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"Out of the usual reasons people encourage you to either found or work for a startup, "get rich" is not the primary motivator" in my experience with startups a

• geofft 11y ago
  Well, sure. But there's a couple of levels of "get rich": "make enough money to be self-sufficient," "get so much money that you have not yet envisioned what you might do with it," "get into a minority of rich people." The first one seems like an extremely common motivator, yes. The second one sometimes; the third one unlikely. But the first one does not require economic inequality; the second one might, and only the third one does. This is what I find puzzling about pg's claim to be in the business of creating economic inequality. Sure, he's in a business that happens to have that effect now, but that hardly seems like a core requirement of the business. (And this doesn't even address the fact that "startups do X" is sort of circular. Could non-startups, e.g. small businesses that stay small, do X just as well? Or better, because they don't have the failure rate of startups? If we are no longer able to have them run by people motivated by getting rich, is the good done by startups less likely to happen?)