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.
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.