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Comment by sombremesa | Hacker News Reader

So which of "inherit, marry, steal" does successful exit as an early employee fall under?

I think that would be under the deliberately excluded category of winning the lottery. It's so unlikely that it's pointless to add it.

Probably a mixture of all three.

Genuine question-- How new is this phenomenon? What were the first companies to make non-founder employees rich?

Jack Welch got pretty rich and he wasn't the founder of GE. Perhaps you mean non-founder and non-executive?

Yeah that's what I was aiming at. "Early employee stock options" or equivalent. I assume that kind of thing didn't exist in the periods this "wisdom" comes from, but I could be totally wrong.

Steal (obviously); the world is zero sum. Any money you have was taken from someone else. Probably an amazon truck driver who was forced at gun point into the job.

Confusingly i dont think its that simple. If you equate wealth to work, then with increased automatization, you can grow wealth without stealing it from someone else. Not saying that you can't increase wealth through exploitation though.

I think anonuser123456 was being sarcastic. The "forced at gunpoint" was, I think, a hint.

There are those who hold the viewpoint that if you don't have money from a job, you're eventually going to run afoul of those with guns (police), so you are forced at gunpoint to work somewhere. I've seen people say that here on HN. This is why I'm not sure that it was sarcasm. But still, I suspect it was.

yeah, you are probably right. That would make a lot more sense.

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