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Ask HN: Could 20 tier 1 developers build a billion dollar company in 5 years?

5 points by 999900000999 ↗ HN
As a thought experiment, imagine your a founder and due to a weird tax code thing you can effectively deduct all employed salaries.

You may offer up to 400K TC per employee.

You must have a valuation of at least 1 billion after 5 years.

Alternative challenge.

You are a senior software engineer. You can only offer 75k to junior engineers, and you have up to 20 of them.

You only need to reach a valuation of 10 million after 5 years.

8 comments

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GianFabien
I might be oversimplifying; but it is the product, the founder's salesmanship and connections that might result in a $1b company.

No matter how many brilliant programmers you employ, if the investors don't see merit in the product, vision and market the valuation won't grow.

999900000999
With that many smart people I'm assuming you could chase trends but do them better.

If I wasn't so lazy I would of kept working with machine learning 5 years ago when I first ran into it.

I imagine if I went all in on starting my own company I'd at least have some cool stories.

jarsin
I would think going junior route to 10 million would be way easier. 1B is becoming a unicorn. A very rare occurrence that has to come into existence at just the right time in the right market.
marssaxman
Is it possible? Well, probably - WhatsApp famously had only 32 engineers when they sold the company for $16 billion. But is it likely? Oh, goodness, no.

The second challenge sounds much easier, though I'd trade at least half of those engineers for marketing/biz-dev support.

999900000999
>The second challenge sounds much easier, though I'd trade at least half of those engineers for marketing/biz-dev support.

No, they really want to be software engineers and will quit if you tell them to do different things.

In fact these kids( and at least a few in their 50s) are green. They might not even know how to use git.

marssaxman
Launching an engineering-focused startup with a "we'll figure that out as we go" attitude to the rest of the business is a mistake I will never make again, thank you very much; once in a lifetime was enough.
re-thc
Impossible. You can't even feed yourself and will die before then.

> effectively deduct all employed salaries

This is only useful if you have income to deduct. It's less useful than a fund raise to begin with.

> You can only offer 75k to junior engineers

As above. I have $0 then I can't offer anything to anyone.

> You only need to reach a valuation of 10 million after 5 years

In the past there have been cases of higher valuation from just demos or outsourced MVPs. As long as you have the connections than the engineers. This is valuation not earnings from an actual product.

999900000999
Okay, you raise a good points. From a philosophical perspective, what do you think makes a billion dollar company worth a billion dollars. Is it good staff, good ideas, luck .

Or does it just take a founder with a track record of billion dollar exits...