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How People Get Rich Now

paulgraham.com

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Re: How People Get Rich Now

#921

Post by danans »

marcmarc wrote: post #918
danans wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone who isn't like PG (so, 100% of the population) is finding it difficult to make enough money to have a life in the most basically fulfilling sense: education, retirement, support for loved ones, and good health This exactly. PG arguing the relevance of the Gini coefficient is oblivious to the the crumbling state of the public infrastructure in the US and the declining accessibility of high quality public go…

The Gini coefficient is a relative measure. It is possible for the Gini coefficient of a developing country to rise (due to increasing inequality of income) while the number of people in absolute poverty decreases. This is because the Gini coefficient measures relative, not absolute, wealth. In Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty is looking at wealth groups (top 1%, top 10%, rest of the population). And it paints a…

Agreed. Admittedly upon reviewing the article, PG did use it as an effect, not an objective. But at the end of the day he's reasoning from rarified datasets like % of billionaires inheriting their wealth, vs using more broadly meaningful indicators like inequality in healthcare and education access, housing uncertainty, and others. That's what makes him so out of touch.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#922

Post by mike_hearn »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #902
mike_hearn wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common argument but would seem wrong to a lot of people. It's just unintuitive. Most people of our parents generation would find this argument slightly absurd, and our grandparents would find it entirely absurd. It sounds weird because it assumes that every tech business has either insurmountable lock-in or insurmountable first mover advantage, without explicitly stating that. To fill in that assumption req…

1. Good unit economics can come from various sources. The idea that Slack has little lock in and hence can't have good economics is misguided. Coke has little lock in, yet amazing economics. Google has little lock in, yet amazing economics. Sources of competitive advantage aren't restricted to lock in. Scale is a source of competitive advantage, for example. 2. Your point is hard to refute and may be correct - it isn…

For (3) it isn't required to have a moat. Market dumping is sufficient. Nobody is going to compete with a firm that's selling below cost, as Uber/Lyft are doing. But, I've used non-Uber/Lyft taxi apps that were perfectly competent. It's not that hard to build such an app, especially if you 'just' want to sell taxi rides in local jurisdictions instead of any conceivable moving service in every possible geography. If/when they stop burning money, only then we'll find out what kind of moat they have.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#923

Post by jason0597 »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #919
jason0597 wrote: post #913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about YOU, not what your parents did. YOU personally had no ability to determine in which country you were born in.

Well duh, noone who has ever lived has willed themselves into existence. But just because you didn't will yourself into existence, that doesn't then imply that the circumstances of your existence are based on luck. My parents chose to have a kid, where else would I be born except in the country where my mother chose to live? There was 0 luck involved, I wasn't going to randomly pop into existence in Mongolia when my…

>If you apply your reasoning to any other area in life you can see how silly it is. If you put in a lot of work/effort into building a car, is the existence of the car the product of "luck"? After all it had no more choice in where it was created than a person.

That is a false analogy. We're talking about you being born, not you putting effort into building a car.

Why are you switching the argument around to where your parents decided to settle? The whole point is about where you are born, not the area your parents decide to give birth in.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#924

Post by Breza »

benzor wrote: post #893
mike_hearn wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common argument but would seem wrong to a lot of people. It's just unintuitive. Most people of our parents generation would find this argument slightly absurd, and our grandparents would find it entirely absurd. It sounds weird because it assumes that every tech business has either insurmountable lock-in or insurmountable first mover advantage, without explicitly stating that. To fill in that assumption req…

This is an excellent answer and took the thoughts right out of my mind. To elaborate a bit for GP: No I would not have classified early stage Google or Facebook or Amazon as "perpetually unprofitable tech" because, frankly, they clearly weren't. All 3 of these companies had strong, obvious moats that enabled them to preserve pricing power. All 3 of these companies had a small handful of initial cap raises and have gr…

It's incredible that Amazon was able to build such a moat in the early days. Logically, you'd think that somebody like Sears (which became a huge company in the first place by offering the convenience of shopping from home!) would have made a big early investment in online shopping and become gigantic.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#925

Post by Breza »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #589
Balgair wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the fake-meat companies tech companies? I thought they are more like contract manufacturers, brewers, or other industrial foodstuffs. No doubts on the access to cheap debt, though.

WeWork was also never a tech company but pushed really hard to brand themselves that way. If evaluated truthfully as a real estate company, the money they raised was hilariously idiotic. So much of this world is driven by idiotic speculation based on slick websites and charismatic presenters.

I just finished reading Billion Dollar Loser and I think you might like it.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#926

Post by Breza »

int_19h wrote: post #795
oconnor663 wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I guess you run into definitional questions around what counts as wealth or ownership. If you could seize any building in your country at will, do you own all of them? What if you could probably only size a few dozen before people started getting angry about it? Etc.

The same goes for stock, though. When we talk about billionaires, most of that money is invested somewhere. So nominally it's worth $X because it's N shares worth $Y each; but if they try to sell them all off rapidly, that would drive the price down. Finding enough buyers might also get tricky.

That's exactly why successful companies generally have to pay more than their stock value to go private.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#927

Post by Breza »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #827
mmmmmbop wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious: Do you have any more background on this? Who are these rich people that are not listed in Forbes?

Cryptocurrencies have created many paper-rich people who wont be on the list. Just 10k bitcoin would make you very rich these days, and there must be a few low-profile geeks with that may coins on a HDD. Also anyone rich, non-domiciled and "avoiding tax" will presumably not be on the list.

Even simpler than that, you could have inherited a billion dollars, stuck it in an index fund, and not made a big deal about it. I'm certainly no billionaire but I can appreciate living below your means and not having a flashy lifestyle. If you stonewall the Forbes people, you don't get on the list. If you send an accountant to politely explain that Forbes has no idea how much of that billion dollar investment is left, you don't get on the list.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#928

Post by Breza »

adwn wrote: post #577
sillysaurusx wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm? That paragraph is accurate. When you're free to work flat-out – as hard as you can, as much as you want – you can make a lot more progress than if you were paid to do the same thing for someone else. 36x may not be the exact multiple, but it's correct within a power of two.

> Hm? That paragraph is accurate. No, the assumptions in it are ridiculous in context: 1) "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee" : Okay, maybe you can "work" 80 hours a week, as in "be in the office 80 hours per week". 2) "if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour" : No. You can't stay focused for 11.5 hours a day, especially not 7 days in a row, especially e…

I agree with you. I run a corporate data science department. Maybe I'm an anomaly, but I have a lot of freedom to decide how things get done. And when our website went down the other day, I got to hand the problem to our Tech team, go to sleep, and wake up to find a functioning website because I work in a company that pays a skilled team of people to handle problems like that. One of my friends was moving from a salaried job to freelance and balking at charging really high rates. I explained how much BS other people handle for her in her job, like buying computers, finding clients, etc.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#929

Post by danielmarkbruce »

mike_hearn wrote: post #922
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Good unit economics can come from various sources. The idea that Slack has little lock in and hence can't have good economics is misguided. Coke has little lock in, yet amazing economics. Google has little lock in, yet amazing economics. Sources of competitive advantage aren't restricted to lock in. Scale is a source of competitive advantage, for example. 2. Your point is hard to refute and may be correct - it isn…

For (3) it isn't required to have a moat. Market dumping is sufficient. Nobody is going to compete with a firm that's selling below cost, as Uber/Lyft are doing. But, I've used non-Uber/Lyft taxi apps that were perfectly competent. It's not that hard to build such an app, especially if you 'just' want to sell taxi rides in local jurisdictions instead of any conceivable moving service in every possible geography. If/w…

Uber is a public company. They do over 50% gross margins. One may reasonably suggest some of their marketing expense should be in the COGS, but even if you take all of it, they are still GM positive. Similar story for Lyft (also public).

These stories persist, of companies deliberately running their companies so as to give away a $1 for $0.80 or whatever - but with very few exceptions it's a bs story.

Re: How People Get Rich Now

#930

Post by karmakaze »

tpmx wrote: post #13
burlesona wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which model did you go with?

I've generally gone with Philips 40-43 inch displays. I'm on my third one because of office moves etc. They keep changing the models, but they only have one in this size at a time. Edit: The one I'm currently using is still on sale: BDM4350UC.

I'm using an LG 43UD79-B 43" monitor and enjoying it as well. I don't like swiping between workspaces so having lots of extra space around the main viewing area makes it easy to see and access lots of paned or overlapping windows.

For gaming I use the center 2560x1440 area 1:1 pixel mode--only does 30/59/60 Hz so not for the serious.

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