We're building a non-profit sustainable marketplace (read: a sustainable Amazon that gives away all profits to EA charities), it's called BOAS and it's live on boas.co
We're trying to raise funds from the EA community and we're still looking for founders and interns, mostly in software dev/marketing/sales and overall hustling. If you have thoughts on any of those, please email me!
Thanks, Vin
A domain name, a wix store with and a print on demand platform attached to it is something you can set up in a day for less than 50 dollars and in my opinion does not need a grant, unless that grant is 50 dollars. I assume the grant is larger and would support those working on it, but I would have also like that to be for-profit to see if the market demands this. I personally would love to know what the grant size is with a rough breakdown of how it's going to be spent.
Apart from that I'm not against this. The website needs a bit of work if you ask me (I've been an ecommerce marketeer for 8 years). I'm not a fan of the design and I think there are off the shelve themes on wix that would look a lot better, but I know this is just an MVP and things will improve and it's great you're getting this out there early.
Thanks Tristan! I've added the full meaning in the text to avoid confusion and also added BOAS means good.
I think this is a good question to think about. I agree it would continue to be great to endorse the principles rather than the movement. I personally have wondered to what extent I personally and our company should endorse EA, because some of its associations are good, and others maybe not so much. I ended up sometimes talking about EA, but mostly talking about the principles and not actively saying the company or I are EA's. I see a lot of EA aligned companies taking the same approach. This seems like it might be good for both the company, and perhaps also EA, especially if there's bad news around the company, like with FTX right now.
It might be good for the EA movement for this company to show commitment, but it might be bad for this particular company if it leads to bad PR and negative brand associations. It could be net positive to take a hit on your brand if you continue to help people discover EA, but it's also a difficult decision to make when you run a company, and it's hard to find out which weighs heavier: the performance of this company or the influence it has in EA.
Just a note from someone who is an FTX customer.
I moved some of my crypto holding to FTX because I trusted them and Sam and wanted the profits from my crypto holdings to go to EA/FTX Future Fund. FTX have always told me my funds would be secured, I did not trade leveraged funds, so I'm the only rightful owner of that crypto and FTX has likely been using it to make money on leveraged instruments. This seems like fraud, and the optics of this for the EA community, and the already difficult optics of lontermism, seem to me like they will be very bad.
I'm priviliged, my holdings in FTX were 2% of my net worth (I enjoy following crypto) so I'll be fine, but many will not.
At this point FTX turning into a PFG would be very bad optics for the movement and maybe a net negative.
I turned to FTX because I knew what SBF would do with the profits, but many don't know that, and I think they could have done better if they advertised that fact to consumers. FTX has loads of external for-profit capital so that makes it very hard for them to turn to the PFG model in practice though.
Very valid point and the recent news suggest that there might have been fraudulent business practices. If that's the case, or even perceived as being the case (as it is now), Dustin should perhaps not do it.
I've just updated with recent news!
Thanks, I want to clarify that Dustin buying FTX would not be the same as Meta buying FTX.
I didn't know about CZ wanting to donate his wealth, that's insightful. Perhaps EA can try and talk with him about his charitable giving.
The counterfactual is a good reason against the takeover, thanks for als bringing that up. Even if the EV of the takeover is high, but the probability of success low, a failed acquisition might mean EA loses most of its money.
Even if that has extremely low odds of working that seems like it could be worth a try. Ego's have caused many catastrophe's before.
This is a great writeup, and I generally agree we might be underestimating entrepeneurship for ETG.
However, as others said, 2014 onwards seems like a macroeconomic anomaly, and an even bigger anomaly if you focus on just tech startups. YC is predominantly tech, and I think the returns on tech will regress to the mean, so your numbers are inflated there.
The bigger issue is using YC as a baseline. It's incredibly hard to get into YC (they are currently at a <1% acceptance rate) and YC focuses on tech. The average entrepeneur is likely to make significantly less than the entrepeneur who got into YC with a tech startup. I would like to see someone (I'm too busy, sorry) run the numbers on the average entrepeneur/founder in north america or europe, and I think the numbers will be significantly lower.
This is anecdotal, but many incubators and startup advisors mention it's better to work for a corporate or scaleup if you're looking to become rich, the vast majority of founders don't make it.
Having said that, I think entrepeneurship (especially EA entrepeneurship) is still a very compelling story in terms of ETG and expected impact.