Add to that, if there exist individuals who have enough of the resource of highest utility, it can become a liability for society. One bad way is that they use it to suppress others, through lobbying or buying out media companies or whatever. The other is how vultures react to them, pushing up the prices whenever the billionaire individual is involved and pricing out others.
Many of these billionaires they're referring to are paper stock billionaires. It gives you access to maintain control/takeover other companies. For example, Elon made an argument that his package payout (if fulfilled) was so large because it served him to be able to retain control of his company.
Another example would be taking over media companies like what Bezos did, the side effect would be being able to waylay/hide any dirty laundry.
Is there some standard he/people use to come up with the initial company paper-stock worth? A 2m company I would imagine needs to have some tangible traction already.
Of course - at founding, if $20M goes into the company at $1 per share, and the CEO gets a 10% equity stake (usually subject to restrictions), then the CEO has $2M on paper (or will have after possible vesting.) Real money in this case came from the original investors that flowed into the company in exchange for ownership, but the CEO can't really do anything with his shares yet. At this point the original investors are taking a huge risk with their money - chances are, they just lost $20M dollars, and probably even more, as it can often take a long time of putting good money after bad.
Once a company starts operating, but before revenue (and hopefully eventual profitability), the valuation is trickier. The share price _should_ be the number of shares divided by the sum of all future profit (minus current debt.) Which is hilarious of course, because no one actually knows the denominator.
That original $2M equity stake can grow to billions if the company ends up making something that a lot of people want or need, so the sum of all future profit is large. Or, much more likely, it will be worth nothing, or a modest amount.
Graham's essay kind of avoids the point of whether ownership of a vastly appreciating asset is "fair", if a bunch of other people help that asset to appreciate.
But these are still numbers plucked from the air (or as you put it, from the 'future'). I want *tangible, material bases* to start from if any.
Another far more sensible model I've found is slicing pie. Each founder's input % of the pie pre-'bake' is their % of the rewards. And what makes up for one's slice of the pie? The dollar-value you would've earned if you worked somewhere else, times the period of baking. These can be tweaked accordingly to the type of investment put in. IMO, it seems far more grounded compared to say a flat 10%.
To quote good old Chester Karass (https://www.amazon.com/Business-Life-Dont-Deserve-Negotiate/...): you get what you negotiate. In an ideal world, people are compensated according to their contributions (and when hired, expected contributions.) This isn't a once-and-done thing, though - compensation (in the form of company ownership) gets adjusted all the time. The flat 10% is just a starting point (a typical CEO level of ownership in a start up, although this number varies quite a lot, due to aforementioned negotiation.) If a CEO screws up badly enough, they might get fired even before their stock vests.
Sure I'd acknowledge the risks taken. Arguably though, there should be some degree of a known benchmark just so people don't get overly taken advantage of.
Agreed, what a disappointment of an essay, encouraging a growth at all costs mindset and pretending that this growth doesn't involve/encourage bad side effects.
And a lot of these structures either involves a percentage cut or a security of some kind. And it's not new, it's copied.
To add on context, the experiment you're giving is called a *blind judging test*. Remove the branding and labels, and let judges sample the results and see if they can tell which is ranked correctly.
Some examples are blind wine tasting tests. There are instances whereby some journalists invited renowned/established wine tasters and subjected them to blind wine tasting tests. Turns out the judges couldn't tell which was which. Pretty embarrassing.
It speaks volumes as to how people can accurately judge the value of things. There is research by some network scientist that says you can't generally can't tell the 1% from the top, though you can tell the really bad from the generally good. What OP's experiment might tell us is that the LLM competitive advantage is so small no one can tell which is objectively better.
Sure they're complex but tbh they don't need to be. Sorry to bruise your professional ego but you should understand that there's a lot of decisions in bigtech/corporate that equates to 'buy it don't build it, it'll be cheaper, and (secretly) I can show it off on my resume'. And then when you use it, usually it isn't catered for the business' purposes because the tech is meant to cover a large amount of use cases. At that point they move on and the inefficiencies become the norm.
And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.
I'm at a loss when it comes to this comment section. I'm not sure why most people here seem to think that web development is just querying a database and presenting the results.
I'm often doing math when working with ranking (search and otherwise) and throttling/rate-limiting. What about fraud detection and prevention? There isn't an off-the-shelf solution that you can use to build a modern site. It requires hundreds of hours of hard work and an understanding of everything from binary to color theory.
The job of a full-stack developer has a lot of complexity and requires a great deal of creativity. Game dev too.
I'm not sure why my ego would be bruised by anything you said. None of it applies to my work.
Are you just throwing out buzzwords at this point?
What has ranking have to do with the standard website? Or fraud detection/prevention? Clearly these are out of the scope of the standard website. And I highly doubt they require deep math, just some probability, maybe a slight use of matrices.
Given the number of surface level buzzwords you throw out, I think your ego's preventing you from looking deeper.
Again, you're not wrong, but none of those things are insurmountable. If the team is really so stressed it cannot spend 30 minutes, over the many year of the existence of that bug, that seems like a development environment close to hell.
Knowledge loss is precisely my point: there is very little a-priori knowledge needed to solve this, the guy who found the bug proves that.
I think the differentiator is the amount of deep Math that goes into it.
A simple card game is on par with standard app development.
But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too.
The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.
> The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives.
You're waaay too tuned in to the corporate ideology to be saying something like this. I suggest you zoom out. The top heavy games do make a ton of money, so evidently there's value in entertaining people and giving them some good playtime compared to the drudge that is corporate life (PS. in case you didn't know not all people love to work for some other guy's mission/vision).
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