This seems intrinsic: the greatest creative opportunity lies where institutions (inc. the labor market) fears to tread. To some extent they're valuable opportunities _because_ institutions won't operate there.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @DavidDeutschOxf
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
Is that $2k of present-your time, or $2k funding? Hard part there has to be finding people with a 1% chance of being patio12, right?
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I think if you literally showed up at my door in 2007 through 2009 with "Here's $2k cash in yen (and, if I am being totally honest here, social license to quit your day job)" that would have saved me two years of my life / accelerated business trajectory by two years / etc.
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Replying to @patio11 @jtbooth1021 and
$2K wouldn’t have bought you that social license, would it? And with social license, would you need two years to save up $2K in ten on your salaryman salary?
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Replying to @dfabu @jtbooth1021 and
The thing which is obvious to me now but not obvious to me then was that I was the only person who had to be comfortable with me quitting, so if you had delivered a narrative that would have gotten me to sign off on it along with the check, I model it "one coffee or less."
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