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I can see you are angry - this is not about me. If Amazon had had a competitor back in the day that had done just that - everything Amazon did, only shared mor

I can see you are angry - this is not about me. If Amazon had had a competitor back in the day that had done just that - everything Amazon did, only shared more, then probably we would all be buying from ... err ... Mississippi.com. But this competitor would have had to pull all the right moves - as well as sharing differently. And one day, yes there will be some innovative new company that will do to Amazon what they have done to Walmart. And maybe that company will have a competitor that will be a co-op and maybe they will have the edge. It has worked ok in the UK for John Lewis. But the lesson from John Lewis is they have to be good at all the basic stuff - and only then do they get to pick staff based on the nicer governance / culture / slight pay gap. Building a company is hard. Building something like Amazon is freakishly hard. Which is why this "treat employees well" is basically never left up to the market and just tacked on afterwards in regulations. And finally - yeah would Bezos exactly be hurting if he was half as wealthy. Neither of us think so - which kind of is my point. If there was some (weird) regulation that meant no-one can become richer than 10 billion dollars, and would need to improve share grants when they go over, guess what, Bezos would still have started Amazon, still done it all, and still have a yacht and a second wife. The phase space available to us is larger than we think.

philwelch 4y ago
> I can see you are angry I'm not angry. I'm just making a point. > Building a company is hard. Building something like Amazon is freakishly hard. And that's the point. > If there was some (weird) regulation that meant no-one can become richer than 10 billion dollars, and would need to improve share grants when they go over, guess what, Bezos would still have started Amazon, still done it all, and still have a yacht and a second wife. I don't want to fixate on Bezos in particular, but there are probably a lot of founders who would be hesitant to start a company if, once that company became valuable enough, they would be forcibly divested from it by law and therefore be at risk of losing control. Even if you're a vision-focused founder who is intrinsically motivated by wanting the company you are founding to exist in the way that you want it to exist, with no regard to your own personal wealth, you're going to be hesitant with that sort of confiscatory regime. And that's setting aside the fact that building a large company is not only "freakishly hard" but also tremendously risky. If you have a wealth cap of 10 billion dollars thinking "10 billion dollars is enough motivation for anyone", sure, but there's a risk premium involved and the expected value is nowhere close to that number.

philwelch 4y ago

> I can see you are angry I'm not angry. I'm just making a point. > Building a company is hard. Building something like Amazon is freakishly hard. And that's the point. > If there was some (weird) regulation that meant no-one can become richer than 10 billion dollars, and would need to improve share grants when they go over, guess what, Bezos would still have started Amazon, still done it all, and still have a yacht and a second wife. I don't want to fixate on Bezos in particular, but there are probably a lot of founders who would be hesitant to start a company if, once that company became valuable enough, they would be forcibly divested from it by law and therefore be at risk of losing control. Even if you're a vision-focused founder who is intrinsically motivated by wanting the company you are founding to exist in the way that you want it to exist, with no regard to your own personal wealth, you're going to be hesitant with that sort of confiscatory regime. And that's setting aside the fact that building a large company is not only "freakishly hard" but also tremendously risky. If you have a wealth cap of 10 billion dollars thinking "10 billion dollars is enough motivation for anyone", sure, but there's a risk premium involved and the expected value is nowhere close to that number.