You still got 3% in a market that’s not in your favor. And likely you’d have had -3% otherwise and not 0%.
13,892 karma · joined November 6, 2016
That's a pretty bold assumption.
Almost every startup that has succeeded was utterly unscalable at first in tons of technical and business ways. Then they fixed it as they scaled. Over-optimizing early has probably killed far more projects and companies than the opposite.
Doesn't that just mean that employee compensation is an even smaller percentage of expenses versus other companies? So you can ignore that side of finances even more than other startups?
Fun fact I learned the last time this topic came up, social security in the US pays more than German government pensions.
In the end someone who was working at Google in the Bay Area for 15-20 years can retire if they didn't have life style creep (which is different than cost of living). Not the case in Europe.
I take it you've not met many such people or business owners. No one except the utterly delusional would think a mom & pop restaurants, dry cleaners, new law practices, etc. would become a F500 company. Amazingly people start companies for reasons other than becoming a F500 company one day.
The point of labels is to quickly give a lot of relevant information about some entity. This helps customers, investors, clients, future employees and so on understand the entity quickly.
Every single definition highlights that difference versus traditional small businesses. Trying to re-brand small businesses into "startups" for the cool name factor just seems silly to me. If you're making a sustainable small business then call it that. Don't call it a startup. You'll get more customers that way as well and more relevant business contacts.
People care about startups because of the high growth rate. Renaming a small business to a startup achieves as much as slapping a porsche logo onto a honda civic. The civic is a solid car but you won't make people'd heads turn with that logo on it or not.
It sounds like these are small businesses and not startups. The US has 10% small businesses per capita.
Does this also apply in the case of government or corporate abuse against people? For example class action lawsuits?
I suspect those in power would love this since it's much easier to influence a few career judges than random jurors with "incentives."
edit: There's also a material difference between no one, a few, many and the majority. You made a specific claim that no employee provides more then $1.5m of value. I disproved that with Google's own comp. Not my problem you're butt hurt about being called out for being wrong with quotes you said yourself.
> no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company
> Sub in $1.5m/year
Are you standing by that or is your new assertion now that no employee contributes $500m but that many do contribute $1.5m/year?
The back and forth is getting a bit confusing so trying to make sure we're on the same page.
edit: You do realize that a non-trivial number of employees including ICs are paid more than $1.5m/year. So even Google disagree with your assertion.
> Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world?
You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%.
A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
Perpetually doing less in fear of not getting paid enough for doing more is how you get paid a pittance while complaining about it constantly. Doing more and then finding a way to get paid more is how you get paid more and be happy.
If require everyone to just organically align based on whatever argument is made that the group sees as the best then, congratulations, you have a mono-culture around that. That's not how most people act or react.
In a good organization they first try to figure it out themselves versus distracting a developer (thus costing possibly hours of productivity due to breaking someone's flow). The same way a developer would first try to answer their own question before they start badgering another developer.