Who is this for?

• if you have a track record of making stuff happen
• if you’re thinking about starting a nonprofit

Why build a small business? (instead of a nonprofit)

• Much better feedback loops
  • Money ⇒ scaling up
  • Faster learning ⇒ career growth
• More contact with reality
• Concrete wins are good for diversifying the movement
• Easy to go from company ⇒ nonprofit, harder the other way
  • Big examples obv are Dustin Moskovitz, Bill Gates
  • More “locally”, Lincoln Quirk of Wave
  • I haven’t really seen anyone go the opposite direction…

Aside: more nonprofits should see themselves as selling goods and services, rather than raising donations. Lighthaven’s doing a reasonable job of this.

Why serve the gray tribe?

“gray tribe” = rationalist, EA, Bay Area/London/NYC hubs. Reads blogs, drinks Soylent. AstralCodexTen, LessWrong, EA Forum, Marginal Revolution.

• We have a lot of money
  • Tech money, crypto money, (soon) AI money
  • Good feature of a customer to have
    • Business value is roughly # customers x $ size of customer; if $ size goes up you can do less sales and marketing
  • Good for fundraising, investment
• Early adopters: open to weird, novel ideas; willing to beta test stuff
• You understand the customer profile, can dogfood
  • (tbh this post might be very selfish: “make more things for Austin, I can pay you”)
• High degree of trust within gray tribe
  • Good for distribution! see Lantern,
• Your customers are smart, like you. This is fun!