Apollo – Funding for Moonshots
apolloprojects.com
apolloprojects.com
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
3m will achieve none of that.
And I am not talking just about software - an aerospace, material science, fusion or biotech startup can work with that.
I think the more apt wording is it's enough to get to the next round of funding
Edit: This was an aerospace company too
I mean if I had a plausible 2-year plan on how to fix the image processing part of self-driving cars and autonomous drones, just the knowledge of how I consider that possible might be worth more than $15m to Google, Uber, Skydio, or the DoD.
So to me, this looks more like a glorified way for teams without connections but with a great prototype to get introductions to the "real" investors that'll pony up $100m+
Moonshots are very exciting but also have an incredibly low success rate. Investing in only five companies makes me believe that they're either setting themselves up for failure (unlikely bc these people are smart) or they're trying to fish for startup pitches with a different branding approach.
The section on "Why don't more people start them" was interesting to me. One hugely important thing I don't see mentioned as a possible cause is the failure path (i.e. what happens when you fail, which is the most likely outcome). This is drastically different in 'moonshot' fields than in software startups. In many fields, a failed startup causes permanent career damage, so that's a big reason why people don't start them.
Because of this, I think the founder equity exchange program is a great idea. I would have happily diversified 10% of my stock with other founders, and it would not have de-incentivized us at all.
What was it?
It would be super interesting to know what led YC to abandon HARC, which actually had a membership comparable to the great research efforts of the past [1], in favor of doing things this way. I don't believe they have ever said much about that, it just seemed to vanish.
This is the most telling line in the whole thing. Why? Well, for n=5 to be a useful experiment, the success rate would have to be... way higher than 1 in 100 or even 1 in 10! They're practically asking for people who want to open fast food franchise locations.
This is super cool. I wonder where this idea came from.
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October 12, 2010
Startup Insurance
This post is another theoretical post. Humans by nature are very risk averse. Start-up in itself is very risky with a high probability of failure. Failure in the start up world means lost time, lost opportunity, lost capital, lost confidence and so much more. For some of us we handle these risk pretty well and can perform excellent under these conditions, but for most of us, we would rather have these risk mitigated if we could .
One of the questions I have often pondered was how to succeed at this start up game in one go? How do I mitigate my risk to the point that failure is almost impossible?
Consider VC or even Y-combinator, the way they mitigate their risk is to acquire small equity in a lot of companies. The companies that make a killing pay for those that didn’t make one. Let suppose you had 10million to invest and you are investing 20k into each business for 10% equity and the probability of making 100million is 10%[These numbers were chosen for ease of calculation and only here to illustrate a point] . The probability that you don’t make back your 10million is 1 x 10^-23 reflecting a very minute risk.
In the case above, only the VCs are actually reducing their risk; the startup themselves are still faced with 90% chance of failure. I think startups should basically use the same strategies as VCs to mitigate their risk. Each startup donates 5% equity to what would be the equivalence of an insurance scheme, if somehow your start goes bust, no need to worry cause at the end of period you would be given profits from all the rest companies that participated which should be enough to get you back on your feet."
This is from memory, and I tried to search for a source, but the keywords are practically ungoogleable. Maybe someone else knows more.
It's still fairly early-stage (self funding, saving money by doing a lot myself + hiring Russian aerospace engineers) so if there's anyone here on HN with a spare 20k/100k/1MM they want to spend on awesome futuristic technology, my email's in my profile :)
I'm keeping the specifics of my company under wraps (to everyone but potential investors), but the idea is radically improved long distance transportation here on Earth with a near-zero carbon footprint as one benefit.
I've considered various US gov't funding options, which can be really nice (they don't take any equity & some are pretty lax with how you spend the money) but those take a while to get, and you generally need someone who's got experience writing proposals if you want to have a good chance.
Hiring Russian aerospace engineers worked out great for me so far, but I'm not sure I'd recommend the process to most startups. The biggest thing is that the geniuses that speak English well have all left Russia for various reasons. That leaves you with either non-geniuses, or geniuses with poor English. Usually, they've tried to learn English themselves and didn't get as far as they'd like, so "just hire a language coach" isn't a simple solution here. If you just want a lot of average engineer bodies, though, you can get that for cheap. I imagine it'd be ideal for something like building a tunnel or a bridge, with a lot of routine calculations and established design procedures.
The other big thing is the hiring itself. I got extremely lucky - I'm good friends with a great Russian technical recruiter living in Moscow, who was able to actually find people for me. But even with that huge advantage, it was tough.
If anyone has questions about the process, ask away - the idea of hiring expert engineers/programmers from cheaper countries has always fascinated me, and surprised me with how difficult it is.
Language barrier is not a problem in my case, I am fluent in both English and Russian. I know one can get cheap engineering talent in Eastern Europe, was more curious about your startup idea.
Anecdote 2: Michael Spivak's "Calculus on Manifolds" is famous as the hardest math textbook an engineer will have to tackle. Well, there are major theorems in that book that are "easy" exercises in Vladimir Arnold's Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics.
Irodov by any chance?
> We expect you to have a big vision and a “Tesla Roadster”—a concrete first step, ideally something you can accomplish in a year or two
Seems the $3M is to get to that first step vs. achieve the vision.
I did find it amusing though that "affordable housing" is listed as an example of a moonshot venture, considering the core reason behind high housing costs (in the US at least) is overly restrictive zoning.
Though I guess one could say it would take a venture of that scale to defeat the entrenched and gatekeeping NIMBYs and enable much more housing to be built.
It’s just not a problem capitalism is gonna solve. There isn’t huge profit to be made. Government could solve it.
You don't want to live in government housing when money is tight and some company offers a quick buck to pluck up that hole in the budget. Coops don't have that problem, they can't be sold, as they're owned by their members, which are largely also their renters.
A lot of places around the world have problems with affordable housing. In all those places attempts have been made to solve this issue. If this were an easy problem as many people seem to claim it is (I am not saying you said this) then it would have been solved already. It is not. The people running this fund realize that this problem is a lot harder than what it looks like on the surface.
The other problems with housing are solved pretty well by coops, even though I'm thinking of moving out of mine - providing affordable housing is nice on paper, but it also gets you neighbors that are socially challenged.
But the local government answers to local residents, but new developments don't help existing local residents (home owners), it helps new residents (often immigrants or young people who can't/won't vote).
In the US there is also reasonably cheap housing in large cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago and Indianapolis.
In some large cities on the coast there isn't affordable housing. All these places have market economies. It's just that in places that are really successful if you have restrictive zoning and stop people building housing that people want prices go up.
It's also not just a US thing. In Australia, New Zealand and the UK zoning is also restrictive and housing is much harder to afford.
Allow people to build up and out and markets will provide affordable housing. Restrict the supply of housing and housing prices will shoot up in successful areas.
In New York and other cities, financiers and banks buy up entire apartment blocks and let them stand empty to drive up property prices.
The advantage of the government is it isn’t tied to a profit system.
It's also possible to haul water in - and that's what a lot of people do. There are services that will truck in a few thousand gallons of water and put it in your tank.
Unfortunately the project has been essentially a failure. It was supposed to become self-sustaining and reach 5,000 people, instead at its peak it reached less than 100. Great idea though.
I'm still a little too early with my project to meet the July 11th deadline, and I'd feel ashamed to pitch too early. It's a very ambitious moonshot project, though.
20% for 3M sounds generous for some, but perhaps risky for those that are further along. What do comparable investment offerings look like?
I'm curious as to how historically "charter countries" are significantly different from a model like imperialism, and if I'm entirely off base here what startups would qualify as a success in this category (that I've obviously clearly failed to understand.)
Besides, there is no real history of country creation without violence to assert borders, and a charter country would assert a monopoly on violence within its geographic borders, which can displease a lot of other countries.
> significantly different from a model like imperialism
You can imagine a direct democracy anarchist commune charter country. Which is pretty opposite to imperialism.
P.S. Our moonshot: https://www.exodusorbitals.com
We are working on making space more accessible for everyone, through "satellite-as-a-service" model. We will allow software developers to upload their code to our satellite, creating an application development platform in space.
You can read more about us at our website in parent comment.
I read: https://www.exodusorbitals.com/files/nova_mission.pdf
Will there only be one instance of the "user segment" per Satellite, or will there be one supervisor / bus, with lots of simultaneously running user segments?
The answer to "one or many user segments" will depend on what we will learn from that ESA mission ourselves. Some satellite instruments can be shared simultaneously, some require exclusive access and have to be accessed in sequential order.
The endgame for all of us is large-scale colonization of Solar System.
Strictly speaking, there's nothing that says moonshot startups can't be pure software plays.
This is the same first step needed to support automated testing materials science at a massive scale, which will unlock innovations in battery energy density, photovoltaic energy capture efficiency, construction materials, manufacturing efficiencies, etc.
AI/ML require some way to verify proposed designs, similar to OpenAI's Gym. A physics/chemistry simulator would save massive time by allowing software automation to allow software to run simulations in massive parallel.
I see this as a "human genome" sized project that unlocks massive amounts of basic science.
They're displacing the real thing.
I like incredibly accurate physics/chemistry in reality.
There's so much room for improvement in some fundamentals that would lead to more ideal simulations, seems like some of today's simulations are a bit premature.
[0] https://foldingathome.org/
Edit: Link to project
I think it's interesting that humans can participate in the process of finding relevant solutions, but I think it's more important that any agent can be used to find and test solutions to specific physics/chemistry problems.
My hope was to do for low-level physics what OpenAI does with video games -- using them as simulators for problems and to create competing agents to solve that problem.
This is for the same reason you can't use almost any existing airplane simulator for calculating space travel far beyond the parameters of {gravity near the surface of the Earth, air friction far from STP at sea level, time elapsed as the velocity of the craft approaches the speed of light, heat as the aircraft approaches temperatures far beyond its rating}. A very narrow simulator can make approximate values for these items at the cost of not being very flexible for a wide variety of testing. Example: being able to test the properties of a ton of materials at near 0 Kelvin or near their boiling point would be far cheaper and faster if they were in a digital simulation than if we had to hire specialist workers to find the pure material and create the environment required to mimic those settings.
Which brings me back to why I posted it here, in this moonshot thread and not just some fan article about a flight simulator. I think a general physics simulator is like basic science -- it's a foundation upon all of the other layers of the stack of existence on Earth is based (ignoring temporarily the more complicated things like consciousness, gods, and other philosophies). If someone sinks the cost for the simulator, they could potentially take a royalty of all of the material science breakthrus of all new innovations found using the simulator.
1) Very high-fidelity codes which you’re describing, accurate at the molecular (atomic?) scale are typically never usable in any meaningful sense for macroscopic scenarios. This is usually because they’re either too computationally expensive, taking too long to run even on huge supercomputers, or because we actually don’t know how to bridge the gap between the small and large-scale physics behavior.
2) It’s unclear what you mean by “incredibly accurate”. Different fields have different definitions of what accurate means (as well as different kinds of physics they’re trying to take into account) so your ultra-accurate simulator in one domain might be very off in another. From reading your comments it seems you’re most interested in materials science. That’s not my direct field of expertise but if they’re anything like every other field of science/engineering, there is a very strong division in the field with regards to what kinds of simulations are used where.
3) This is something people usually don’t think about, but stuff like materials research is protected not just by proprietary laws but actual government export control laws. So not only will such a distributed system be looked at with raised eyebrows by corporations, but the US government might move in to shut it down if there’s suspicion that the distributed information is getting to nodes managed by foreign nationals.
In short, there are a plethora of issues related to the scope and objective of what you’re proposing. It would require a Herculean amount of effort for an unclear payoff, unfortunately.
Yup, almost like a virtual moonshot or something . . .
Unsteady aerodynamics alone are one hell of a challenge.
Is there a list of advisors we can see as well?
We need way more things like this.
> A company 1) focused on a significant technological development or complex coordination and 2) that could have a transformative impact on the world.
> EXAMPLES:
> Rapid response vaccines, non-carbon energy, solar geoengineering, VR/AR, biological manufacturing, new education formats, new medicines, affordable housing, and charter countries.
What are some examples of current or past startups that could have qualified for Apollo?
– Boom
– Genentech
– Pixar
– SpaceX
One challenge is that there’s an implicit third requirement for moonshots: 3) transformative potential must be recognizable at the start. Thus, a company that sells BASIC interpreters for the Altair might be missed.
> Rapid response vaccines, non-carbon energy, solar geoengineering, VR/AR, biological manufacturing, new education formats, new medicines, affordable housing, and charter countries.
I think none of these are moonshots except "new education formats"
I think this is a problem.
Moonshot doesn't have to be, we wish this existed.
It should be, this field hasn't had much work and no one has gone down this path, it's about exploring a new world.
VR/AR are done to death for instance and will continue to be done. Someone will just loophole this with a interesting X (that's done to death) and add the word VR to make it sound like a moonshot.
Moonshoot idea - setup a framework that allows people to accurately identify moonshots.