
New RFS: One Million Jobs - wasd
http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-rfs-one-million-jobs
======
nawitus
Creating jobs is a strange goal. The effective, simplest and most probable
solution is working inefficiently. Working efficiently, on the other hand,
typically eliminates jobs.

All politicians talk about creating jobs. 99% of the time it leads to bad
regulation that creates jobs through incentivizing inefficiency. People of
course will vote for politicians that advocate job creation because people
want jobs. The extreme form of this is ludditism.

People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing
jobs but creating value. If a company could be made automatic and all it's
employees jobless, then that would obviously be positive. The company would
still create the same value to society, but would require less people.

The main counter-argument is that those who advocate job creation only
advocate "necessary jobs or "meaningful jobs". In practise that doesn't pan
out. It's simply a backwards way of trying to create more products and
services.

~~~
andrewtbham
I also fundamentally disagree with this post. My goal as an entrepreneur is to
eliminate a million jobs. I am reading a book about the Shipping container,
and it massively reduced the number of jobs for longshoremen and merchant
marines.

I can also say that working at a big company that is people's mentality. They
want to manage a lot of people. That's their goal. Not to create value. And
imho the results are often poor.

I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were
able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs. imho the goal should
be to find a way for people to meet their basic needs without needing a job.
NOT to create tons of jobs.

~~~
eugenejen
I think you are confused with his proposal. YC is looking for any company that
can create demand that requires 1 millions workers to fulfill it.

It is not to create a huge company. It has nothing to do with eliminating
jobs. It has nothing to do with provide basic living standard.

For example, if a new technology that allow us to regrow part of organs
easily, but it requires living persons to carry the organs within their bodies
until organs mature to be transplanted. Those people may have a job as 'organ
incubator'.

~~~
andrewtbham
My goal would is (as an investor in Organovo) to regrow organs and it's
agnostic to whether it creates, eliminates or displaces workers.

~~~
eugenejen
Of course you should not. But in the end, you need other people who are
willing to trade something for your investment.

Your investment would be valued 0 if no one wants or needs it. And valuation
is how much they are willing to pay for it.

So in the end. I think creating jobs is just a mask for 'creating demand for
new things for people have no new creating wealth'. Since total aggregation of
time of lives of oligarchs and their families are much limited than total
populations. So it is better to create demand for consumer market.

But of course, if one day, oligarchs have technology to enable them to live
forever, they will have unlimited time to live and my argument won't sustain
under that condition.

~~~
001sky
This is a bizarre tangent. An oligarch could just enslave people through brute
force or more subtle means of mental and psyhcological manipulation into
working feverishly in a self-defeating system of exploitation.

Is that "creating demand" for labour? Or for the products?

Is demand for slave labour a good kind of demand?

~~~
eugenejen
It is a valid argument. If an oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human
being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing to trade
their precious time of lives with the oligarch by being enslaved.

But I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to
commit suicide and having no pain anymore in their lives. Then the oligarch
will have no one to play the game with.

So to keep the system working, the oligarch has to fulfill desires of people.

My main point is the most precious wealth for everyone is the time of their
lives. And we all trade our time in lives with other people in either products
or services. Progress in technologies has enabled us to enjoy growing purchase
power of our time and enable us with more fulfillment of desires. But for the
moment the whole economy system somewhat gets stuck and we are having problems
to figure out what demand can we create to allow people to trade with. Even an
oligarch has to trade wealth for desires.

~~~
001sky
"An oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement.
And the rest of human beings are willing..."

That's not how _slavery_ works.

"I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to
commit suicide"

Again, this is not historically aware.

=====

I will agree with you on a broader point, which I think you've left unsaid:
that everything you want in life is almost always in the hands of someone else
already.

For example, if you want a thing someone else has already owned it (or its
component parts). If you want a friend, someone else has already been in a
relationship with them (either earlier friends, or their family etc). If you
want to build anything you need tools, and raw materials, and other resources
that somebody else has already found, claimed, owned or handled.

And in that logical sense, "success" is nothing more than taking what (some)
other people have already got.

But you've over-abstracted the point to much:

*Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires."

True, but this is still consistent will chattle slavery.

I may "trade my wealth" for weapons, and food, and the means to keep you
chained to the cotton field. But that says nothing of the way in which the
threat of violence co-erces you into doing my bidding--that type of coercive
consent is an interesting but ultimately tangentially related academic rabbit
hole.

------
lifeisstillgood
I would not like to use Uber as an example of creating jobs.

I see them as KFC in the egg farming world - pushing all the capital
expenditure and risk onto smallest individuals whilst then aggregating what
should be a distributed market.

I think any company capable of directly claiming to create one million jobs
will be this abusive on a massive global scale - not something I would want to
invest in personally.

I can imagine plenty of ways to create a million jobs - invent fusion power,
invent a foldaway surgery theatre, but they are not things that capture the
value back to the originator (that is the genuine use for patents).

So this seems like "build a market platform, make sure it is not
interoperable, find a business model that makes individuals dependant on you,
while pretending they are businesses". I think I understand what YC is
reaching for here - there is a coming hollowing out of jobs, somehow we need
to create new jobs. I agree - but a business model that creates new jobs _and_
captures that surplus seems to me abusive - or it is a marketplace open to
competition from other marketplaces and that's rarely a way to make money. So
far.

Edit: clarify as much as I can this early before coffee

~~~
absherwin
How many Uber drivers have you talked to? Every driver I've asked has been
quite happy with the job. While they might avoid open criticism, often they've
provided sufficient details about their other or previous job that it's clear
that this is an improvement.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
As many as I have chicken farmers, long haulage truckers and other "capital at
the lowest rung" industries. Which is one.

But that's not the point - Uber has no obligation to their drivers to provide
work, or a fixed amount of pay not does it want to operate in an environment
where it Ilis forced to do that. And history shows that if you have all the
capital requirements at the bottom of the ladder (you own the car / the
chicken shed / the 17wheeler) then the bottom of the ladder will keep cutting
its own throat.

Uber would not be in business if it owned the capital.

What surprises me is the taxi firms do not seem to be fighting back with a
(open) app of their own

------
sama
most people seemed to have picked up on this, but we aren't looking for a
company that wants to have one million _employees_.

i can envision a future where a million people drive for uber, or where
someone creates a healthcare platform that lets individuals find people who
need care, or an education platform that matches up people who want to learn
with people who want to each, or...

~~~
smacktoward
So it's "a million jobs with no healthcare or retirement benefits," then.

~~~
jleader
How about a company that figures out how to provide _very_ affordable high-
quality health care to large numbers of people, so they aren't dependent on an
employer for their healthcare? That would allow many more people to become
free-lancers, or to work for companies too small to get good health insurance
prices. Such affordable healthcare might make it possible for a million more
people to work for startups.

Such a company might not be feasible in the current regulatory climate, but
some people say the same about Uber.

~~~
mtbcoder
You are describing universal health care.

~~~
neurobro
I read it more like a machine in everyone's basement, next to the water
heater. It would diagnose illnesses, set broken bones, stitch up wounds, and
inject you with all the drugs you need.

------
bdcs
"I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in
the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to
happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work." Bertrand
Russell
[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

~~~
SupremumLimit
Great quote! Job creation is such a short-sighted goal, when we should really
be looking at an organised transition to less and less work. Things are going
that way anyway, but in an entirely uncontrolled fashion which will lead
(perhaps is leading already?) to a lot of social problems. Instead of
attempting to go down _that_ path, Y Combinator just wants to prop up the
existing system it seems?

~~~
prawn
The RFS talks about sparking a million jobs, not necessarily a million full-
time, long-commute, high-stress jobs. They could be the sorts of opportunities
where the takers can get a fairly painless way to cover some bills for 15-20
hours a week from home.

Or a way of handling job sharing so that a million full-time jobs are just as
easily managed by two million people who'd prefer to reduce their hours.
(People going on maternity/paternity leave would love an opportunity like
this.)

------
patcon
I know "jobs" are a goal with good intentions, but I have to disagree. While
it's political suicide to claim otherwise, aiming for job creation simply
plays into the idea that more jobs are the things we desire, when what we
really want is a comfortable existence and a sense of fulfilment.

What new consensus might we converge on if we continue to automate away jobs
quicker than retraining can reasonably be expected?

Personally, I'm excited when technology can expose the lie that 40-hour-per-
week paying jobs are required to be a contributing member of society.
Unfortunately, exposing that lie likely involves some period of high
unemployment before a critical mass of people start to reject the premise that
holding a job equates to worthiness in society.

I've recently come across the term "accelerationism" on HN, and it seems to at
least partially describe the above position:

> Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the
> insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to
> protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate
> its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

------
chubot
edit: To answer my own question, I guess it has to be a "job platform" like
EBay or Uber, and not a company (as sama is saying). Otherwise the economics
are quite challenging.

There is the distinction that EBay sellers get most of the revenue; EBay just
takes a cut and thus doesn't have to have a huge amount of revenue itself.

\-----

Doesn't this mean the company has to make more than $50 billion in revenue?
Assuming a $50K wages a year, 1M jobs takes $50B to pay for.

Do the jobs have to be in the US?

Seems like an interesting idea, but my first thought is that you would want to
find some way NOT to pay $50B a year... that would be a lot of profits. More
profits than the vast majority of companies make.

It seems risky because it's hard to imagine getting to 1M jobs in less than 10
or 20 years. But in 10 or 20 years, computers will have gotten a lot better at
the things that they are currently poor at. It's very hard to predict, but it
will change rapidly.

Did EBay create 1M jobs? i.e. a significant number of people have made their
entire living on Ebay. I think it might have been on the order of 1M, but not
sure.

edit:
[http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073](http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073)

Ebay in 2005 claims 724K as primary or secondary source of income. If I had to
guess it would be more like 72K "jobs", as 1/10th of those people might have
Ebay as their primary source. That was 2005, but I don't think the order of
magnitude has changed in the last 9 years.

~~~
_delirium
_Did EBay create 1M jobs?_

This is pretty difficult to determine, if you want _net_ jobs created, not
merely people who currently make a living selling via eBay. For example, when
a consignment store closes and that business moves to eBay, those are jobs
shifting from one location to another, not really net-created jobs. Figuring
out how to net that out is pretty complex, and I'm not sure solid enough data
is available to determine to what portion of eBay's business are new
transactions, versus existing merchants shifting sales channels.

This is perhaps even more clear with Amazon Marketplace, which has a number of
booksellers making a living selling used books full-time there, but probably a
number actually amounting to _fewer_ employees than have been displaced by the
same Amazon's impact on brick-and-mortar used book stores. Many of the full-
time sellers are even direct continuations of such used-book stores, which
have laid off most of their staff and "gone virtual", transitioning from
meatspace to online storefronts. (This isn't to say that Amazon Marketplace
doesn't produce other advantages, but creating net new jobs in the used-book
sector is probably not one of them.)

~~~
YokoZar
To further complicate things, you also have to count the _customers_ of the
firm in question. Amazon made certain things cheaper, and there are probably
at least a few marginal businesses out there that can exist because of it.

A similar argument goes for eBay -- there are probably entrepreneurs out there
who make a living in part because they can use eBay to buy things. This
includes obvious stuff like resellers, but also less obvious stuff like a
business that just uses eBay products as one of many inputs.

------
dllthomas
A lot of people are treating this like a genie wish, or an unreflective prize
awarded to the first team to accomplish this by any means, or something...

This is a _request for startups_ with a particular feature. Funding them still
needs to seem like a sufficiently good idea. Somehow, I don't imagine Sam
leaping to fund slave labor(!), or even less-obviously-absurd things that only
technically meet the requirement while not actually doing so in a meaningful
way or having any chance at a profit.

------
hooande
This is moving the wrong direction. We want to use automation to reduce the
number of jobs, not to create makework for it's own sake. This is the key
statement:

 _There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans
and computers—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and
vice versa—and some of these require huge amounts of human resources._

As entrepreneurs it's our task to make computers better at the things that
they aren't good at. It will require groundbreaking technology, a lot of work
and incredible amounts of risk...but if not us, then who? We're blessed with
the ability to make tools that make lives easier, we should be doing
everything we can do make machines do more work so that humans can do less.

If Adam Smith was right and land, labor, capital is the relevant equation,
then automation is a way to create nearly unlimited amounts of labor. Human
brains are probably the most powerful computers to ever exist, it's unlikely
that busy work is the best way to utilize them. A focus on creating jobs just
exacerbates the social problems of capitalism. When people mention basic
income, they usually also mention automation as a way to mitigate the loss in
the labor force. If we push for more jobs instead of automating away jobs,
we're just delaying the best outcome.

The most important question of the 21st century is "What can be automated?".
Reducing the number of jobs is our great calling. Paradoxically, we'll have to
employ at lot of smart people to make progress toward that goal. I think
that's the real challenge, and it's one that we can rise to.

------
bfwi
List of companies/organisations on that scale:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers)

~~~
noobermin
Dreaming big is good, but may be that goal is off by an order of magnitude or
two? For comparison, just look at [1].

I'm not discouraging, but what startup even has the potential to hope to
employ even 100000 individuals within the next 10 years?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_the_United_States)

------
nostromo
Commenters aren't realizing you can create jobs without hiring people.

Uber has created many jobs. Airbnb too.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Created or moved? I would argue that the Uber/AirBnB jobs have just taken
market share from existing jobs. That's not to criticize or make it less
worthwhile, I just don't think that is the intention of the RFS - though its
brevity leaves it quite open.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Uber has definitely created. Typically speaking there's a hard cap on the
number of taxi drivers. For example Seattle hasn't issued a new taxi license
since 1990 [1]. That's insane! The area has grown dramatically in that time.
That said there is some amount that are moved rather than created. It's
definitely something that should be considered.

[1] [http://www.change.org/petitions/seattle-city-council-
break-t...](http://www.change.org/petitions/seattle-city-council-break-the-
taxi-monopoly-and-level-the-playing-field)

------
ironchief
I'm reading this as "one million indirect jobs" as opposed to "one million
directly employed jobs". I'm not sure that a corporation with one million
direct employees is currently a desirable end goal due to large organizational
overhead, political infighting and large inertia. Of course redefining what
"jobs" are, would help.

~~~
goodcanadian
I am reading it as several companies that create an aggregate of 1 million
jobs rather than one absurdly large corporation.

~~~
bstpierre
I am reading it as the creation of an entirely new industry which will spawn
sub-industries, hundreds or thousands of firms, and a million jobs over the
course of the next 20 years.

------
Siecje
What about YouTubers? Or people with Etsy stores. These businesses focus on
letting people be able to make a living off their service.

~~~
muzz
Agreed, but how many people make enough for it to be their full-time jobs?

65% of Etsy sellers make less than $100/yr:
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/08/etsy_economi...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/08/etsy_economic_impact_report_etsy_crafters_generate_895_million_in_annual.html)

------
derpherperderp
There are only two types of things which can be produced: information and
material.

Most people aren't very good at working with information beyond basic pattern
recognition/recall and to some extent, human interaction. Most of the people
who are good at either or both of these things are already gainfully employed.

In the material realm, we already produce enough food, clothing, housing, and
computers to suit the needs of the public. We have more empty residences than
homeless people. As technology advances in the imminent years we will become
less reliant on people for producing these things--not more. Most significant
material advances will come from knowledge work discoveries (e.g. larger
capacity batteries), not from material work (assembling batteries by hand more
quickly or using more people).

Dolphins do not derive their self-worth, happiness, or other aspects of their
life from a "job." Perhaps humans are poised to become as advanced as they
are?

Imagine if a million people had the freedom to experiment in whatever way they
chose: to make music and art, to enjoy their lives without the approval of
others as expressed by dollars of consumption. How much would the culture they
create be worth?

------
ch
Curious if there are any companies which currently create millions of jobs?

I suppose one could create a new market which could have capacity for such
jobs. That might still be in the best interest of a startup.

~~~
polarix
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers)

Seems like walmart and the Chinese energy companies are the only private
employers of >1m humans.

------
yannis
The toughest part of this is the idea needs to help _expand the economy_ that
is how real jobs are created. There are many ways folks! From the absurd, such
as moving money from inefficient areas of the economy (i.e. _taxation_ to
efficient areas of the economy, private individuals, or from banks to small
businesses.)

If there is a legal way for example for an employee that pays $10,000 in tax
to employ someone at $10,000 and save that money then for each tax-payer a new
job is being created. This can be for example be channeled via a non-profit
(which scales via software) which would legally employ the individuals assign
tasks to the individuals, provide training (which can employ trainers) help in
seed money etc., basic health care and other similar services.

Another counter-intuitive idea, is to target high worth individuals, rather
than low end individuals. Thousands of people are in jobs and interested in
getting out of them to start a business. A Job + investment scheme in
businesses that need financing might or might not work, but worth thinking.
This keeps the individual employed and if the business expands would probably
create another 2-5 jobs easily.

Franchising as a co-op rather than sending money to the mother ship, can
easily scale in many sectors.

I think this is the greatest RFS ever and wish it success from the bottom of
my heart. If no single scheme can achieve it, maybe 100 schemes can. It is not
impossible.

------
bryanlarsen
Can we use Tim Hudak math?[1]

context: in the recent election for the province of Ontario in Canada, Tim
Hudak promised 1 million new jobs if he got elected. There were several
questionable ways he arrived at that number, one of which was counting 8 years
of a single new job as a new job.

1:
[https://www.google.ca/search?q=tim+hudak+math](https://www.google.ca/search?q=tim+hudak+math)

------
dreamdu5t
This demonstrates a severe lack of understanding about basic economics. Jobs
are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Paying someone $1 to dig a
ditch and refill it is a job.

What we need is not jobs. What we need is the ability for everyone to make a
living they deem acceptable (TV, heat/AC, car, electricity, plumbing,
internet). That's the real issue here...

------
dkyc
I dislike the new, hyper-ambitious side of YC (also in the other new RFSs: AI,
HealthCare...). Have any of the truly revolutionary inventions (like steam
engine, automobile, microcomputer, internet) started out as something
developed to have such an incredibly big scale, or did they merely turn out to
have big implications? It's the latter, and I think it's not just a
correlation, but a causation: To make something truly disruptive, it needs to
be _new_ , and it is very unlikely to come up with something that is new while
at the same time aiming to solve a problem that everybody can agree on (like
let's build one million jobs, let's build AI, let's fix healthcare etc).
That's usually the reason government projects fail, and the reason startups
succeed, and having YC now focusing on stuff with the "could-this-be-a-big-
company"-shaded glasses is a 180° turn from their original heritage.

~~~
sama
you will be happy to hear that 90% of the companies we fund still get mocked
on HN and elsewhere for "being small".

certainly agree that's usually the way to get huge. and even the "hyper-
ambitious" companies we fund have to start with going after a very small
market--in fact, their first products mostly sound like toys, and that's a
feature not a bug.

it's a mistake to build a startup that looks like a huge government project.
it's also a mistake to not think about how to be a huge company one day. in
fact, i remember one of the first meetings i ever had with airbnb. i told them
how i thought that this silly-seeming thing they were doing could one day
change the way most people travel. i think it seemed crazy even to them at the
time.

~~~
dkyc
Indeed, most of the yc-funded startups still focus on building practical
stuff. But isn't the airbnb example showing that it works to "not think about
how to be a huge company one day"? I mean, if the size of their idea (changing
the way most people travel) was not clear to them at the time, and yet they've
succeeded (or are on their way to do so), it obviously worked out.

------
hyperion2010
I really like this perspective. Computers are tools that can enormously
increase the power of a single individual. There are huge opportunities to
increase both human productivity and computing productivity if we can figure
out how to create tools that foster more symbiotic interactions between humans
and computers.

------
tonydiv
I would also be looking for the opposite. Software that eliminates the need
for people, especially consultants, can be huge opportunities too.

That's what we're doing with MindOps–an easy-to-use OCR API. Currently humans
transcribe receipts, we automate it.

------
owenversteeg
I know it's not what sama meant, but these are the only employers that have
1MM+ employees (excluding the DOD, the PLA, the NHS, and the Indian armed
forces):

Walmart 2.1 million (United States)

McDonald's 1.9 million (including franchises) (United States)

China National Petroleum Corporation 1.6 million (People's Republic of China)

State Grid Corporation of China 1.5 million (People's Republic of China)

Indian Railways 1.4 million (India)

Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn) 1.2 million (Taiwan)

Note that Indian Railways, the State Grid Corporation of China and the China
National Petroleum Corporation are state-owned.

~~~
001sky
Finally some data. Most of the big companies with "real jobs" top out around
300K. Of course its easy to create "mc-jobs" or the equivalent.

------
justincormack
Its not a million, but the Pathak's[1] created around 100,000 jobs by
effectively creating the British curry house, supplying ingredients and
recipes to largely Indian-Ugandan refugees after they were forced out by Idi
Amin. Thats why most have the same menus.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-
obituarie...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-
obituaries/8222809/Shanta-Pathak.html)

------
4k
Interesting. Thinking about what computers can't do now or in any foreseeable
future, I wouldn't be surprised if spending time with people in need of human
interaction becomes a huge industry in coming years. I first laughed at ideas
like Awesomeness Reminders etc, but I can see there's a future in that
direction!

------
mhoad
Just for some context Google have ~50,000 employees according to this
[https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html](https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html)

~~~
webwright
And has created/expanded jobs in SEO, SEM, android development, etc. How many,
do you think?

------
tomasien
Seems like Uber is such a company - I can see how "this could potentially
create 1 million jobs" would be a conduit for "this could potentially be a win
on a scale yet unknown"

------
hansy
Does "job" refer to the traditional sense of a primary source of income? I
guess what I'm asking is, do services like TaskRabbit and Airbnb also fall in
this category?

------
esseti
How the RFS works? i see that there are different "calls", but if i click to
"apply" the deadline was in march. so, what should one do to apply?

------
ISL
An interesting request -- it's asking the question "what can people do that
computers and mechanization absolutely cannot?"

Care for one another?

~~~
morenoh149
I'd venture to say, anything creative. That is, until we get strong AI.

------
braindead_in
We have managed to create around 4000 jobs for audio transcribers. Around 10%
are regulars on our platform. Long way to go for a million.

------
johnrob
Perhaps a better phrase than "jobs" is "earn income". The former comes with a
lot of assumptions.

------
GraffitiTim
MobileWorks is an example of an existing YC (S11) company that has the
potential to do this.

------
AndrewKemendo
That's just under the size of the Active duty US military or major industries!

Quite a task.

------
MrQuincle
Find another planet, or the moon.

Populate it.

There are jobs here, there will be jobs there.

A million will not be sufficient.

------
udfalkso
RFS?

~~~
JoshTriplett
[http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

------
danielweber
What does RFS stand for?

~~~
vram22
Request For Startups. Was first posted by PG some years ago:

[http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

Might have been a play on the acronym RFC (Request For Comments).

------
mbesto
Sooo...marketplaces?

