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Explaining Impact Markets

brasstacks.blog · 1,028 words · saved by 1 readers

There begins a global effort to build working flibbleflops, and you see some teams of brilliant people starting to work on flibbleflop engineering. But it doesn’t take long for you to notice that the teams keep running into one specific problem: they need money to start (buy flobble juice, hire deeblers, etc), money they don’t have. So, the people who want to build the flibbleflop go and pitch to investors. They offer investors a chunk of their prize money if they end up winning, in exchange for cold hard cash right now to get started building. If the investors think that the team is likely to build a successful flibbleflop and win the billion dollar prize, they invest. If not, not. If you squint, you could replace "flibbleflop" with highly capable LLMs, quantum computers, or any number of cool and potentially lucrative technologies. But if you stop squinting, and instead add the adjective "altruistic" before "billionaire," you could replace “flibbleflop” with “malaria vaccine." Let's

Let’s say you’re a billionaire. You want to have a flibbleflop, so you post a prize: Make a working flibbleflop — $1 billion. There begins a global effort to build working flibbleflops, and you see some teams of brilliant people starting to work on flibbleflop engineering. But it doesn’t take long for you to notice that the teams keep running into one specific problem: they need money to start (buy flobble juice, hire deeblers, etc), money they don’t have. So, the people who want to build the flibbleflop go and pitch to investors. They offer investors a chunk of their prize money if they end u

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