Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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My goal as an entrepreneur is to eliminate a million jobs.

Surely your goal as an antrepreneur shoul dbe to provide a million people with a desirable new product/service/ The word 'entrepreneur' means 'between-taker', ie someone that carries things back and forth between suppliers and consumers, like historical traders.

Identifying economic inefficiency and finding something to remedy it is one way of identifying your target consumer, but far from the only one. In your example of the shipping container, you neglect to consider that they're only useful insofar as there is sufficient trading activity taking place to fill the containers up. Labor shortages aren't often a big limiting factor on trade.

I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs.

So do I, but creativity and productivity are wholly different things, especially when it comes to paying the bills.

Yes, I think another way to think of the 'between-taker' idea is that an entrepreneur find ways to use existing resources in a new way that creates more value than those resources could previously create. Sometimes those resources are physical (machines, buildings, etc), but they can also be human beings.

I think it is reasonable for YC to have an investment theory that is something like 'productivity enhancements are making many talented human resources available more cheaply, a business that finds a way to use them could do well.'

But, I think the Uber example is a little unclear. It seems likely to me that driving is going to be automated away in 10-20 years. And, since so many adults drive (even those with other jobs), there is a massive incentive to find a way to automate that activity and make it safer.

I think there is a bit of a paradox - as the number of people employed in a task increases, the incentive to automate that task increases as well. I am not too optimistic that creating large numbers of long-term sustainable jobs is easy, but I think the attempt to find uses for undervalued resources makes as much sense for humans as it does for any other resource.

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