Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant. Thanks for posting. Actually quite a good metric for thinking about valuation, ie it’s 5x what it should be right now.

View on HN

I think about it the other way. Businesses with high $/revenue per employee, high margin, etc. tend to be fundamentally better managed and more robust.

I'm not claiming that applies to Nvidia either way specifically, but it's a good sign in the generic:

1. They're efficient.

2. They've avoided the curse of overhiring (hi, Google!)

3. They can stay afloat even if business drops a lot.

But this article is about market cap not revenue. But even revenue is almost meaningless for the things you mention -- it's profit per employee which would be interesting. And for that, tech companies are nowhere near the top.

Check this https://airleasecorp.com/press/air-lease-corporation-announc... they made 753.6M in 2023 with 163 employees or 4.6M per employee. No one comes even close. No one.

I believe Fannie Mae is the second who made 17400 with 8100 people or 2.17M per employee.

To compare, nVidia made 4368 with 29600.

If you take their latest quarters results ($6B profit) you get $220k/employee per quarter or $880k/year

why bother

Probably the Sicilian mob too. So what? Criminal enterprises do not count.

Interesting. Yeah would be cool to look at profit

Or here's another perspective:

Remember the point of "AI" is getting human-like productivity out of machines.

So should it be surprising that the company at the forefront of this is has a low human-to-everything ratio?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com