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What to do with $10m

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:

People Iā€™d fund

NameLinkTags
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