I call this Groucho's law: you should never work on any project for which can get funding. Tongue-in-cheek, but there's a grain of truth to it: the easier funding is to get, the more likely something like it would have happened anyway.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @DavidDeutschOxf
Hmm, flipping that about: if you want to be a useful funder, maybe you should never fund a project that anyone else in the world would fund. Which sounds nuts, but has the benefit you're sure any impact was additional.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @DavidDeutschOxf
A thing I feel moderately strongly about and hope to experiment with eventually: the first
$X for some X which funders broadly consider is not just too low to matter but too low for them to even *contemplate a funding decision* would unblock stupendous amounts of value.5 replies 1 retweet 18 likes -
can you rephrase? not sure I'm following (syntactically)
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Can I use a specific example to make it a bit more concrete? Consider a Series A round in venture funding. It might be for about $5 million these days. The cost of evaluation for a successfully closed round is north of $100k when you account for time of the relevant people.
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Replying to @patio11 @catherineols and
It feels plausible to me that you can unlock a lot of good with substantially less than $100k, but the structure that can produce a Series A round can't even contemplate that opportunity. Argument applies to other fields than technology companies and other funding options.
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Replying to @patio11 @catherineols and
I think, even within fields that have high-dollar funding available and assumed to be on the happy path, that there is likely substantial value unlocked by low dollar checks. In fact, I think the lower bound for impactful funding and marginal returns to it are likely *shocking.*
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Replying to @patio11 @catherineols and
There's an old saw about "for want of a nail, the war was lost", but I think that has other-than-metaphorical quality to it. I feel with north of 90% confidence that I could have accelerated my career by plural years for about $2,000 and a cup of coffee, for example.
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Replying to @patio11 @catherineols and
And when I think of some situations I've seen, I have to believe that there are e.g. meaningful research papers which didn't need a grant, they needed ten dollars, in a very, very literal sense.
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the adjacent aspect that's also echoing in my head as I read this is time, e.g. "sometimes the project lead just needs to spend 10 actual dedicated minutes thinking about thing X"
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I ran a business, for years, which was an existence proof that asking one question and providing one default answer could repeatably result in millions of dollars at relatively well-operated companies. (The question: "What should we do re: pricing?" The answer: "Charge more.")
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