I’d be curious about the financial aspects: How close is Wave to profitability, has it been difficult to raise money, how much have you raised so far, do you need more funding, do you think the EA ecosystem should provide more funding opportunities for for-profits?
On EA providing for-profit funding: hard to say. Considerations against:
Wave looks like a very good investment by non-EA standards, so additional funding from EAs wouldn’t have affected our fundraising very much (not sure how much this generalizes to other companies)
At later stages, this is very capital-intensive, so probably wouldn’t make sense except as a thing for eg Open Phil to do with its endowment
Founding successful companies requires putting a lot of weight on inside-view considerations, a trait that’s not particularly compatible with typical EA epistemology. (Notably, Wave gets the most of this trait from Drew, the CEO, who, while value-aligned with EA, finds it hard to engage with standard EA-style reasoning for this reason.)
Considerations in favor:
Helps keep the company controlled by value-aligned people (not sure how important this is, I think the founders of Wave will end up retaining full control)
If the companies are good, it doesn’t actually cost anything except tying up capital for a while
Overall, I think it could make sense at early stages, where people matter more and metrics matter less (and capital goes further), but even at early stages there’s probably much more of a talent constraint than a funding constraint.
The Wave business is currently unprofitable, although Sendwave is profitable and has been propping up the mobile money business. We have plenty of runway at this point, but we are likely years away from becoming profitable: mobile money is a very expensive business to start, mainly due to investing in the agent network.
In terms of what EA ecosystem should provide: the best thing would be better support for entrepreneurialism. Support from others probably comes in the form of social encouragement -- I think Founders Pledge is one notable EAish org working on this, as they don’t just get people to pledge but are working on building a network of founders who can support each other in various ways.
I think the ecosystem needs a more coherent theory of corporations doing good with their mission—in particular, there’s a dominant cynical ideology on e.g. Hacker News, where people see that the purpose of a for-profit corporation is to “create shareholder value” and then they assume that the leadership must be sociopaths. In fact, the bulk of companies are trying to do something great for the world and a ton of them succeed at it. I don’t know how to change this perception quickly, but maybe an army of social-media commenters would work :P
What about money? EAs giving founders a little money to quit their job and get started makes a lot of sense to me as well, but I recommend capping “free EA money” to for-profits around $50k or so: money is fungible, and you have good reasons to be in the competitive investment markets by that point—those markets create useful feedback loops for both startups and investors that it doesn’t make sense to diverge from.
I’d be curious about the financial aspects: How close is Wave to profitability, has it been difficult to raise money, how much have you raised so far, do you need more funding, do you think the EA ecosystem should provide more funding opportunities for for-profits?
On EA providing for-profit funding: hard to say. Considerations against:
Wave looks like a very good investment by non-EA standards, so additional funding from EAs wouldn’t have affected our fundraising very much (not sure how much this generalizes to other companies)
At later stages, this is very capital-intensive, so probably wouldn’t make sense except as a thing for eg Open Phil to do with its endowment
Founding successful companies requires putting a lot of weight on inside-view considerations, a trait that’s not particularly compatible with typical EA epistemology. (Notably, Wave gets the most of this trait from Drew, the CEO, who, while value-aligned with EA, finds it hard to engage with standard EA-style reasoning for this reason.)
Considerations in favor:
Helps keep the company controlled by value-aligned people (not sure how important this is, I think the founders of Wave will end up retaining full control)
If the companies are good, it doesn’t actually cost anything except tying up capital for a while
Overall, I think it could make sense at early stages, where people matter more and metrics matter less (and capital goes further), but even at early stages there’s probably much more of a talent constraint than a funding constraint.
The Wave business is currently unprofitable, although Sendwave is profitable and has been propping up the mobile money business. We have plenty of runway at this point, but we are likely years away from becoming profitable: mobile money is a very expensive business to start, mainly due to investing in the agent network.
In terms of what EA ecosystem should provide: the best thing would be better support for entrepreneurialism. Support from others probably comes in the form of social encouragement -- I think Founders Pledge is one notable EAish org working on this, as they don’t just get people to pledge but are working on building a network of founders who can support each other in various ways.
I think the ecosystem needs a more coherent theory of corporations doing good with their mission—in particular, there’s a dominant cynical ideology on e.g. Hacker News, where people see that the purpose of a for-profit corporation is to “create shareholder value” and then they assume that the leadership must be sociopaths. In fact, the bulk of companies are trying to do something great for the world and a ton of them succeed at it. I don’t know how to change this perception quickly, but maybe an army of social-media commenters would work :P
What about money? EAs giving founders a little money to quit their job and get started makes a lot of sense to me as well, but I recommend capping “free EA money” to for-profits around $50k or so: money is fungible, and you have good reasons to be in the competitive investment markets by that point—those markets create useful feedback loops for both startups and investors that it doesn’t make sense to diverge from.