Increasingly believe that the "good, cheap, fast—choose two" maxim is devious misinformation spread by the slow.
In my experience, "slow" and "expensive" usually go together. I was in a meeting yesterday where lopping a year off a project schedule also ended up reducing the cost substantially. Fundamentally, it takes time to spend, and adding the temporal constraint tends to make things simpler and more efficient.
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I've long been interested in new ways to organize science and enable curiosity-driven discovery. Today, in partnership with @Stanford, @UCBerkeley, and @UCSF, we're excited to announce Arc Institute, a new undertaking in this vein: arcinstitute.org.
Arc is, fundamentally, a nonprofit that will conduct basic research in a somewhat new way. It’s based on three core ideas. First, betting not on projects, but on people. Arc will fund biomedical investigators to pursue whatever research programs they deem most worthy of study.
This might sound basic, but people tend to be shocked and horrified upon learning how many bureaucratic hurdles the nation's top researchers must contend with. A labyrinth of funding applications typically stands between a good idea and an important result.
Stripe launched 10 years ago today! Still jump out of the bed as enthusiastically as I did at the outset. (Actually somewhat more so -- wasn't really a morning person back then.)
Ten years in, it feels like we're just *now* starting to properly internalize the possibilities of the space in which we're operating. The bad news about Stripe is that infrastructure takes a long time to build, but the good news is that the benefits can compound for a long time.
Looking forward, the internet + global economies will expand massively over the coming decade, and boost global prosperity to new highs. There are millions of entrepreneurs to enable, businesses to unlock, and allocative efficiencies to improve!
In December 2020, we noticed a few findings — some of them from Fast Grants-funded scientists — that led us to be optimistic that fluvoxamine might be an effective Covid-19 treatment.
Based on the responses, we funded two clinical trials for fluvoxamine. One of those trials failed to recruit enough participants. Another did and the results are summarized here: blogs.jwatch.org/hiv-id-observa….
Someone I know has had some quite useful COVID-related posts removed from Medium, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor—they've been deemed "COVID misinformation". (It's not what the WHO endorses!)
I think his posts overstate the case for the treatment he’s arguing for. They aren’t without justification, however. He has some considerable scientific evidence on his side (including a small RCT).
This year, we’ve come to better appreciate the fallibility and shortcomings of numerous well-established institutions (“masks don’t work”)… while simultaneously entrenching more heavily mechanisms that assume their correctness (“removing COVID misinformation”).
Hard to find good stuff online but WWII Committee on Medical Research probably has useful lessons. In very short order, figured out how to scale penicillin production, found better malaria antivirals (including chloroquine!), huge improvements in blood transfusions/replacements…
These programs were *fast*. (Just over one year from formation of board to coordinate work on malaria to getting the first therapeutics shipped.)
There's lots of precedent for rapid, successful, directed medical research led/coordinated by US Government.
It may be worth touching on why we're building Atlas. Partly, it's to make access to infrastructure for entrepreneurship as broadly and cheaply available as possible. Talent is uniformly distributed... but opportunity is not. We want to help correct that.