Note: This was a prompt for the application to the Future Forum. Reposting here in case someone decides to hand me $10m to spend.
I would poach 20 of my friends from the Silicon Valley FAANG circuit, and start 7-10 startups of 2-3 people each. Each person gets $500k in exchange for 7% investment (suggested: 2 years of salary at $150k/year, plus $200k for spend on hiring/compute/other stuff), to work on a tech project. Project ideas:
- Public goods funding, scientific funding mechanisms
- Universal job application for EA jobs
- Better institutional governance mechanisms (see Holden Karnofsky on "Why Nonprofit Boards Are Weird)
- Microcovid-type calculators for other areas of life (jobs, marriages, exercise, productivity)
- Economic concept simulators/games providing an intuition for things like diminishing marginal returns, land value tax, comparative advantage
The people I would poach:
Name | Link | Tags |
|---|---|---|
Alex Lien | www.linkedin.com | |
Ida Mayer | idamayer.com | |
Vlad Sitalo | www.linkedin.com | |
Nicky Case | ncase.me | |
Adrian Marple | www.marplebot.com | |
Aella | aella.substack.com | |
Sam Stowers | www.dozy.health | |
Shawn Xie | www.linkedin.com | |
Derek Pankaew | www.linkedin.com | |
Sam Chung | www.linkedin.com | |
Maged Ahmed | www.linkedin.com | |
lsusr | www.lsusr.com | |
Kyle Tan | ||
Devon Zuegel | devonzuegel.com | |
Peter Hua | www.linkedin.com | |
Hansen Qian | www.linkedin.com | |
Quan Zhou | www.linkedin.com | |
Agrippa Kellum | precog.markets | |
Eric Zhang | www.ekzhang.com | |
Roger Chen | rogerhub.com | |
Linus Lee | thesephist.com | |
Angie Chen | www.linkedin.com | |
Lawrence Luk | luk.xyz | |
Michael Liu | www.linkedin.com | |
Evan Ye | www.linkedin.com | |
Tina Zheng | www.linkedin.com | |
Eric Luttman | ericluttmann.com | |
Dan Schwarz | www.linkedin.com | |
Kimberli Zhong | kimberli.me |
Other awesome folks
- Anna Wang
- Ted Suzman
- Ben Cogan
- Conor Barnes
- Barak Gila
- Keri Warr
- Peter Hartree
Retroactively fund:
- Vipul Naik
- Microcovid
- Berkeley coworking space
- Agrippa