The past three years, the YC crowd has really tried hard to justify wealth disparities, gentrification and generally treating employees like garbage, as part of their Objectivist agenda.
Paul, employees do the automation, not the founders.
That's like saying anyone who thinks hammers are a good idea is really saying a hammer makes a builder successful, not the builder. It's just a tool, and he's saying tools mean one person can do more. You don't need to straw man a philosophy on to it to then have something to argue against.
> employees do the automation, not the founders
Founders normally are employees. For the phase or type of company pg is talking about, they may be the only employees.
I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers.
I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on about $75 million from a YC start-up when an unnamed higher-up told them to fire me two weeks before my first vesting, because I had the most amount of non-founder stock in the company (a compensation for which I took a 66% salary cut).
(edit, typos and turned 100s into 1,00s)
When founders start, unless they're hands-off directors, they'll be CEO/CTO/etc, which are employee positions. They'll get a salary, because they're employees.
> I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth.
I don't see why. It makes more sense to focus on founders if he's talking early stage, where you can string a load of systems together to produce a business process. As you get bigger you'll probably regress to the mean of driving processes through admin and management staff, unless you stay laser-focused on keep automation around.
Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all?
> Founders really take far less risk than employees.
If it would be true, why aren't you a founder? You know, blaming other people for wealth/startup/marriage or government/party/boss/partner is easy. But when it comes to actual execution, most of these people come up blank.
You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.
Did you read the tweets, or just the headline?
> You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.
I have helped start 4 companies with 1 gracefully neutral exits, 1 sold, 1 gracefully neutral, and 2 nose dives. After every exit I walked into a job making more $$ than at the job I worked at before the previous startup. The only "risk" a startup founder takes is the potential for a below-market salary for a short period of time.
~20 years ago I failed at a music start-up, royally failed. We burned through $2.5m in about 11 months with nothing of value having been produced, then the dot bomb exploded while we were raising our A round. The same investors funded my next failed startup and offered to fund the one after that.
Once you get to say "I'm a founder and names you might know from vc insider have given me amounts of $$" you have a golden ticket.
In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.
Progress comes from all sorts of places. Scientific progress come from scientists. That doesn't result in things better in my life without a huge number of other people doing things well and efficiently. Both of which includes anything people will pay for, including b2b saas apps. Try having a pandemic lockdown without Amazon-level fulfillment in place. Thankfully we didn't have to.
Who would you like to appoint as an arbiter for what "valuable work is"? If certain people enjoy and pay women to fart in their faces - would you like to ban that? How about other "useless" activities that humans enjoy like video games or massages or fashion or fancy restaurants - would you like to ban those as well?
Depends entirely upon the quality of the fart.
I think Keynes said "The worst form of capitalism is in which the public holds all the risk, and the private sector realizes all the rewards".
Focusing on the latter is fair enough. Thinking that a corporation having lots of money is bad seems completely pointless. That money ends up as dividends or higher salaries or lower prices. Tax the first two and celebrate all three.
Not that anyone listens to him, but Noam Chomsky has been saying this for his whole career.
The idea of automation is that we should advance as society. The very point of it is that we need to work less, but it never turns out that way because the benefits of automation are seized by the few.
Hence, we forcefully invent new labor regardless of purpose. Half of our economy is keeping each other busy with bullshit to keep this going.
And if that wasn't perverted enough, now the message is: actually, we don't need you. At all.
1920s robber baron bs.
Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on the heads of those who have dedicated many hours of their lives building this free software.
It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability
I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.
Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit
But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial
I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package
> those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave
“I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman
I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project.
It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave it out willingly.
This sort of attitude has soured me to the entire open source community. They want to be able to give their work out for free, but then have a say in who uses it and how it's used, which is exactly the opposite of free and open.
As for "treating employees like garbage", that's just a baseless smear.