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 | ||
Ida Mayer | ||
Vlad Sitalo | ||
Nicky Case | ||
Adrian Marple | ||
Aella | ||
Sam Stowers | ||
Shawn Xie | ||
Derek Pankaew | ||
Sam Chung | ||
Maged Ahmed | ||
lsusr | ||
Kyle Tan | ||
Devon Zuegel | ||
Peter Hua | ||
Hansen Qian | ||
Quan Zhou | ||
Agrippa Kellum | ||
Eric Zhang | ||
Roger Chen | ||
Linus Lee | ||
Angie Chen | ||
Lawrence Luk | ||
Michael Liu | ||
Evan Ye | ||
Tina Zheng | ||
Eric Luttman | ||
Dan Schwarz | ||
Kimberli Zhong |
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