Patrick McKenzie: evaluation

Transcript context

…You go back to commission versus omission. It's the exact same reason that we shouldn't have blamed Google if they got involved, did it themselves, and maybe made a mistake. Like come on, to remove the bottleneck that was basically stopping all global economic activity and causing millions of deaths. you had to take money out of your daughter's college fund. It's so insane. There's a positive takeaway here. There is one tiny actor who understands that he has unitary control over some decisions, and who is capable of betting boldly on those without a huge amount of process when it is important to bet boldly on things. Not to toot my own horn here, but this is literally what happened. On the first day, we're getting in Discord together and there's a bunch of infrastructure we have to sign up for. We have to get hosting, etc. There is an annoying mechanical step at this point where you have to put down a credit card, for a potentially unbounded expense. People were like, “there's a list of things that we want to do. Since there is no money here, I'll take this one and you take this one.” After I heard this conversation go on for two minutes, I said,”this is not a conversation we should be having. Here is a debit card for my business which I've just spun up on the backend. This is literally my job. It 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.” Why did I do that? “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 four hours writing a scraper.” We don't think about that in government procurement and in charities. We have some sacred virtues like, “you must minimize waste. You must minimize opportunities for corruption. You must maximize for funders’ line item support of individual things that charities buy.” Those sacred virtues conflict with winning. At the margins where they conflict, we should choose winning. We should choose human lives over reducing corruption. One of the few things we are reflecting on is the tremendous amount of waste and fraud that happened with PPP loans and other pandemic stimulus things. I'm not just saying this to be contrarian, folks. We should be glad there was waste in COVID stimulus. If there was no waste, we were clearly not choosing the right margin to focus our efforts on. I want to clarify this for people who don't have context on how much money typically goes around in Silicon Valley. They think, "oh, $1.4 million. How hard should that be to raise?" If you right now, given your reputation, literally tweeted out, "I'm not going to tell you my idea but I'm raising a $50 million seed round," that's going to get filled. People don't understand. I have friends who are 16 years old who have some GPT wrapper and they don't have to worry twice about raising $1.4 million.…

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