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I’ve raised for and run two moonshot concepts that failed.

Now I work on an enterprise saa. Much happier with the saas, but maybe it is a life stage thing.

Really fascinating - can you talk a little bit more about your experiences?

You always hear about trying moonshots but I’ve never heard someone who went reverse and was happier!

I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but as someone who also started (and failed) a moonshot company I can chime in. To grossly oversimplify, failure (especially when you put everything into something) can make people jaded. The breaking point for everyone is different, but eventually you just don't want to try the pie-in-the-sky idea because you remember how painful the failure is, how many years of your life you lost, how many relationships damaged or ruined, personal debts accrued, etcetera.

At some point you want to minimize stress and just take an easy job that pays a shitload of money and you value your free time more than your career.

But I've been wondering, why not make the shitload of money first, and once you've got many years saved, then go off and do a moonshot?

The usual explanation is something about lifestyle and mortgages and children and so on, but whether you earn the money in your 20s and do a moonshot in your 30s, or do the moonshot in your 20s and earn money in your 30s, don't you wind up at the same place either way?

I think the darker take on it is that as you get older you realize that things are harder and you're not as dumb. Mortgages and children are a polite way of saying "I know how stupidly hard that is, I like spending time with my wife and kids and family and I'm going to actively choose a quality life over an impactful life."

I tell people to only start a startup, and definitely only start a moonshot startup if you can't help but let your ambition destroy your happiness. Things at Apollo are going really well, and it has been ~5x more stressful than when I was working at a really fast paced and successful US company. It's probably ~15x more stressful than when I was working at a laid back US tech company. You do it because you have to see what you're building in the world.

The answer is that you’re right. I did the money first, and since then working on moonshot stuff has been a lot more enjoyable that what I typically see here.

The challenge and stress of the moonshot never goes away, but the stress is more “intense trek through the mountains” and less “my family is going to starve and my friends hate me. “

"Intense trek through the mountains" is more like a vacation when you go through real stress while building your company.

> why not make the shitload of money first

Because it is very very hard to get to "fuck you"-money and passive income often isn't quite as passive as it seems.

I went the other way. I did a moonshot, made great connections, had a few years of fun, learned tons, but also had horrible years and had no financial security after a decade of unceasing work.

I managed to get a mid level leadership role for a huge tech company. I no longer think about mortgages or tuition, I’m a million times less stressed out, and I enjoy my life.

It’s common but it’s not “sexy” to say fuck it, I want a sure thing for a while.

Totally, I can't imagine having started this business and moving to Nairobi with a couple kids and a mortgage. I think moonshot businesses are in many ways the privilege of the young and at least modestly financially stable.

>One of the excellent things about YC is how they are completely unphased by moonshots.

I have never seen YC as a company investing in moonshots. Most of the companies that get accepted seem to be building products for developers or similar saas businesses. Some of their recent biotech investments are a bit more cutting edge, but full of moonshots, YC is not.

It's hard to keep up with all the companies they have funded but looking briefly here are a few along those lines:

Momentus - space propulsion, handy I guess for shooting towards the moon

Cruise and Embark - self driving cars and trucks

Helion and UPower - nuclear fusion and fission

Boom - supersonic aircraft

Ginko and Atomwise - custom designed organisms and drugs

Rigetti - quantum computing

Nectome - mind uploading

and I'm sure there are quite a few more

They're VCs. They have to bet on moonshots, because they bet on a lot of companies, most of which fail. If they don't bet on crazy ideas, it means the few that succeed, will only succeed like a "regular" company would succeed - with some nice just above positive cashflow, growing in the next 20 years to somewhat sustainable business - nice and slow. This will not fuel financing other 100s of companies that have failed.

What they need in every company they fund is at least a potential of astronomical exponential fast growth, if it succeeds. That's why many of these can be called "moonshots".

If the upside in a company is only to be "mildly successful" - they are not for VCs. The upside has to be explosive (even if there is a low chance of it).

Yah, but I don't know if it's really fair to lump all VC businesses into the same bucket. Weebly and Boom don't same like the same kind of risk.

Also YC seems to have changed in that regard under Sam Altman compared to PG. The old YC did very well with web startups like Airbnb and Reddit but they didn't have the nuclear fusion and supersonic aircraft. It remains to be seem if YC succeeds with the latter stuff but well done to them for trying.

Earl I’m so so glad you did, and it’s been such a fun ride to witness.

+1 to your experience of the role YC plays, and +1 to what y’all are doing at Apollo

Thanks!

>>One of the excellent things about YC is how they are completely unphased by moonshots.

On the other hand, it's not like they're betting the farm on a moonshot. They've funded over 1400 companies so they can afford to take chances, $150K for 7%. Who knows...after all they make their money of very few companies.

I'm not sure I'd call that a moonshot. Difficult and maybe crazy, but modern agriculture clearly already exists and works, unlike driverless cars for example.

I mean... we're trying to end human hunger for a few hundred million people. Thank you for believing in us? No one has ever told me that it sounds more plausible than driverless cars. I'm torn between puffing up my chest and taking the compliment.

That's a moonshot. I am a native Nairobian, and would like to know how you will revolutionize the sector. Biggest employer, biggest component of GDP but still extremely low yields, low income and inefficient with lack of adaption of tech.

Agricultural Inputs Procurement, Distribution, and Financing + Uber-style remotely managed field agents + ML Credit Ratings + off taking/market access

Basically, we start from "What is the best/highest ROI product we could sell a farmer" and then work backwards to make the rest of the business happen. It's required a ton of infrastructure and ground game, things that people in the developed world take for granted are huge problems here.

Let's get coffee?

It seems to me that if you want to do this right, you ought ot be thinking about how you can bootstrap the infrastructure and industry to produce the neccesary products and agricultural inputs locally.

Also, can you make it sustainable. AFAIK, industrial farming is destroying soil quality in nations that use it, and some farmers are looking at returning back to techniques like crop rotation...

The good news is our farmers are way too poor to put too much fertilizer/inputs into their fields, they're generally applying fertilizer with a spoon seed by seed.

To be honest, we're not going to tell farmers that they should pay 4x more to produce their inputs locally. These are some of the poorest people in the world, telling them they should continue to have a hunger season every year because of long term concerns about soil quality isn't in me. If you want someone to help lobby for a nitrogen tax in the developed world though, I'm your guy :) .

Good to know you're thinking about these kind of things :) I think your definitely trying to do a good thing :)

It is true: right at this very moment, billions of people have enough food do eat. It is a worthy task to try to extend that to the hundreds of millions who are not there yet, but it's hardly something that has never been done before, unlike driverless cars.

That doesn't mean it will be any easier (or harder), but it does mean that it is less of a "moonshot".

Yah, it might also be different connotations on moonshot. If you believe a moonshot has to be something new + unlikely/hard then it's definitely not a moonshot. If you think a moonshot is something that's just incredibly unlikely but potentially super valuable, it definitely is.

Empirically, at least two investors who had put money into successful early-stage driverless cars and one who put money early into Planet Labs thought what we were doing was going to be harder. For some VCs, Africa might as well be the moon.

To me one implication of a moonshot is that you're aiming to hit a small target, and a miss is a miss no matter how close you get.

You made "end[ing] human hunger for a few hundred million people" your goal, but it isn't the case that anything short of that equals complete failure. Even if you only got a fraction of the way that'd be a massive success in my view.

Totally, and it that sense not sure if we would count. There probably isn't much of a sustainable space in below a few hundred k though.

Here’s a quick question, what makes you think it’s the lack of technology that is the cause for poor farming yields? What makes you think it’s not due to property rights and rule of law?

If you went 50 years in to the future and came back with X widget for farming and just dropped it in random place in South Sudan or Niger, I don’t think they would just become farming power houses.

When we talk about basic ag tech, we're not talking about drones or robots, we're not even talking about mechanization, it's mostly fertilizer and seed breeding.

- The accumulated knowledge of crop science is pretty strong, it's not a secret what the limiting factors in cereals crops are.

- Empirical results (see groups like The One Acre Fund, extensive research farm results in the region, high confidence RCTs leave basically no doubt)

- For US farmers prior to ~1930, they had the same average yields as Kenya does currently. In fact, fertilizer usage and yield have a very strong correlation and Kenya has a very similar curve.

Are there factors besides inputs that can impact yield? Absolutely. You could see from satellite imagery the places where conflict reached in Syria by harvest time as that conflict was developing. Market access and infrastructure in Kenya are super hard also, fertilizer is more expensive in rural Kenya than it is in the United States even though the consumers are much poorer.

Basically, there are certainly places that we're not a good fit for. I don't think we could operate in places with active conflicts like South Sudan, but Africa's a real big place. Kenya is quite stable and has effective if not formalized property rights for most smallholders. The thing I always try to remember is that America had very similar problems. The area that is now the great bread basket of the world also used to be referred to as "The Wild West."

That doesn’t address the core issue of rule of law and property rights though. Pick any number of countries in Africa and air drop them ag-tech that’s 50 years into the future. I don’t for a second believe that it would cause much of anything to change or improve.

Your US example appears to have been constrained by the current tech and knowledge of the day. In Kenya like you bring up, they aren’t limited by those things but rather lack of rule of law and property rights. So how can you compare them apples to apples?

This isn’t a chicken or egg thing. Rule of law and property rights are the necessary condition to allow people and society to grow and flourish. You can’t skip those necessary steps.

I mean look at the agricultural output for Zimbabwe for reference.

Hey, I'm sorry but I truly don't understand what you're trying to say. I want to try and understand where we disagree, because to me that usually indicates we're having a communication failure. I think this is an empirical question and I feel like it's been settled at every level, and so I'd like to understand at what level we're disagreeing.

Things I believe:

- At the plant level, crop science has shown fertilizer and seed breeding are by far the dominant factor that control the first 75% of yield above wild types of maize/corn.

- One Acre Fund RCTs have shown that providing seed and fertilizer substantially improve yield outcomes.

- At the macro level, the development path of most countries that have transitioned out of agricultural economies have correlated extremely well with fertilizer usage. From the US to China, yield correlates really, really well with fertilizer usage and minimally with things like rule of law indexes of property ownership.

Which level or statement do we disagree at?