Thought Summary

Had a great call with Greg. I'm super impressed with everyone so far. This is a great team. Doing this as an independent, pure play 501c3, but with a crystal clear focus on the positive advent of strong AI distributed widely to humanity does seem to make the most sense to me. Please correct me if we aren't on the same page. The company would still aim to bring in revenue in excess of costs at some point, but positive net revenue would just flow to cash reserves. On the comp front, I think having the default approach be a cash salary and a cash bonus that vests over four years and stacks with refresher vesting bonuses every year is the way to go. People could, at their option, if you are amenable, convert that cash amount to YC stock. I'm also fine if they want to convert some or all to SpaceX stock. I can pretty much do what I want on the SpaceX side, as it is private (thank goodness). Also, we will have insane amounts of real world sensor data -- several orders of magnitude greater than any other company -- at Tesla that the team could use when helpful. Was thinking a bit about names. It is always super hard to come up with one that doesn't suck and isn't already taken by someone that won't give it up. Least bad name I have thought of so far is Freemind. Conveys the sense that we are trying to create digital intelligence that will be freely available to all -- the opposite of Deepmind's one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach. Having "mind" in there isn't great, but the synonyms suck and their name has been subsumed in the public sphere by Google/Alphabet. You come up with anything? On the time allocation front, I've decided to dedicate whatever amount of my time that is materially useful, even though it will come at some cost to SpaceX and Tesla. If I really believe that this is potentially the biggest near-term existential threat, then action should follow belief. That said, this probably amounts to half a day per week (higher in the beginning), with more time allocated when we hit a key decision point or crisis.