> It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation.

That's like saying anyone who thinks hammers are a good idea is really saying a hammer makes a builder successful, not the builder. It's just a tool, and he's saying tools mean one person can do more. You don't need to straw man a philosophy on to it to then have something to argue against.

> employees do the automation, not the founders

Founders normally are employees. For the phase or type of company pg is talking about, they may be the only employees.

Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context?

I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers.

I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on about $75 million from a YC start-up when an unnamed higher-up told them to fire me two weeks before my first vesting, because I had the most amount of non-founder stock in the company (a compensation for which I took a 66% salary cut).

(edit, typos and turned 100s into 1,00s)

Is that legal? Were you able to file a lawsuit or just ate all of the loss?

In most US states employees can be fired at any point without cause. What happened to OP is horrible, but not illegal.

It's just business in the USA, that's all.

Yeah no one has anything to say about this, probably they read it and run to check their agreements sweating buckets. That's messed up, sorry to hear it.

Many of my friends and colleagues became wealthy thanks to winning the YC lottery, some as founders some as employees. The way they changed afterwards drove me away from the pursuit of money entirely. I'm sure the me in this timeline would not like the me in an alternate timeline where I lasted there two more weeks and achieved wealth status.

> Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context?

When founders start, unless they're hands-off directors, they'll be CEO/CTO/etc, which are employee positions. They'll get a salary, because they're employees.

> I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth.

I don't see why. It makes more sense to focus on founders if he's talking early stage, where you can string a load of systems together to produce a business process. As you get bigger you'll probably regress to the mean of driving processes through admin and management staff, unless you stay laser-focused on keep automation around.

> I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this.

Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all?

> Founders really take far less risk than employees.

If it would be true, why aren't you a founder? You know, blaming other people for wealth/startup/marriage or government/party/boss/partner is easy. But when it comes to actual execution, most of these people come up blank.

You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.

> Not sure I understand you. Why do post-acquisition wealth need an justification at all?

Did you read the tweets, or just the headline?

> You have worked for a startup. Well, you was aware of the risks. But I'm pretty sure the founder had more risks than you. I say this as someone who founded a company recently.

I have helped start 4 companies with 1 gracefully neutral exits, 1 sold, 1 gracefully neutral, and 2 nose dives. After every exit I walked into a job making more $$ than at the job I worked at before the previous startup. The only "risk" a startup founder takes is the potential for a below-market salary for a short period of time.

~20 years ago I failed at a music start-up, royally failed. We burned through $2.5m in about 11 months with nothing of value having been produced, then the dot bomb exploded while we were raising our A round. The same investors funded my next failed startup and offered to fund the one after that.

Once you get to say "I'm a founder and names you might know from vc insider have given me amounts of $$" you have a golden ticket.

I don't follow? Lots of technical founders create their own automations.

His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed.

1920s robber baron bs.

Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on the heads of those who have dedicated many hours of their lives building this free software.

  > those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave

I fixed that for you.

Yep. Absolute suckers for giving out their work for free I guess.

You misunderstand their intentions.

“I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman

This assumes that there is no financial intent in the work. My favorite example of this is that many thousands of Google's engineers used an app (Homebrew I think), but Google wouldn't hire him, thus letting him share in wealth partially created by his life's work.

Did Richard Feynman struggle to pay rent?

Wasn't his work funded by the government?

Where does he mention open source? And using open source software is not standing on anyone's head.

Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.

Unless that code is under the AGPL specifically and the software isn't cloud-based (and the vast majority of start-ups these days are doing SaaS) then there's no license violation there.

Not every single startup.

It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability

Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir.

I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.

I'm not an engineer, so it's possible there are engineers in my company copying and pasting from stack overflow

Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit

But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial

I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package

What are you talking about? There is not always code copy and pasted from GPL'd code. Giant amounts of open source software is not released under GPL, and automation is moving fast enough that there's a huge amount that's not released under GPL precisely because if it is then people don't use it.

I made this exact argument in the early 2000s when open source starting getting popular and many in the tech community thought I was ridiculous.

I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project.

It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave it out willingly.

This sort of attitude has soured me to the entire open source community. They want to be able to give their work out for free, but then have a say in who uses it and how it's used, which is exactly the opposite of free and open.

Open source software is often funded by big corporations once it hits critical mass because it's a nice way to stamp out competing small businesses who might be have been able to charge $ for a small chunk of software functionality.

OSS creators can choose their license. If I make something MIT licensed, I can't then complain that people are "stealing" my work. Just make proprietary software at that point.

Pretty clear that these are people who want to fuck you over. Silicon Valley elites have accumulated enough power to come mask off. Entitled dirtbags who profited off government funded science and technology who've never created an ounce of value in their lives.

Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers.

In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.

Most progress has come from universities, defense and government funding. These losers build an app and proclaim themselves gurus on the future. It's insane that people fall for it.

Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.

Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.

But what about the yet another distributed key store we built?

I feel like you're making fun of Riak :)

> Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.

Progress comes from all sorts of places. Scientific progress come from scientists. That doesn't result in things better in my life without a huge number of other people doing things well and efficiently. Both of which includes anything people will pay for, including b2b saas apps. Try having a pandemic lockdown without Amazon-level fulfillment in place. Thankfully we didn't have to.

No not all work is equal. Progress is a rare thing. Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces. That's not valuable work. Neither is building shitty apps.

Scientist's work is not necessarily valuable either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

Who would you like to appoint as an arbiter for what "valuable work is"? If certain people enjoy and pay women to fart in their faces - would you like to ban that? How about other "useless" activities like video games or massages or fashion or fancy restaurants - would you like to ban those as well?

Who's saying anything needs to be banned. We're talking about who can reasonably claim to be contributing to the progress of society. Go ahead and smell the farts my friend

I'm not equating all forms of work to progress. That'd be a category error. It's the inverse: you saying only progress comes from scientists is a category error.

> Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces.

Depends entirely upon the quality of the fart.

Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

I think Keynes said "The worst form of capitalism is in which the public holds all the risk, and the private sector realizes all the rewards".

> Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

Focusing on the latter is fair enough. Thinking that a corporation having lots of money is bad seems completely pointless. That money ends up as dividends or higher salaries or lower prices. Tax the first two and celebrate all three.

Progress comes from individuals. MIT did not endow Claude Shannon with divine knowledge of Boolean algebra and information theory. He discovered it himself.

Claude Shannon was able to do what he was able to do because of the ample research funding and the academic environment. I have great respect for people like Claude Shannon but they require an ecosystem to be able to do their work.

There were plenty of electrical engineers at MIT working on differential analyzers when Shannon worked on his paper. Why Shannon and not them? Funding and ecosystems don't make technological revolutions anymore than they make cures for diseases. After all, the four papers that revolutionized physics in the early 20th century were composed by a 24-year old patent clerk. Someone has to do the job of thinking and putting those ideas to paper. This is a requirement of any great idea irrespective of funding or people. Thinking is an individual pursuit with an individual reward.

There is both an individual contribution and a societal contribution. No one is denying the individual contribution. But none of YC types had anything to do with inventing the internet but feel like they are the only ones who deserve it's rewards. They haven't created anything like information theory. It's mostly been about fleecing retail investors. More SBF and less Shannon

> Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars.

Not that anyone listens to him, but Noam Chomsky has been saying this for his whole career.

https://youtu.be/a4ZIhW5ZpaE

It does seem a bit tone-deaf for pg to be making this argument at the precise moment tens of thousands of people are being laid off in the tech industry. Definitely a "mask off" moment. Either that, or he has a large equity stake in a manufacturer of pitchforks.

Stop stealing the internet bits from Claude Shannon. He did the work and deserves his cut.

The idea that the fruits of automation should be awarded to the single guy on top is ridiculous, and that's not communist thinking.

The idea of automation is that we should advance as society. The very point of it is that we need to work less, but it never turns out that way because the benefits of automation are seized by the few.

Hence, we forcefully invent new labor regardless of purpose. Half of our economy is keeping each other busy with bullshit to keep this going.

And if that wasn't perverted enough, now the message is: actually, we don't need you. At all.

I've been around YC for 80% of its existence and have never observed anything that could remotely be described as an "Objectivist agenda". I'd remember it too, if I had.

As for "treating employees like garbage", that's just a baseless smear.