Patrick McKenzie

Here is a, like, a debit card for my business, which I've just spun up on the back end because, like, this is literally my job, which has $10,000 on it.

Spend the $10,000 on anything that accelerates this project.

There is no approval process.

Don't get a receipt.

Don't worry about the paperwork right now.

And why did I do that?

Because we were doing things like, well, okay, the information about where hospitals exist and what their phone numbers are is probably scrapable from the internet for free, or we could buy a commercial database, but that's a stupid amount of money.

It's like $2,000.

I'm like,

Relative to the importance of this project, $2,000 is a trivial amount of money.

Just spend the $2,000 immediately rather than spending like four hours writing a scraper.

And we don't think about that in government procurement and in charities.

We have some sacred virtues about like you must minimize waste.

You must minimize opportunities for corruption.

You must maximize for like the funders of the charities for their money.

line item support of individual things the charity spies.

And those sacred virtues conflict with winning.

And at the margins where they conflict, we should choose winning.

We should choose human lives over reducing corruption.

Like,