4. On Elevator Pitches and Community-as-a-Product. Ready. Fire. Aim.

Dear Co-creator;

We have officially started our journey. Iacta Alea Est, Ad Astra per Aspera!!!

Some threads (no, not the Meta kind, and boom triple entendre) are becoming clear in our journey. One is the community. Community-as-a-Product (CaaP– you heard it here first). Web3 talks much about community as decentralization is the maxim over there. Having dabbled in the Stanford DAO, I borrow the concept of CaaP from that world. Ultimately community is not just about tech anyway, it is a cooperative with a mission in our formulation. The UX in Web3 is so uninviting that you have either the die-hards with the mission of decentralization (whether it is ownership or sexy tech) or you have the ponziers whose mission is just want to make easy money. Our cooperative needs to have a bigger and more valid mission both from a commercial and public good perspective.

So here is the meta elevator pitch: We, the affiliated People, have come together (=cooperative) to create some stuff that we ourselves will use (=first order beneficiary, first order liability), such use will be commercially lucrative (=sustainable for us), and will create good for the world.

The industry that we pick becomes somewhat secondary in this formulation, a beach head almost. If you have an affinity, or trust in the community (compare that to the trustless formulations in crypto), then the cooperative can do more things together. After all, the members of the community will be the number one customer. The teacher and the doctor would help each other in the old days, and the shopkeeper would also buy from the town’s only shop. Pricing was such that it incorporated trust and sustainability. This is important. (Next 5 paragraphs are skippable. Complex? Yes. Complicated? Unfortunately).

Cryptocurrencies solve trust issues inherent in the intermediaries much like cash does. One could argue that when you strip away all the technological conveniences of a digital currency, it is very much like the good old “trustless” cash in spirit. One could also argue that if you trust the central bank (and you are kind of forced to trust the central bank given the social contract backed by guns), then a digital currency stored in the database of a central bank is arguably a better technological solution than a cryptocurrency stored in the databases of everyone. Humanity has experience with both trustless and trustful store and transfer of price when trust is defined solely in the context of the intermediaries. One is either trusting the instrument itself (cash, gold, tea leaves), the central ledger (digital cash), or the decentralized ledger (cryptocurrency).

What if there was inherent trust between the parties due to some sort of an affiliation or relationship? What would the value and store of exchange for such trust look like? We are no longer looking at obvious price exchange but value exchange. Would the system still be better off assigning a purely “financial” value to every single interaction and price things in a trustless or fiat medium? Or would there be fuzzy and emergent properties based on such trust that can never be financialized? Can this new method of price transfer also affect value itself, and its transfer?

If you reduce hard enough, all exchange of value comes to a human-time-based unit, and fiat is extremely crude when human-time employs trust (or any other virtue). Consider lifetime value and the properties of exchange with your child. You may pay her minimum wage for household chores when she is young. You may leave her your entire net worth when she is old. Given the relationship (and trust), fiat money is not a good exchange of value in your relationship as her one hour may be as low as the price of a song and as high as the sky. Since you are “affiliated” with your child, she might even consider payment in kisses and hugs.

They say money can’t buy everything. Fiat sure can’t. But perhaps another store and exchange of value might do a better job when it is not easy to “price” the properties of the exchange cleanly.

One hour of the world’s richest person should surely be more expensive than the wasteland scavengers in Maputo, right? Perhaps, but not to the tune of 1 billion-to-1. Studies show that there is a lower and an upper limit to material riches as a determinant of happiness, and the ratio (in the US example) seems to not be more than 100 magnitudes. Society’s answer to the great disequilibrium has been taxes. The fact that it has been working in some places (North European countries have been a perennial favorite), and not in a lot of other places seem to come down to “trust.” With whom do you do the exchange and the nature of such exchange are infinitely more important than with what you do the exchange. Cryptocurrencies solve the price transfer problem, but the real problem lies in the value transfer.

Enough pseudo philosophy. I think you get the idea: we are creating a cooperative that will use AI to scale!

What will be our beachhead? Here are five ideas as promised for your vote. You will help me reduce them to two and we will spend the rest of July on them.

1) Federal Credit Union: a bank for the community. Concept already in existence so nothing new here, we just optimize it for our global community, sex it up with tons of cool tech (already have most of it), and incorporate AI as a personal financial advisor, to comply with regulations, etc. I wrote quite a bit about it in my first letter so take a look (Thanks Vladimir for helping shape the idea, and an ability to work with you software).

2) “How are you?”: Your AI Medicine Woman asks you how you are every morning. And takes it from there as a doctor in your pocket. Well, more like a health technician that is adept at keeping your data and providing it in perfect form to your physician. No physician, well you are in luck because it can refer you to fee-paying physicians. It doesn’t need a license to give you alternative medicine ideas. Beachhead to the personal assistant of the future. Since it is a community product, anonymized private health data at scale which is extremely valuable accrues back to the members. I wrote about this also, so take a look at the previous newsletter. (Thanks Alpay, Riza, Tolga and my Android robot for helping shape the idea.)

3) ClaimCarbon: A holistic “solution” platform for the community to help fight climate change. The carbon market has challenges about transparency, methodologies, cost/value inconsistencies, insufficient impact, resource inefficiency and scaling up with limited removal options obstructing organizations' climate change net-zero goals. On one hand, the deployment of nature based solutions and the novel technologies needed to reach the offset 1.5°C target is a huge challenge. Innovative solutions are needed to streamline processes, ensure integrity, and generate lasting environmental and societal benefits. I know, it is mouthful, but allow me illustrate: Imagine our community finds 1,000 farms that can integrate XYZ technology into their methods for better yields that results in carbon credits. Farm (marketing)+technology (cost) =yields (revenue for farms)+carbon credit (revenue for ClaimCarbon). So we better get cranking on finding nature based solutions and farms for our platform along with funding for the cost and a customers to sell carbon credits. Complex? Sure. Complicated? No. And we may be able to work with my friends at Carbonaires. (Thanks Pinar for the idea and all the work you have already done).

4) EdTechPlaceHolder: I wrecked my brains about this the most and have worked quite a bit in ed tech in the past both as an entrepreneur and as an investor. Can’t find anything and too burned to be cavalier about an AI teacher. Why? Because people don’t want education per se. They are forced to do it via credentialing. Kids want education because of their natural curiosity but also because they are forced to do it by their parents (and the system). I would rather help Khan Academy with their ChatGPT push than create my own teacher though. No? Some in our community (and I, of course, as AddShortcut is about accessible education) are passionate about ed tech so I am presenting this option in case you want us to continue looking and not give up on education. Also I asked my sister from another mother, Eve Psalti, Senior Director @ Microsoft Artificial Intelligence what AI company she would start if she wasn’t busy doing the most work in AI for the world already. We haven’t had the conversation yet, but I bet she will say education of some sort. I’d do what she says in a heartbeat.

5) City-Based Community-Solar Utility Company: Last idea is very specific. Because I can’t get it out of my head for the past 10 years. I almost got $100m from the World Bank for the City of Izmir (5m metropolitan) in 2017 to put solar on 5,000 rooftops and tie them to the grid via the municipal mechanics (was advising the mayor). It had awesome feasibility then and cost decreased considerably since and yet there is no city-wide apartment solar solutions at scale. Complex? Very. Complicated? Hell no. So we pick a city, do the feasibility, get funding, hassle with the politicians, and start a “utility” company. Crazy? You betcha. Remember, though, I almost did it once and the reason I couldn’t had nothing to do with tech or business (long story ☹). Where is the AI you are asking. Fuck I know. Yet. How about some ML that does load balancing optimization on our unique grid?

My soon-to-be shareholders (who are also allegedly in our Slack) vote on their preferences and get future shares as per our rules in my incentives newsletter. Vote and earn. How? Right after the paywall in our Premium Members section. Not a premium member? Ask for it nicely and I will gift it to you. Also I stopped complaining about not hitting 1,000 in our community. Gotta roll with that defeat for now. It’s not you, guys, it’s me ;-).

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