Patrick McKenzie

And one of the few things we were reflecting on is the tremendous amount of waste and fraud that happened in the PPP loans and other corona stimulus things.

And I'm like, okay, I'm not just saying this to be contrarian, folks.

we should be glad there was waste in like COVID stimulus.

If there was no waste, we were clearly not choosing the right margin to focus our efforts on.

Not trying to brag, folks.

Just telling you the reality of Silicon Valley and also the reality I put in the document.

I have some knowledge of how seed funding would work if I attempted to raise seed funding for a for-profit company.

And I thought originally...

We're probably going to be charitable, but I'm going to pitch this to people as essentially like a seed investment, which they expect to like spend all the money as quickly as possible and go to zero while driving the total addressable market of the company to zero.

But I'm bummed.

This is what passes for humor with me.

And so I told folks pretty confidently in the first couple of days, I'm pretty sure I can get us $8 million.

And then I was actually able to deliver on 1.2 after far more tooth pulling.

But like, yeah, descriptively, if I was asking for a seed stage investment, if I wanted to get $8 million wired by tomorrow, I think I could probably do that.

And that is a civilizational inadequacy because like you can literally get $8 million for a blank check for something that has a profit motive behind it.

But if I write on the check, hey, we want to fix the manifest inability of the United States to figure out where the COVID files are, that blank paper becomes less valuable by the fact of writing that.

So maybe on reflection, I just shouldn't have told people and said, oh, the blank check company was this thing and we're making it a 501c3, which some ethics issues in that, but the ethics issues are less bad than allowing people to die.

So discounting to zero is like the opposite of wisdom here because we didn't accomplish zero.

We accomplished a...

extremely impressive thing in aggregate, which vastly underperformed like the true thing that we were capable of.