Is Leverage core rebranding to Paradigm Academy? Are the other branches Reserve and Bismarck Analysis?
anonymoose
Karma: 202
[Question] Where are Leverage research staff now?
[Question] To what extent is Paradigm Academy a front organization for, or a covert rebrand of Leverage Research?
after I read this comment I left thinking that Reserve performed exceptionally poorly but..
Your initial impression was correct. Reserve has entered a terrible market and managed to perform substantially worse than its terrible competitors. Since May 24, when Reserve Rights was priced:
the S&P gained 14%,
cryptocurrency at large lost 17%,
cryptocurrencies excluding Bitcoin lost 33%,
while Reserve Rights managed to lose 52.3%.
About two years have now passed since the post. Main updates:
Leverage Research appears to be just four people. They have announced new plans, and released a short introduction to their interests in early stage science, but not any other work. Their history of Leverage Research appears to have stalled at the fourth chapter.
Reserve seems to be ten people, about seven of whom were involved with Leverage Research. Reserve Rights is up by about 160% since being floated two years ago.
Paradigm Research is now branding as a self-help organisation.
Thanks Larissa—the offer to write up posts from Leverage Research is a generous offer. Might it not be a more efficient use of your time, though, to instead answer questions about Leverage the public domain, many of which are fairly straightforward?
For example, you mention that Leverage is welcoming to new staff. This sounds positive—at the same time, the way Leverage treated incoming staff is one of the main kinds of fact discussed in the top-level post. Is it still true that: (i) staff still discuss recruitees on individual slack channels, (ii) mind-mapping is still used during recruitment of staff, (iii) growth-rates are overestimated, (iv) specific lists of attendees are recruited from EA events, and (v) negative rumours are still spread about other organizations that might compete for similar talent? To the extent that you are not sure about (i-v), it would be interested to know whether you raised those concerns with Geoff in the hiring process, before joining the organization.
For other questions raised by the top-level post: (a) are Leverage’s outputs truly as they appear? (b) Is its consumption of financial resources and talent, as it appears? (c) Has it truly gone to such efforts to conceal its activities as described under the general transparency section? (d) How will Leverage measure any impact from its ninth year of operation?
From another post: (e) How many of the staff at Leverage Research are also affiliated with Paradigm Academy? (f) How much of the leadership of Leverage Research is also playing a leading role at Paradigm Academy?
Since your investigations give you much more information on this topic than is available to an interested outsider, it should be very easy for you to help us out with these questions.
You are also incorrect that Bitcoin has returned 1% over the same time period.
Reserve Rights was floated on May 24 according to CoinMarketCap, at which time Bitcoin was worth $7800-$7950, and it is now worth the same amount, so the error must be either with you, or with CoinMarketCap.
Reserve has now lost 50.6% of its value since its float, while Bitcoin has returned ~1% over the same time period.
Leverage Research spent a further $388k in 2017.
At least 11 of 13 Paradigm Academy staff listed on Linkedin are known to have worked for Leverage Research or allied organizations.
The coin made by Reserve (one of the successor companies to Leverage Research) has returned −32.7% since its float at the time of writing. In the same time period, bitcoin returned 24%.