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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

> This is explicitly a focusing effort for me. I could write a $20M check myself, but knowing that other people's money is on the line engenders a greater sense of discipline and determination.

Dude doesn't even need the money...

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In the companies I've seen that are funded by the founder directly, the founder winds up with an unhealthy (actually, toxic) personalization of the company. It quite literally belongs to him, and he treats the employees accordingly.

that's a function of Silicon Valley personalities and the narcissism. When normal people run such a company we call that a family business

Silicon Valley certainly doesn't have a monopoly on those traits. I've known some seriously psychotic family businesses too.

I have unfortunately experienced exactly what you describe.

Getting someone to invest in your idea is also a good way to demonstrate to others that your idea is worth investing in, a signal that isn't nearly as strong as when you invest in it yourself.

Best humble brag I’ve ever seen.

If you liked that you'll love the Lex Fridman interview.

I watched some clips from the interview, good stuff. I personally don’t like Lex’s interviewing style though, so I couldn’t watch the whole thing.

Glad I'm not the only one. I'm 90 minutes in and finding some of Lex's questions really bad. Especially "What is the best programming language?", but I'm also astonished that Lex doesn't seem to know what an x86 is, hasn't really heard of Pascal, and was incredulous that anyone could write a game in assembly language (but as Carmack points out, everyone in the 80s was writing games in assembly, BASIC just wasn't fast enough).

Maybe Lex was trying to dumb things down for a non-technical (or younger?) viewer, but it doesn't come across that way and just interrupts Carmack's flow. Carmack is excellent though.

Yeah, bad questions is one part of it. Lex also tends to interject with his own observations or anecdotes that end up interrupting the guest's flow. I'm tuning in because of the guest, not the host. In a guest-oriented format like this, I feel like the goal should be to get the guest to talk. It's just a personal preference for me, so YMMV.

Doesn't strike me as a humble brag at all. He just seems self-aware about how he's motivated and that that he functions better when it's someone else's money on the line.

Oh, I understand the intention.

When it isn't about the money, it is usually the credibility and influence that VCs can provide. Looking at the list of investors, of course Carmack would want to have them attached to the project, if for no other reason than to make raising the next $100M a cakewalk.

Using VCs as an accountability partner is interesting. He should have taken investments from not already rich supporters, to feel even more motivated not to let them down.

Has there been an AGI kickstarter before? Like, the supporters gets access to the models developed etc.

IIRC Medium was similarly funded with VC, and founders specifically decided not to fund it themselves and treated external capital as an accountability mechanism.

Well if company still failed it would be case of not already rich to poorer than before people who supported this endeavor.

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