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Selling yourself for fun & profit [QTB talk]

Selling yourself for fun & profit

trigger warning: open finances

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(as notes)

Austin’s history of making money

Individual work
When
Monthly revenue
Yearly*
Learn Algebra
2012
$30
$0.3k
Tech internships
2015
$10,000
$30k
Google eng
2016
$30,000
$400k
Consulting
2019
$10,000
$50k
Streamlit tech lead
2020
$30,000
$400k
(various side projects)
2022
$200
$1k
One Word
2020
$500
—— now orgs ——
Manifold (prediction markets)
Dec 2021
$18k/y
Manifest (conference)
Jan 2023
$320k, or $60k
Manifund (charity funding)
Feb 2023
$190k/y
Mox
Dec 2024
???

* yearly doesn’t match monthly because not all things go for 1 year

Current stats

  • Austin $1.3m liquid assets, plus $200k Rachel
    • $300k-$600k on stock trades (lifetime earnings)
    • Main illiquid asset is ~10% of Manifold stock, maybe worth $2m
    • Donated: $200k
  • aside: find it interesting that money talk is so taboo. rationalists will tell you all about their sex life but don't share their eg net worth, or salary

Should you charge for things?

  • level 1: default capitalist world, charge for things
  • level 2: EA kind & free world, everything is gratis (eg, EAG)
  • level 3: Rationalist world, charge for value (eg, Lightcone)
  • level 4: think carefully about transaction costs and charge appropriately
    • patio11: “free, or very expensive”
    • (fb messenger is free. maps is free. how does that work?)

Manifest as a case study in pricing

  • default ticket is 500
    • lots of "pricing discrimination" via early bird, volunteer tickets
  • then also supporter tickets, eg $2000
    • (high prices also anchor people)
  • one of the most important ticket prices is negative (paying for great speaker's flights and housing)
  • then: sponsorship tiers, 10k/20k/50k
image

How to price things in life, the universe, everything

Order of magnitude pricing things is a huge edge

(story about Ricki dropping James's macbook and then just pulling out $200? To pay for it)

Quick: what would your prices be to:

  • price a dinner conversation with your favorite famous person
    • Elon Musk, Matt Levine, Trump, whoever
  • price your time, on an hourly/daily/weekly basis
    • to do your profession for a new client
  • price a marriage
    • or eg on the margin, what is an additional year of marriage with the love of your life worth, vs being single for another year
  • price a baby

(instead of costs, it can be useful to think instead “choosing between a world where you have X or $Y in additional money” — what is $Y?)

(spoiler alert, PYOL is great practice for this)

Why this matters

  • prices help you figure out what's important, what to pay attention to
    • order of magnitudes/ballparks
  • prevent you from getting dutch-booked (losing money/value)
    • eg if you value time at $100/hour and a cleaner costs $40/h, hire cleaners!
  • you need prices to be able to sell things
  • prices help you and others agree on contracts, which leads to positive sum transactions.
    • One place where I disagree with straw-Ricki: in the real world trading is positive sum, don’t worry about adverse selection.
    • Even within finance there are massive apparatuses to enable huge amounts of trading, because liquidity is socially beneficial, unlike eg opiods

How to do it? Pretty commonsense: Eg pricing the opportunity of Mox

  • look for comparisons (zillow). See a lot of properties
  • ask around for people who have done similar things
  • price a bunch of things anyways
  • ask Claude (did this a lot for Mox)

note: money is not the biggest component of your assets.

  • (trite but "there's more to life than money")
  • future value of career,: connections, your knowledge & skills, your time are worth much more

Appendix, random topics

What Ricki wants to hear

  • "what are Austin's management, life goal philosophies"
    • Saul's thinking of work & philosophy, have a lot of overlap
  • Conversation on Ricki & Austin on advice or pushing back vs starting a company

automated market makers, uniswap x*y=z vs clob

  • pros: no spread, always available, instant gratification
  • cons: slippage, low liquidity

Why money works well for aggregation/social networks: eliciting more info, people are careful

  • and why it doesn't: imposes a psychological cost to interact with the site (why "play money" is good). (though: habituation works as well as play money -- think paying for a restaurant, or moving money)
  • insider trading
  • how do the best bots on Manifold work (?)

economics of QTB

current economics sucks

  • 16 students times 1500 = $24k
  • Staff time: maybe 4 people working 3 weeks = 12 weeks of prep + teaching
  • = $2k/week. x50 weeks = $100k/y
  • and this doesn't account for: $4k venue fee, all the other costs (food, materials, etc)

what to do about it?

  • 1) go where the money is. corporations are usually willing to pay a lot more than individuals, for things that they want. Manifest is ~50/50 funded by tickets vs sponsorships
  • 1a) job boards. Huge source of value to corps
  • 2) retro funding. Like, here's an option to pay qtb 1k or $500 more just because it was a lot better than expected.
  • 3) ongoing memberships, both support of project (patreon, Scott), and exclusive opportunities. Downside: maybe not scale
  • 4) sell more things to existing QTB people (201)
  • 5) automate heavily. make the trading platform self-serve & educational? videos?

observations

  • selling your time is not generally a good longterm business strategy, because it's bottlenecked on you. In software, cf patio11 on contracting vs productizing