The part that I am not following in your argument is why are we even introducing that variable in the first place. I mean, sure, money, beauty, health, IQ, EQ, and so many other factors are helpful and make everything easier. But why is money so intrinsically linked to Sam Altman's specific path to success? He comes from middle class, and all the money he made came after he was validated in his approach, not before. So why bring it up here? And if you're going to bring up money, why not bring up all the other factors I mentioned above?

I’ll help you out. A bunch of us here deal with board members on a daily basis. Some board members are great, others not so much. To hear that there is a board out there that gave voting rights to an employee makes us experience two simultaneous sensations: 1. Hell yeah!, and 2. I wonder if they picked the right employee.

I’ll leave it at that.

I empathize with the quick back-of-the-napkin math ("if we could just take Bezos' money and give it to the poor..."). But I think there's an important nuance here.

You're making it sound like the only group of people that would be affected by this are the folks with $0 in net worth, so that the upside is $100m. In reality, anyone who's ever earned the first $100m (not inherited or won in a lottery), only ended up accelerating their ambition and likelihood of doing a lot more. Case in point - all of the Paypal mafia - they are all working their asses off every single day, and none of them would have had the upside that you're talking about.

In short, your proposal would basically mean that you're going to force into retirement anyone who demonstrates to be a 1000x doer. In the worst case scenario, the opportunities those people would have created would be lost for a long amount of time (eg: creating a domestic automaker that turns the ICE industry upside down). At best, you would be expecting from unproven people who have not yet validated their abilities to execute on those opportunities with the same level of success as the 1000x doers.

So it seems to me that the question is not so much "what could we do with Bezos' money," but more "how much of Bezos' money are we comfortable with not being generated at all to ensure that he never has more than $100m."

  Trustpilot optimizes their SEO to rank for search terms that include the "negative review" phrase.

Once Trustpilot has your profile up on their site, they will quickly start ranking for the "negative" phrase. You will be tempted to squash down those negative reviews by redirecting your positive reviews there, which will then also give them higher ranking for all of your review-related phrases - including the negative one. At this point you're locked in - without your intervention, your average rating on Trustpilot will always be lower than on any other service, and in order to counterbalance that, you will be helping Trustpilot's SEO more than any other service. Game set match.

What to do? I would suggest four main principles:

1. They will eventually get your profile, you cannot escape that. But what you can do is create a profile yourself that will be crippled in SEO (eg: wrong TLD, or slight mispelling, perhaps an extra word, etc). You might have to take several swings at this, but the goal would be to come up with a name for your company that i) ranks for your correctly spelled name in their internal search, but ii) is not competitive in the global SEO race with other companies that have your correct spelling.

2. Pick a different review service that's more honest and will work with you on a good faith basis. I found the BBB to be the most business-friendly of all of them (a bit surprising, I know). They just simply don't operate as a VC-run business that has to grow fast at all costs, and as a result, they won't turn on your like other services do (eg: it's in the services' interest to keep the content on the site, and the BBB will take things down more aggressively than any other service I know). Once you pick your canonical 3rd party review service, make them the #1 in SEO for your name by ensuring that they always have an order of magnitude more content than any other service.

3. You might be pressured to send content to Trustpilot to make up for the bad reviews. Do as little of that as possible, and each time you do that, send 10x more content to your chosen service.

4. Some people (usually those meaning to inflict the most harm) will always choose to leave their 1-star reviews on an external site so that they cannot be taken down. But you can definitely lower that volume by making it exceptionally easy for people to leave a review on your own site. That approach is far more favorable because you have a lot more options to turn the sentiment of the reviewer from negative to positive (assuming you're willing to do some custom coding). You'll still need a 3rd party review service (eg: Yotpo) so that your ratings can show up in Google Shopping etc, but you can collect those by sending all your purchasers that standard "review your purchase" email. If they leave a bad review using that service, you'll have the full context and will be able to react accordingly. Apart from that email, make sure that people can leave a review on your site without having to verify their purchase. In my experience, a substantial portion of customers doesn't realize why unverified reviews are discouraged and often not even available, which drives them to Trustpilot. So regardless if you're using Yotpo or some other service (most of which don't allow unverified reviews), make sure that a customer can click on a "review this product" button right on your site. I'll let you figure out 1) how to make this happen, and 2) what to do if in that case someone selects a 1-star review (hint: put your best foot forward right then and there).

If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.

The way rich people actually show off to other rich people is by doing what's right for their companies, thereby increasing the value of their equity - which then allows them to buy luxury goods and impress other rich people that way.

Another notable YC investment that I always admired was Immunity Project (an attempt to make a free HIV vaccine) - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/immunity-project.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31360098

Points: 25

# Comments: 16

So, yes, doing your own corporate taxes in the US is likely not a good idea, especially if you hire people across several states. But the cost of an accountant is a minuscule cost compared to paying X% more across your entire payroll (not to mention other aspects).

[0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.