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> It really isn’t. There’s lots of other reasons to make a company, and making money is the means, not the ends. If you didn't want money at some level, you wo

• enos_feedler 4y ago
  a social club and hobbyist group can't make big world changes without the cycle of capital pumping through it's veins. For that, you need a company. Or a really good non-profit message.
  • lazide 4y ago
    If the cycle of capital is required…. Isn’t making money literally the necessary sustaining part?
    • enos_feedler 4y ago
      Make it yes. Put it in your pocket no
      • lazide 4y ago
        Seems like a whole lot of yak shaving then. Seems pretty dumb? Or self delusional?
        • reducesuffering 4y ago
          It really depends on what you mean by "making money" and the distinction is important. The world is currently setup a certain way, and if you want most peoples' time, a lot of which is required for big impact, you need to pay them $ so that they can shelter and feed themselves. So generally you at least need gross margin from revenue to be able to pay employee costs. So you can "make money" as in revenue, but as an owner, never take much more than an $80k salary providing for your basics, even over the course of decades. Right now, that's probably the best model to get things done. Even Google and Facebook have only skimmed off a tiny amount of their total profit to some founder real estate and yachts, due to their zero dividend and repeated truckloads of $ dumped back into company reinvestment consisting of employees.
          • lazide 4y ago
            But this is what I’m referring to as self delusion. Google and Facebook made their founders insanely wealthy. Literally some of the most wealthy individuals on the planet. Taking on such a large amount of risk and doing such a huge amount of work, with the goal of (legitimately) only paying oneself $80k if successful - which is not a livable wage for most people doing founder work in the Bay Area - doesn’t make sense. It’s literally stupid if that’s the goal, because it’s self destructive. It’s literally all risk, no reward. At a minimum, rewards enough to rebuild reserves and set someone up to not have to worry about daily expenses and be able to take several large future bets without risking bankruptcy seems saner.
            • enos_feedler 4y ago
              Why not? I collect $60k annual in dividend income and live off of it in palo alto building the next version of the web. fuck vc.
              • lazide 4y ago
                Because that is a very, very, VERY narrow and hard to hit target. It's intentionally limiting both the upside AND the downside. If that's what you end up with, hey that's cool. There are far worse outcomes possible in the world, and that one is pretty decent. But why not be open to more? Especially when starting and planning. After all, if things go well enough, you could do the same with $1 of salary. None of that necessarily requires VC either, just an open mind. Intentionally saying 'I don't want to make enough money to be wealthy' at a job which is based on building a machine to make money, is intentionally handicapping oneself. Think of it like setting a required minimum latency for a UI or API that you would intentionally never serve a response faster. Folks are welcome to do whatever they want of course, and if my competitors prefer to do this, that's cool by me! If someone doesn't trust themselves with the potential success, I could also understand that. But maybe it would be worth working on that part first. Because that will be a huge problem regardless.
                • enos_feedler 4y ago
    • johannes1234321 4y ago
      For an IT project (up to some scale) the primary form of capital needed is time. With some savings or some other source of income one can have a acceptable lifestyle and time for something which one enjoys.
  • safety1st 4y ago
    Linux Torvalds? The FSF? Mastodon? For what might be the next one, Andreas Kling with Serenity/Ladybird? The first graphical web browser was built by a couple of college students. Have none of these had a big impact on the world? One of the unique properties of software is that creating it doesn't have to be a capital intensive affair.
    • enos_feedler 4y ago
      I agree. I was being sarcastic
• ergonaught 4y ago
  > If you didn't want money at some level, you wouldn't make a company, you'd make a social club or other hobbyist group. In almost every case, there is a better way to make money than whatever any individual is doing. If money were the point, they’d go do something else. I had this argument with the executive and sales teams at a company 20 years ago. I knew from direct personal experience that there was more money to be made via plumbing contracts for the US Army than our entire software development company was making. Did they want to do plumbing? I assure you they did not. Money, it turns out, wasn’t the point after all.
  • orangeoxidation 4y ago
    > Money, it turns out, wasn’t the point after all. Not the only point. Asking them if they wanted to do the sales team job without compensation would get you the obvious answer. They wouldn't. Money is the point, it's just not the sole point and it cannot be stretched arbitrarily. "Money for rent", "money for retirement", "money for vacation" and "money for a second home" are not the same.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    There's a couple other professions that make more than that. One of the oldest, in fact.
• jjtheblunt 4y ago
  I think you're overlooking folks who saved more money than they can spend (sanely), and who create companies as a means of containerizing the creation of something else. As an example of this, consider Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Nobel Prize winners in 2020 for Crispr/CAS9, and realize they're entirely financially secure, yet they've taken their science and created multiple startups to bring consequences of their science through regulatory processes to deliver results.
• Psychlist 4y ago
  > you wouldn't make a company, you'd make a social club or other hobbyist group. That's one of those "I'm not your lawyer" sort of things. The exact structure for a group depends a great deal on the fine print of both the group and the local legal system. I've worked with everything from a joint bank account (legally not even an organisation) right through to a holding company operated by a trust to administer a variety of different entities that got together to buy some land. The latter was a PITA but it was necessary to get the various people to actually put their money in. When your hobby is, say, running a steam railway, you need a bunch of weighty assets starting with a railway line (probably located on some land) and likely also some kind of shed to keep your steam engine in... it's very easy to end up with millions of dollars in assets even if all you really want to do is pull the cord that makes the "whoo whoo" noise.
• wpietri 4y ago
  > If you didn't want money at some level, you wouldn't make a company, you'd make a social club or other hobbyist group. This is definitely not true. Sometimes companies are the best vehicle for what you're interested in. That's especially true in a society so oriented around business. As an example, I new a guy who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He retired, but was bored. He had an idea for a product, so he put together a small team to build it. In his phrasing, "Profit is permission to continue." He wanted it to be self-sustaining, but he never cared about making money out of it. Or I used to be part of a bandwidth cooperative; we were a bunch of sysadmins who clubbed together to rent a cabinet for our personal servers. I just did it all on my personal credit card, but in retrospect it would have been much easier just to register a company and mostly treat it that way.
  • pdimitar 4y ago
    I don't get your last, wouldn't a company be required to register income and not only expense? How would your example work?
    • wpietri 4y ago
      Members paid in, money got paid out to vendors. It would have been more convenient to have a separate company with its own legal identity and bank account and not be tangled up in the individual finances of one person. Even though the long-term goal was explicitly not to make money.
  • xboxnolifes 4y ago
    > In his phrasing, "Profit is permission to continue." He wanted it to be self-sustaining, but he never cared about making money out of it. So... money was a requirement to continue. His goal may not have been to acquire personal wealth, but you clearly stated here that money was definitely a company goal. Otherwise, profit would not part of the conversation.
    • wpietri 4y ago
      Nope. Money was not a goal. Sustainability was. He wanted it to break even, not make money.
• p1necone 4y ago
  > If you didn't want money at some level, you wouldn't make a company, you'd make a social club or other hobbyist group. If you just made a hobbyist group you'd still need to get a job unrelated to your hobby, which takes up a bunch of time that could be spent doing stuff you're actually interested in instead. So sure, technically it is about money at some level, but only because we live in a capitalist society and don't have a choice.
• dgb23 4y ago
  Making a company might just be the most straightforward way to maintain a financially sustainable venture. But profit might not be the primary goal of it.
• hinkley 4y ago
  You can't eat money. You can sleep on money, but it won't keep the rain off of you. Money won't fix a broken bone. Doctors do that. If you have all the money in the world but no doctor, you can't convert money into medicine. Money doesn't guarantee your safety, your self-esteem, or happiness. Lots of rich suicides out there, some just more slow than other (self-destructive tendencies). It's a means to getting most, but not all of these things. It's not the only means, and it doesn't always work. It's the things money can buy that are important, not the money.