Selling Juicer
goddamnyouryan.com
goddamnyouryan.com
> Juicero wasn’t designed to squeeze juice out of packets of fruit. Juicero was designed to squeeze money out of VCs, and it did a great job of it!
Weird fallacy. If I am paid to dig ditches in Haiti, is my true value different from digging ditches in Monaco?
The amount someone brings in depends on their context: what organisation, what country, what city.
We don’t have a “true value”.
Employees are insulated from all this work, which requires, not just manpower, but also a ton of mental space.
Even when you outsource those things to accountants, lawyers, payroll company, HR, etc... you quickly come to realize how much time, money and effort goes into the cost of maintaining government-related compliance.
I predict the country that understands the modern internet-enabled venture and creates laws specifically for them will benefit a great deal in the future. I'm told that Estonia is on that path, but I haven't studied it enough to affirm it
Capital accrued through the exploitation (yes, that's the legal and technical term) of labour.
There is 0 evidence that we wouldn't have a more productive society overall, if capital was more uniformly distributed across society; enabling more individuals to work for themselves or in co-ops.
Capitalist organisation structures are a pyramid with a very small few at the top collecting the vast majority of generated value. I don't think even the staunchest capitalism proponents can argue that a CEO no matter how good, is generating millions of times more value than a line worker at any org. Yet that's the kind of income deltas we see.
And we already know what happens when capitalist orgs reach a certain size. Rent seeking. They direct their resources towards preventing anyone else from competing in their niche through regulation and other barriers to entry. 'Why don't you go off and do your own thing?' Because it takes several million dollars to overcome the barrier to entry and even take a shot in any profitable industry. Exactly the kind of capital that average people don't have with the currently massively skewed wealth distribution curve.
If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things.
tl;dr: your employer isn't doing you any favours by hiring you and exploiting your labour. The fact that they happen to possess the capital necessary to profitably exploit you while you don't, doesn't turn them into a charity.
Unless exploited by force (slavery). The employed/expolited are free to find their true value by alternavtive means? Find another job - less exploitive, or make your own job.
There are many problems with capitalism, I would argue taxation, or more appropriately lack of taxation is a greater concern.
As for the scenario if everyone had 5m in their accounts in the morning, only the most foolish would quit their jobs as inflation would render the windfall as null and void.
We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually concentrate.
> We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually concentrate.
And eventually revolutions topple the structures where value has concentrated when wealth disparity gets too big, and the cycle begins again. After several risen and fallen civilisations/empires, maybe its time to try something other than the one strategy that we for sure know the outcome of.
We don't need to be all equally well off, but we do need to compress the top and bottom 10% of the income disparity curve. No one on this planet should have billions of dollars in personal wealth, and no one on this planet should be too poor to afford shelter healthcare and food.
The Chinese sufffered the same problems of inequallity and the plebs made the same comparisons - for centuries.
So a delta is to be expected, the magnatude I'm not sure if that matters as CEOs are outliers. I think the point you are leaning to is:
despite working full time, the average US resident cannot afford what we perceive to be a 'good quality of life' (many people from developing countries will find that statement hard to believe). This is subjective, and not likely an issue of labour being exploitative.
It is a question on what type of a society Americans want (and vote for), which is an entirely different discussion covering taxation, education, health care, corpotate political donations/lobbying etc.
From a market perspective the delta represents supply and demand.
From a market perspective the delta has nothing to do with supply/demand. Microeconomics and supply/demand theory doesn't really have any answers to the fact that wealth and power tends to acrete. The textbook answer will be along the lines of 'but then smaller more agile entities will arise that displace the incumbents' but the incumbents have long ago figured out strategoes such as rent seeking to prevent that.
Capitalism is fundamentally broken in several clear ways:
* It assumes that individuals are rational actors who are sufficiently informed to make generally optimal self-interest decisions
* It assumes that there's a force or mechanism to modulate or prevent acretion of wealth. So far the only such mechanism historically has been bloody revolutions
* It assumes that we know the 'true value' of things including externalities. The climate crisis is a huge example of how utterly wrong that is. If car and fossil fuel costs accounted for externalities, they'd cost somewhere in the vicinity of 10-100x more than they currently do. Would that have prevented the boom that led to current quality of life in the developed world? Probably. Would it also have prevented an existential threat to us? Certainly.
The pursuit of continuous growth has become clearly a self-terminal strategy that not only failed multiple times in history before, but is threatening our entire species via anthropogenic climate change now.
I'm advocating that we stop pursuing continuous growth and focus on collapsing the insane wealth disparity and dismantling the structures that have acreted unprecedented wealth and power into the hands of <100 people worldwide.
Someone who acreted sufficient wealth to extract profit from your labour more effectively than you can alone, is not doing you favours, is not being charitable, but merely exploiting you to acrete more wealth to exploit more people ad infinitum.
sure wish i knew how to exert force to make the kinds of changes you are proposing come to fruition in the real world.
Once there is an off-planet colony i expect the resource pressure that is starting to show will ease up considerably. Capturing asteroid/mining other planets for resources - there are a lot of ways for things to course correct. Everything we're facing right now is coz of an artifical bottleneck in our species expansion
It will also render existential threats moot coz there will be off planet resources to rebuild a civilization in case things do go catastrophically wrong.
How would we maintain this equal distribution? Some people would invest their capital in tools, training, and trade. Other people would spend it on entertainment. Before you know it, bam! Inequality!
I'm not advocating for evenly sharing all wealth between all people. I'm advocating for compressing the extreme outliers on both sides of the wealth distribution curve and uplifting the bottom 10% while also exponentially taxing the top 10%.
If we taxed the top 10% of income earners on a curve from 50% to 99% marginal tax rate for 90th to 99.9th percentiles respectively, pretty much all the major problems like expensive healthcare, poor infrastructure, lack of social safety nets, etc, would be completely financially covered with billions of dollars left to spend on other stuff. Instead we write PR-piece headlines every time some billionaire is 'charitable' and donates to some cause that he personally chose.
1. Read about lottery winners - that is a real life experiment on what people do with 5m dollars.
2. In first world countries, we all are given a mostly equal amount of extremely valuable years. How we use those hours matters.
> The fact that they happen to possess the capital necessary to profitably exploit you while you don't
Many business owners are just average people that were given zero capital by their family, instead betting their time and their own savings. “Capital” applies in some cases (inherited farm? France?) but it is radically wrong thinking for a significant number of “owners” that started out with the same random playing pieces as everyone else in this game.
If you hate “the man”, then work for a small business owned by someone dealt a similar hand in life as you were (if they will employ you - they tend to dislike being told they were born with everything on a silver platter).
I started my businesses with capital I accumulated by being "exploited".
"If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things."
For sure they would, "their own things" in most cases being a spending binge on who knows what, followed by someplace they could be "exploited" again.
The hoots just keep coming.
This particular phrasing just happened to strike a chord for me. It’s likely Marxism 101 but I’m not well versed on economics.
What I mean is, when you join a team and that team is more productive than if each member were working alone, then every member of the team's value is higher when they are a member of that team.
Imagine the same situation, except you say "Climb on my shoulders and get the two apples and you can keep one".
In both situations, we start with you having 0 apples and me having 1 and we end with you having 1 apple and me having 2. In the first, I employed you and in the second, you employed me.
So which one of us was paid less than the true value?
Wording aside (true vs. relative vs. real, etc.) there is a point to this concept and I think we all know it instinctively. Perhaps it could be called "global value" vs. "local value".
Your "true" (global) value is digging the most valuable trench you could possibly dig. Whether the trench is in Haiti saving millions from famine, or in Monaco saving priceless casinos from collapsing. Digging a lesser trench simply means you are not achieving your true value but limiting yourself to a lower value that your employer extracts from you.
The best coder in the world could make billions of $ or improve billions of lives with some genius piece of code. But if they choose to dig trenches in Haiti helping 3 people it means much of that true value is lost.
There is no such thing as “true value”. Value is only what other people are willing to pay for something. Brad Pitt can make more money squinting into a camera holding a pair of sunglasses for 5 minutes, than a laborer might make in his whole life. But that’s because Brad Pitt makes the sunglass company more money by doing so.
By all means let’s clean up systemic issues that encourage an uneven playing field, but by “being exploited” we’ve increased the size of the pie for (almost) everyone in a way never before seen in history.
Yeah your true value is different in that case. Being at the right place at the right moment represent quite a bit of value actually (even if most of the time you have no control over it).
You clearly see "true value" as some kind of intrinsic value, which has to be kind of universal by that definition, but that's not the true value he was talking about, nor does that true value exist as you said in the last sentence.
The true value he talk about is the actual value you bring by the work you do. The thing is we want profit, thus unless you make all the profit, what you get out of your work isn't the full amount that your actual works represent.
2) Consider a more relaxed pace of life. Travel widely. The startup world is a microcosm, and if you haven’t personally experienced and understood how people live outside of it for several months or years, it’s easy to overwork yourself and think it’s completely normal. There’s a reason “digital nomad” is a thing — a recurring story is that people try it out on a whim or by chance and then get absolutely hooked.
3) If you still want to invest time, what are you personally interested in building into the product?
I think the traditional “talk to your customers” is great for staying grounded and understanding pain points, but you can get stuck in a local maximum. As an engineer/product person, you have a unique insight into what is technically possible in your space, which new technological capabilities will become relevant as time progresses, and the general direction of the market over longer time spans. This is an opportunity to be a long-term thinker and focus on building features or related products that are specifically targeted at highly technical early adopters, so that by the time the idea becomes mainstream, you’ll have a substantial head-start.
Be a craftsman and use your skill to more deeply address the problem space.
If you’ve hit sustainability, are as lean as most bootstrapped lifestyle companies, and churn is not a major issue in general, I think the risk of being replaced by new contenders is actually a very slow-motion risk — people are not so good at changing their habits. :-)
It sounds like it was easily over $1m but was it 2-4? 5-10? Very curious.
We do live in wondrous times when this doable for many more people that previously was possible.
Important takeaways for me -
`Being employed by someone is by its very definition, an exploitative relationship, even if your job is great. Your employer can only afford to hire you if you make more money than you cost (again, with a few exceptions of course) so no matter what you are getting paid less than your true value.`
`It’s much, much easier to get to the top, or near the top of the wordpress plugin directory than it is google (essentially it’s making sure the description of your plugin has the right keywords, and then you’ll be there essentially instantly).`
This seems like a somewhat simplistic way to view a company. The amount you "make" for the company isn't the same thing as your "true value," because that isn't a real concept. The value you are able to provide changes based on context and objectives. It's leverage in the moment, not "value" in some inherent sense. Do you think every employee in the world should be able to just quit their job and suddenly realize the same return without changing their costs at all?
Anyway, this dislike came from their tendency to stretch everything and over-commit to get a sale. It ended up souring my opinion of the entire profession and I had zero respect for it...until I tried it myself. I went through this process a few times until I really came to an understanding of how many different personalities and proclivities it takes to successfully run any company of appreciable size.
For every Ryan (OP) who started their own project and succeeded, there are many more who failed (or gave up too early) and lost money they would have earned if they worked for an employer.
Risk always have a premium, so taking risk (starting your own thing) will have a higher expected payoff; at the cost of more variance (risk).