Thread by @patio11

I am heartened to see so much innovation in how to support future entrepreneurs. One example, which I just saw and looks intriguing:

cooperative-capital.com/fellowship

I quit my day job back in the day after I had ~$2k in savings and the notion of a consulting gig 80% in the bag. Lack of those two things had kept me at day jobs for about ~6 years.

Inside the tech ecosystem, $20k looks like a trivial amount of money. Outside, lifechanging.

There hasn't previously been much of a pipeline to get $20k from "people who have it" to "people whose efforts would be worth it, but do not presently have it." Particularly not in the market economy (ex-academia/NGOs/etc).

I also think, just on the terms of this, that the size of opportunity you need to go after is radically smaller than it is for more traditionally invested companies.

This could very literally be "Enough runway to get to be the Internet's #1 expert in [niche subject] + ~$40k/yr."

"Who would that be appealing to?"

Superior lifestyle to an adjunct professor for one thing, with actual growth potential, since unlike an adjunct professor The Internet's Whatever Guy doesn't get told "Yep we'll have 100 of you next year so, basically, you're done."

"What kind of niche subjects are you talking about?"

I mean I pulled a middle class living in central Japan out of "Bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers" but more plausibly you could follow banking stocks, write about medieval warfare and logistics, or do Christmas cookies.

(One of my fun conversations with non-SEO people back in the day was "Who do you think is the most distributed author in the world regarding Christmas cookies and how would you rate the economic returns of that?")

"Do you think medieval warfare expertise could support a living outside of academia?"

Yes; consulting gigs for media productions, publications for enthusiasts, etc. It probably wouldn't be a B2B SaaS company but the combination of distribution and wealth makes it viable.

Interestingly I wonder what the strategy is for this fellowship making money.

There's a pretty clear line-of-sight to "OK, you get 3X your initial investment from winners over ~2 years each."

Then there's that option to invest in a company at $1M valuation if founded within 5y.

(That valuation is scandalously low for tech companies inside of the ecosystem, but wasn't always, and depending on the amount they actually invest it isn't all that dissimilar to being very generous with advisor shares and/or getting one's parents onto the cap table.)

But the presence of it suggests that one thinks that perhaps some people who think their current ambition is quitting the day job will, on realizing that ambition, find that they have much more interesting and high-variance objective functions.

And if that is true 1% of the time it probably doesn't work enough to justify the complexity but if it is true 40% of the time, hmmmmm...