at least two major assumptions that do the the entirety of the work for his "argument", and then takes another few paragraphs to effectively say "just grow exponentially, bro". There's nothing to push b…

His core premise is that one's not required to cheat, use immoral loopholes or abuse anyone to become filthy rich, as a prominent US politician has claimed. That stands unchallenged.

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#819

Post by alliao »

making customer happy is one thing, didn't huxley specifically wrote about how consumer hedonism is how tech bros gain control? lol honestly are we at the end stages that billionaires are trolling oxford union... so DIRE

Re: How to earn a billion dollars

#820

Post by nradov »

LiquidSky wrote: post #808
InterviewFrog wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You saved $500k to buy a beautiful home. You don't know how to build a home. I do. I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees who put in 40 hours a week. I take home $50k. I earn $50k. Now, you like the home so much you tell all your friends about it. I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B. Market forces decide how much you "ear…

>You don't know how to build a home. >I do. Do you? Sound like the people you hired built the home. Do you know how to do what they did? Did you do it? What did you do to earn that $50k?

Why would that matter? Are you getting confused by thinking that the "labor theory of value" is a real thing?
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