I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims. He just does some math and shows that exponential growth is fast.
What did the founder have to do to keep growing at 93%? Good solid business fundamentals and identifying a new solution can get you some growth. But eventually you've done all that and the only way to continue growing is extraction -- buy out your competition and raise margins, outsource your workers, enshittify your user experience. THAT is why no one "earns" a billion. The last $900M pretty much always requires using your resources in clever but unethical ways to extract money from customers and financial markets.
> I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims.
I don't see why he should have engaged with them any more than he did, because AOC's claims are BS. He gave them more attention than they deserve.
What he should have engaged with is, what happens when a startup stops being a startup? All three of his poster children for startups, Apple, Google, and Facebook, are now notorious for treating their users badly and making money in ways that at least a substantial number of people don't think are "earning" money, such as monetizing users' data. And at the last of those three, the founder is still in charge, so even if PG can argue that Zuckerberg earned what he got from Facebook in its startup phase, that doesn't mean he's earning the money he makes now from Facebook in the same way. (And the other poster child he mentions, AirBnB, can't be said to have clean hands either at this point.)
To me that's the biggest gap in PG's worldview more generally, that I never see him address in his essays: once the startup phase is over, the company drops off his radar and he pays no attention to the collateral damage it causes when it's a tech giant. (And of course AOC's claims have nothing to do with this genuine issue either.)
No, because AOC claimed that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. Not that there are ways to make money other than earning it, which of course there are, but that there are no ways to make that much money by earning it, which is BS.
The exact threshold doesn't matter. What matters is that the companies shift away from "make something people want", which is what PG says justifies the money that's made.
The timing doesn't matter because monopoly -> enshittification was always the plan. Hence FAANG were valued with the expectation that they could turn the profit knob at the right time.
What did the founder have to do to keep growing at 93%? Good solid business fundamentals and identifying a new solution can get you some growth. But eventually you've done all that and the only way to continue growing is extraction -- buy out your competition and raise margins, outsource your workers, enshittify your user experience. THAT is why no one "earns" a billion. The last $900M pretty much always requires using your resources in clever but unethical ways to extract money from customers and financial markets.