[rybosworld]

I read this and see two possibilities.

1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence.

Or

2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves.

The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x the work output of those around them. PG more or less alludes to this when he says stuff like

> The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built.

Notice how the credit for the startup's growth is credited to the founder?

> The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends

Again, crediting founders for the entirety of the company's growth. This is obviously flawed thinking in any company that has employees beyond the founder. Those employees are doing a significant amount of the work. And in any company with more than say, 5 people, they are doing the majority of the work.

PG and people who think like him believe ownership==credit. That's the whole problem.

[ip26]

Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.

[ErrantX]

Important context is; he is speaking to a generally small-c conservative.

So 3) he is well aware of his audience and is talking to them directly.

[wrsh07]

I'm somewhat confused by this. Many of the early startups are literally just the founders, and if they find product market fit without bringing anyone on, there's nobody else to give credit to.

I've talked to a lot of seed stage startups this past year, several of them have achieved PMF and have several large customers. None of them have more than five people. If the companies didn't exist, nobody else was going to build the things (most of them) are building.

Where should you assign credit in this case?

Some of them largely eschew AI programming assistance as well.

Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?

[rybosworld]

> Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?

It seems disingenuous to imply that this is what I meant.

If you can scale a startup to a billion dollar valuation on your own, that's a unique example - and I'd be surprised if anyone is against that. I actually am not sure there are any real examples of this happening, though.

The point is that there's a ceiling to how much wealth a person can create on their own. Corporate ownership structures are the only thing that allow for a person to reach hundreds of billions of dollars.

I know one of the common follow up questions is "well what is the exact number that someone should be allowed to make?" And plainly: there isn't one. That's not what these discussions are ever about. The discussion is really about attribution of credit - and that the ownership class disproportionately benefits for things that they could not have built on their own.

[wrsh07]

Suppose you own a thing. And it becomes extremely profitable to own. And so you're able to pay people extremely generously to help maintain the thing. So everybody you pay feels like they're getting a good deal by working for you.

And the thing you own becomes so valuable it's worth a billion dollars.

You are now a billionaire. But through your telling, you don't deserve it, and that might be right. We didn't discuss how this amazing thing came into existence, and if it just magicked into being then sure, you don't deserve it.

But suppose that without you, this thing never existed. How should credit be distributed?

Now there are lots of problems here and there are lots of ways to criticize startups and many of them are legitimate. Oftentimes companies do exploit their employees, or use exploitative contracts, or are exploiting some resource that we don't like them exploiting. But almost every conversation like this implies that this is the only way, that it's theoretically impossible for a company to do things legitimately. And honestly, that's often fair because corporations often become extremely extractive / exploitative (see the new book by Eric Ries if you need examples and counterexamples)

But I would like it if everybody could correctly realize: the problem isn't making a billion dollars. It's how we do it, and it's the incentives that we place on companies for continued growth. If you're a politician you should work to fix _that_, not the existence of billionaires.

[rybosworld]

One thing I'd like to pick at:

> And so you're able to pay people extremely generously to help maintain the thing.

This is optional, and requires the owner to be generous. It is more common for people to not be paid generously. And that matters because these businesses literally cannot achieve their valuations without the employees. Going back to the 1-person, 1-billion startup valuation - there are 0 examples that I can find. What does that tell you? That the maximum amount of wealth an individual can create, in today's dollars, is somewhere less than 1-billion.

I'll try to rephrase my stance: It's not that being a billionaire is bad - it's that all of the billionaires we have believe that they did it themselves. PG basically confirms this in his post. The ownership class thinks they are deserving because no matter how many employees they have, they view all the wealth as something they created by themselves. That disconnect is in my opinion, extremely bad for society.

It's also typical to see delusions of grandeur that lead a lot of these ultra wealthy people into thinking they are working 1000x as hard as everyone else. Elon Musk regularly claims to work 16 hour days, 7 days a week. But somehow he also has enough time to play diablo and path of exile 20-40 hours a week, spend multiple hours a week with each of his ~20 kids, tweet constantly, etc. These aren't people that view the world for what it really is, because the level of wealth they've obtained leads them to believe they have super powers. As a society we can't have rational conversations with people that think this way.