
Discuss HN: why not have a company with no employees? - EGreg
What&#x27;s better, a bunch of young guys working on a startup full time for equity, but not having all the skills, OR a bunch of professionals who are kickass at what they do, have been doing it for many years, but have done it for more than one startup at once, for a mix of equity and money?<p>I think there is something to be said for classical Liberal ideas &#x2F; Libertarian ideas for how to run a business. Adam Smith spoke about how self-employment allows people&#x27;s careers to grow over time and not do mindless work for their &quot;boss&quot;. And I shared a PBS article recently about being paid to look busy: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;newshour&#x2F;making-sense&#x2F;ask-says-notorious-occupy-academic-job-exist&#x2F;<p>I think it&#x27;s better for people to be doing something for MANY clients, and have a growing network, portfolio and experience. The startup should be one client of many, that compensates for work they do for the startup, e.g. stock options vested over time. But the people don&#x27;t work full time on the startup. They have personal and professional lives that only partially intersect with it. As our motto goes, &quot;People live lives. Companies create products.&quot; The company is an entity that should have capital to compensate people, or attract them to do pro bono &#x2F; open source contributions.<p>Replacing employees with contractors is also cheaper for companies, as expensive lawsuits about insurance for employees, and dismissing employees are eliminated, this is especially true in Europe where there are far stronger protections for full time employees:  http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adamsmith.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;research&#x2F;files&#x2F;self-employment.pdf
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tptacek
One problem with this model is that self-employed software developers are
much, much more expensive than full-time developers; 2x-3x more by default,
but often even higher. Think of an FTE as a "bulk purchase discount" for
dev/hours.

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EGreg
In this world of technology, full time employment is gradually being
eliminated for may people, and being self employed is better:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243038/As_the_digita...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243038/As_the_digital_revolution_kills_jobs_social_unrest_will_rise)

And with emerging social technology like
[http://holacracy.org/](http://holacracy.org/) and the one we are building, we
should be among the companies taking advantage of it.

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jfarmer
See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)

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Nicholas_C
Crazy. I heard an NPR interview with him a year or two ago, before he passed.
This article was written in 1937.

