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His assertion is made worse by automation. Every skill the founder can automate they should. That’s efficiency. Every skill they can’t, that’s a crucial skill t

His assertion is made worse by automation. Every skill the founder can automate they should. That’s efficiency. Every skill they can’t, that’s a crucial skill the founder depends on. The more crucial the skill, the more leverage the employee should have over the founder and the more incentive the founder has in sharing equity. This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the automation their business depends on, but even if they did have the skill - I think this is a population that understand the sheer amount of time and energy automation requires to simply oversee, operate, and maintain. The founder can’t be on call 24/7 for every function of every part of any but the most trivial of operations. Finally, typical ownership rules makes the founder highly enriched in equity unless they trade equity for capital or talent to the point they lose control. That controlling equity is the founders reward for the founding. Their share of growing profits is their reward whether they personally grow the profits or their employees do. A smart founder doesn’t try to do it all just so they can squeeze out some other people. They delegate responsibility to employees who in turn find ways to outsize the growth of profits and the value of the equity. Nothing says the founder needs to treat them well or provide them incentive to succeed - but everyone who has ever grown a company knows the best talent is attracted to where they are a “part” of the success, which includes sharing in the reward of their labor not just the labor.

rbanffy 4y ago
> The more crucial the skill, the more leverage the employee should have over the founder and the more incentive the founder has in sharing equity Unless the providers of said ability have to compete for business on price. One should not underestimate how hard it is to replace them.
danenania 4y ago
"This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the automation their business depends on" While that's true, I think it also pushes the profile of the ideal founder much more to the technical side than where it is now. Creating and maintaining automations is inherently difficult-to-impossible to fully automate, and will likely always require some level of engineering skill. Conversely, many of the most important skills a "business founder" brings to the table are also the most ripe for automation. Marketing, sales, administrative tasks, investor pitches, support, accounting: all have the potential to be automated to a large degree by AI.
- danenania 4y ago
  I'm curious why the downvotes? I'm a technical founder running a devtools/security startup. After experimenting with ChatGPT for a few hours, it's clear to me that given the right prompts and model tuning, it's already capable of doing the following tasks at an above average skill level: - Writing cold emails and responding to questions asked in replies - Writing a script for sales calls - Writing a pitch deck - Writing marketing page copy - Writing ad copy - Responding to customer support requests - Writing promotional social media posts I have more confidence in its ability to do these tasks given its current level of sophistication than to meaningfully contribute to engineering tasks (though it can certainly help there too). I wouldn't trust it with accounting or administrative tasks yet, but it doesn't seem far off.
  - jijji 4y ago
    Adding to that ChatGPT can also generate working function code for many different programming languages given the right description in your prompt
    - danenania 4y ago
      That's true, but while it is definitely helpful and can accelerate development, I don't generally see writing working functions to do simple, discreet tasks as a bottleneck to engineering in the context of a nontrivial system. But writing quality cold emails tailored to each prospect is definitely a bottleneck to sales--they are time consuming/tedious to write, and you usually need to write tons of them to get results. Same story with marketing copy, ads, social media posts, etc. having the time and energy to produce this content on an ongoing basis is a major bottleneck to marketing.
      - Oxidation 4y ago
        On the receiving end, being able to rip though thousands of words of AI drivel and pick out the actual content (if any) is going to become a major skill in itself. Not that skim reading and summarisation isn't a skill now, but the noise floor is about to rise by many decibels. Probably there will be AI tools to de-AI messages, like reverse semantic companders[1], coming soon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding

rbanffy 4y ago

> The more crucial the skill, the more leverage the employee should have over the founder and the more incentive the founder has in sharing equity Unless the providers of said ability have to compete for business on price. One should not underestimate how hard it is to replace them.

danenania 4y ago

"This becomes magnified if the founder doesn’t have the skill to produce and operate the automation their business depends on" While that's true, I think it also pushes the profile of the ideal founder much more to the technical side than where it is now. Creating and maintaining automations is inherently difficult-to-impossible to fully automate, and will likely always require some level of engineering skill. Conversely, many of the most important skills a "business founder" brings to the table are also the most ripe for automation. Marketing, sales, administrative tasks, investor pitches, support, accounting: all have the potential to be automated to a large degree by AI.

danenania 4y ago
I'm curious why the downvotes? I'm a technical founder running a devtools/security startup. After experimenting with ChatGPT for a few hours, it's clear to me that given the right prompts and model tuning, it's already capable of doing the following tasks at an above average skill level: - Writing cold emails and responding to questions asked in replies - Writing a script for sales calls - Writing a pitch deck - Writing marketing page copy - Writing ad copy - Responding to customer support requests - Writing promotional social media posts I have more confidence in its ability to do these tasks given its current level of sophistication than to meaningfully contribute to engineering tasks (though it can certainly help there too). I wouldn't trust it with accounting or administrative tasks yet, but it doesn't seem far off.
- jijji 4y ago
  Adding to that ChatGPT can also generate working function code for many different programming languages given the right description in your prompt
  - danenania 4y ago
    That's true, but while it is definitely helpful and can accelerate development, I don't generally see writing working functions to do simple, discreet tasks as a bottleneck to engineering in the context of a nontrivial system. But writing quality cold emails tailored to each prospect is definitely a bottleneck to sales--they are time consuming/tedious to write, and you usually need to write tons of them to get results. Same story with marketing copy, ads, social media posts, etc. having the time and energy to produce this content on an ongoing basis is a major bottleneck to marketing.
    - Oxidation 4y ago
      On the receiving end, being able to rip though thousands of words of AI drivel and pick out the actual content (if any) is going to become a major skill in itself. Not that skim reading and summarisation isn't a skill now, but the noise floor is about to rise by many decibels. Probably there will be AI tools to de-AI messages, like reverse semantic companders[1], coming soon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companding