From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Mar 22 2000 - 12:09:02 MST
>From my reply to Brin:
> - 2 -
>
> It's impossible to make any money off a bright idea for a new business
> unless you are either (1) a venture capitalist, or (2) you have the
> unique high-energy charismatic personality, experience, and credentials
> necessary to found your own startup. However, many of the most creative
> and visionary people, perhaps a majority, do not have the energy
> required to work 16-hour days. In an environment of too much venture
> capital chasing too few ideas, this is absurd.
>
> I'd like to see a Genesis Idea Broker, an Idealab!-like entity, except
> that instead of funding Bill Gross's business ideas, it would accept
> business ideas from private individuals. If an individual's idea is
> accepted, it gets put together with a pre-assembled proto-startup
> containing a CEO and other individuals who have applied to be employed
> by a Genesis Company, and venture capital is added from venture funds
> that have applied to fund a Genesis Company. The visionary goes on the
> Board of Directors as the 'Genesis Director' and gets 5% of whatever the
> CEO gets (in salary, stock, and options). This method could create
> enormous quantities of new wealth, hundreds or thousands of new
> companies, by combining independent and inexhaustible sources of people,
> ideas, and money. You would need creative, intelligent, and pragmatic
> people to filter through the thousands of ideas that would initially
> pour in, and there would be other difficulties, but the first person to
> get it working would be richer than Gates and Croesus.
>
> Initial versions might have a restricted membership of idea-generators
> to cut down on the spam, but you'd have to be very careful to select for
> creativity and brilliance rather than energy and credentials. The idea
> is to tap personalities and modes of thinking that have been ruled out
> by the previous startup selection criteria. There are very fundamental
> cognitive reasons why high-energy, enthusiastic minds - minds saturated
> with the 'positive' emotions - tend not to think in certain ways; and
> obvious social and cognitive reasons why a committee of distinguished
> scientists isn't likely to produce a revolution unless there's at least
> one teenager in the room with them.
>
> Actually, there are many ways that Genesis Idea Broker, Inc. could be
> screwed up so as to duplicate the restrictive idea-selection criteria
> used nowadays, but as Genesis Director of GIB I'd be in a position to
> help keep the vision clean.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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