[nosefurhairdo]

Lots of bold assertions without evidence. Author claims Google's high salaries killed entrepreneurship. Is there any data to back this claim?

Or the idea that democracy can't adapt to social media discourse; not everyone is chronically online. Politicians still respond to public sentiment to similar degree as they always have.

Then there's this:

> AI systems aren't just tools—they're deployed faster than we can develop frameworks for understanding their social implications.

If they aren't just tools, what are they? Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications?

Post feels like a fever dream of someone who fell asleep to the Navalmanack audiobook.

[sien]

The number of unicorns was 39 when the term was coined in 2013. Then there was 119 by 2018 and then there were 1284 unicorns by May 2024.

From :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)#History

So not only is there no data to back up the authors claim but it is wrong and could be checked by looking at wikipedia.

You don't have to be right, you can make claims, but when you make grand claims you should at least check wikipedia.

[nothrabannosir]

Your broader point may stand but that’s not a counter argument if you give the original claim the benefit of the doubt: it can reasonably be interpreted as referencing lifestyle oriented businesses, niche b2b companies, anything small growth with a low ceiling.

Counting unicorns only serves to bolster that point : those are large VC fueled ships which operate on a completely different level. Because it is clear at founding time which type of company they are , it’s reasonable to include that as a qualifier.

Now if the data showed more small-growth companies were started , that’d be a stronger counter argument.

[vlovich123]

What do businesses need? Startup capital. What’s a good way to obtain it? Having a high salary and saving.

The counter argument is that high salaries enable more people to save and take risk rather than just those that start out wealthy.

The main counter is that people get comfortable and don’t take risks is definitely true, but I’m not sure how much that impacts the amount of entrepreneurship that would have otherwise happened.

[jrflowers]

This makes sense so long as you define “entrepreneurship” as the act of making a legal entity with the goal of using venture capital to hit a billion dollar valuation as quickly as possible.

In fact since the number of billion dollar valuations goes up by an order of magnitude every few years we are on track for every person on earth to start a billion dollar corporation in a few short decades. This is proof that you could see on Wikipedia that entrepreneurship is doing great

[cluckindan]

Not sure about that.

https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/google-stanford-and-the...

[reissbaker]

Given the frequent "it's not X—it's Y" type of constructions, lack of researched data, and the em-dashes, unfortunately I think this is the fever dream of a GPU cluster humming away somewhere.

[thrawa8387336]

The only thing worse than the author claiming that is you asking for "data". Like what data? This is qualitative. And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke

[jrflowers]

It’s always kind of funny when people respond to a subjective opinion with “where’s the data?” because unless you’re responding with data it’s pretty much just a way of saying “I don’t like this”

[rwmj]

The blog post makes a bold claim about how the rise of tech salaries at Google killed entrepreneurship. The poster could have at least given this a sniff test: how about, for example, showing a graph of Google salaries overlaid with a graph of the number of start-ups from the crunchbase database? As he didn't even go to this minimum effort, it's valid to ask "where's the data" here.

[jrflowers]

This is a good point. When somebody says something “killed” an intangible thing, they are obviously speaking literally. Honestly we don’t even need a graph, surely if he’s alleging a murder he would be able to produce the weapon, like a knife or a gun

Now obviously someone could mistakenly interpret that sentiment as “incredibly high salaries attracted talent of such caliber that they could have started their own companies but did not” but that simply can’t be possible because there is no graph that shows all of the businesses that didn’t happen, therefore it is literal.

It’s not like anybody on here has worked with somebody that could easily have started their own company but chose SWE at a FAANG. It’s just not a thing

[trinsic2]

Yeah, I noticed this too. It's a kind of response one would make if one felt threatened by the subject matter.

[motorest]

> And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke

To me, it reads like a desperate far-fetched argument to deny employees a fair compensation for their work. As if there is any virtue in stiffing people out of their paycheck.

[bluetomcat]

With a lot of fancy wording, the article basically proposes that slow-moving, bureaucratic educational institutions should catch up with TikTok’s latest algorithm, helping raise the next generation of influencers.

[RajT88]

To the effect it clearly proposes anything!

[Perepiska]

"billions of influencers"

[vineyardmike]

This isn’t particularly controversial tbh.

Yes Google’s high salaries are part of a system that has been reworking entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. This has been documented and discussed at length. Did you look for data?

Big tech pays in valuable stock, and salaries can reach upwards of 500k for relative rank and file positions (not rare one offs). Over a decade, that’s $5M. At the same time, VC firms have been holding companies private longer raising more rounds, which often dilutes the employee shares and reduces the “reward” for employees waiting for an IPO. If that new diluted IPO rewards an employee under $5M for a decade of employment, they were better off at Google/Meta/etc. Startups were always a lottery ticket, but if a “winning” ticket is less profitable than not playing, why join at all?

This plays directly into the thesis that the powerful are extracting additional resources at the expense of the cultural expectations and understandings. VC firms diluting employees is profitable for VCs, but it jeopardizes the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem if smart people prefer better compensation. Same with the recent AI aqui-hire controversies like Windsurf. Why join a startup if the CEO will take a billion dollar payout and leave the employees with worthless stock.

[jrflowers]

>Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications?

I would guess that the argument for wanting a framework for understanding language models’ social implications would be the social implications of language models. Like a phenomenon existing is a valid argument for understanding it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatg...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250...

>not everyone is chronically online

Do you have data to support this? What does “chronically” mean and why would its absence invalidate the idea of social media impacting how people act and vote?

[bbor]

  If they aren't just tools, what are they?

I wrote a lot more below, but I think you've picked up on two important things here:

1. This post seems likely to have been written with the assistance of a chatbot, which explains this phrase. The "they aren't just tools" phrase is only there because he needed a third example for a "it's not just X--it's Y" paragraph, one of ChatGPT's all-time fave constructions.

2. Another cause is more fundamental: the third "leverage" doesn't really apply to this discussion IMO. It's probably useful elsewhere, but owning a large social media company is just a different variety of capital, not some mutually-exclusive group. All expressions of capitalist power in 2025 have some amount of technological amplification going on.

[la64710]

This is a blog post not a research paper. The evidence is anecdotal and most people with common sense know it by intuition all the facts that the author mentions.