Who is this for?
- if you have a track record of making stuff happen
- if you’re thinking about starting a nonprofit
Why build a small business? (instead of a nonprofit)
- Much better feedback loops
- Money ⇒ scaling up
- Faster learning ⇒ career growth
- More contact with reality
- Concrete wins are good for diversifying the movement
- Easy to go from company ⇒ nonprofit, harder the other way
- Big examples obv are Dustin Moskovitz, Bill Gates
- More “locally”, Lincoln Quirk of Wave
- I haven’t really seen anyone go the opposite direction…
Aside: more nonprofits should see themselves as selling goods and services, rather than raising donations. Lighthaven’s doing a reasonable job of this.
Why serve the gray tribe?
“gray tribe” = rationalist, EA, Bay Area/London/NYC hubs. Reads blogs, drinks Soylent. AstralCodexTen, LessWrong, EA Forum, Marginal Revolution.
- We have a lot of money
- Tech money, crypto money, (soon) AI money
- Good feature of a customer to have
- Business value is roughly # customers x $ size of customer; if $ size goes up you can do less sales and marketing
- Good for fundraising, investment
- Early adopters: open to weird, novel ideas; willing to beta test stuff
- You understand the customer profile, can dogfood
- (tbh this post might be very selfish: “make more things for Austin, I can pay you”)
- High degree of trust within gray tribe
- Good for distribution! see Lantern,
- Your customers are smart, like you. This is fun!
Meta ideas
- Things that take risk more seriously (esp covid: masks, microcovid, UV)
- Leans into cutting edge, innovation, tech (Lantern Bioworks)
- Relies on analysis
Ideas
Todo: flesh out, send out draft
- Products
- Far UVC
- Indoor air quality
- Remote setup (h/t Ben Kuhn)
- Services
- UV installation (h/t Jefftk)
- Surrogacy (h/t Ajeya Cotra)
- Conference organizing
Caveats
- Understand the differences between “oh that’s a cool idea” and “I needed this yesterday and can give you a down payment now”
- Maybe focus less on a specific idea/solution and more on a problem area or customer profile.
- I don’t know if “RFP lists” for startups like YC’s have done much
- See Paul Graham on startup ideas
- Some of the stuff might be kind of weird/path dependent/not especially robust (lighting…?)
- Some of these might not scale to VC-backable startup, if that’s what you care about
- Though: many could! And venture isn’t everything.
- Don’t charge for everything
- Some things have network effects, and you can figure out pricing later
- it’s good that LessWrong started out free
- famously, “free” means people feel some social obligation to reciprocate with favors; “cheap” discharges that
- cf patio11: have two prices, free and very expensive
- Handles the “transaction cost” problem
- Many things started by good gray tribe folks have mysteriously failed
- Metamed
- Atlas
- Cate Hall’s vaccine thing
- Elena’s matchmaking; Manifold.love
- cf where are the successful rationalists
Existing examples
Personal examples:
- Manifold
- Manifest
- Manifund
Other examples:
- Brighter
- Constellation, Far AI
- Lightcone
- Lantern Bioworks
- Chris Deneke: Gene Editing
- Personal assistance seems very in demand
- Chris Lakin, Ida Mayer: coaching, productivity, therapy
- Beeminder
- LEARN
- Ricki’s Trading Bootcamp; Ross & Max’s Poker Camp
- Asterisk Magazine
Appendix
- Wave: Why you should start a startup serving developing countries
- (this post is the inverse of that)
- YC’s RFPs
- Fin Moorhouse’s list of ideas