[z3t4]

If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community ... Some problems can't simply be fixed by one man alone. And it's better to own little of something then all of nothing ... Look at for example Elon Musk. He only owned like 5% of the companies he started once they where sold. Also Facebook only had a few thousand users when Zuckerberg started to bring more people in to work on it.

[yurisagalov]

> If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community.

This takes the mythical man month to a whole new level :)

[softawre]

I know you're joking, but in case it isn't obvious - Mythical man month doesn't apply outside dev. Sales/marketing people can actually deliver a baby in 4 weeks.

[qaq]

:) right so every public company can just double sales/marketing spending and it would double their revenue :)?

[z3t4]

There will always be diminishing returns ... But lets say you are spending money on Pay Per Click Advertising ...

[qaq]

As long as I am tiny player yes it would work as soon as I am meaningful in size after a short time it will just affect the PPC

[elmar]

One of many real world examples.

"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185

[ben_jones]

In the case of Elon Musk (and for the record others like Mark Cuban) something tells me you don't make billions of dollars without a (from a modern perspective) massively disproportionate ownership share. Zuckerberg gets off from this because FB is an outlier in terms of it's value, he didn't need as large a percentage to make as much, but Musk does not.

[z3t4]

Musk owned like 11% of Paypal once it sold for 1.5B, while Zuckerberg owned around 20% of Facebook when it IPO:ed for like 5B. The takeaway though is that it's better to own 10% of one Billion then 90+% of nothing. And great things can only be achieved while working together.

[elmar]

Zuckerberg was lucky with a big jump on valuations on Series B Peter Thiel didn't invest because of the runaway valuation, later he regretted [1], and being a "Solo-Founder" :) if standard funding history with 2 co-founders Zuckerberg should have IPO with 5%~10% stake.

[1] "Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiels-bad-investment-2...

Equity in Startups - Cap tables at IPO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134116

[ben_jones]

I stand corrected. It was my belief that he made much more from the acquisition because of how much I thought he put into SpaceX and later Tesla, and therefore would have had a much higher equity percent then 11%. He seems to have had a much higher business acumen then I thought [1] (not to say I didn't think it was already pretty high).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Zip2

[quaunaut]

That's when you've chosen too big a problem. Make it smaller. Find a piece you CAN solve. Then as you gain skill and power, expand. This works in every field.