Yep, if anything good comes from this open letter it will be from people in his own demographic (investors) reading, internalizing, and acting on it.
They'll retweet to get more follows.
They'll +1 and forget about this.
They'll brag about some lab-grown meat investment that is really 0.01% of their portfolio that's chock full of productivity apps and luxury home goods.
They'll broadcast "we invest in the boldest founders changing the world with science and tech innovation", then back yet another consumer goods startup that literally perpetuates the economic challenges this article suggests to fight.
> I very much wish to thank John Collison, Patrick Collison, Paul Graham, Reid Hoffman, Fiona McKean and Tobias Lütke, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Chris and Crystal Sacca for their generous support of this initiative
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/fa...
In the intervening week, $7m in funding was distributed:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/fa...
It will be interesting to see what returns society gets on this $7m.
But in general, I don't think we should be expecting VCs to fund innovation, it is hard to capture most of the value of most innovations, so you end up with VCs writing about how you need to seek monopolies.
Funding innovation is something we should be asking more of our government.
Otherwise this is just someone with the freedom to sit around rambling at length trying to look woke
The model of investing he got rich on is part of the problem
Is he actually going to change that or peddle warm fuzzies and never follow up?
Academia knows where the problems are
States know where the problems are
Pay taxes and they can get on it right away
What is it with rich guys who think they’ve suddenly figured out exactly what societies already well known problems are?
What is it with sycophantic men who kowtow to rich daddy types? The professional world I live in is pretty disgusting with its reverence for wealth stolen from workers who do the actual manual labor to enable his creature comforted up the arse life
See Trump & Kushner
Math models show financial success is luck and government collusion
Limbic brain function takes on a habit of connecting to facts from past success stores in the cortex, to convince the person that their literal agency will always lead to success
And society continually rewards past success even in the face of nothing but failure in other endeavors
Again, see Trump and all the CEOs and hedge funds that keep being bailed out
But I agree, if we look back at this letter in six months to a year and find that he's still driving investments in more lucrative but less useful things, then yeah I agree, he can cram it up his arse.
I also think actual money-where-your-mouth-is actions like the investment in capacity to produce vaccines that Bill Gates is making are way more useful for people with these big megaphones and wallets (but apparently it also makes you a target for the currently in power political faction because the leader of that faction is actually a spineless follower of society's worst impulses, but I digress). But maybe a statement of purpose like this open letter is better than nothing...