Comment by WalterBright
6 months ago
If I was a billionaire, that would be a fun thing to do:
1. find 100 highly motivated scientists and engineers
2. pay them each $1m/year
3. put them in a building
4. see what happens!
6 months ago
If I was a billionaire, that would be a fun thing to do:
1. find 100 highly motivated scientists and engineers
2. pay them each $1m/year
3. put them in a building
4. see what happens!
My guess is not much unless you give them a specific problem, and create a hierarchy.
Otherwise things will just fragment into cliques and fights, like any university department.
What would there be to fight over? They each have a $1m budget.
In the Manhattan project the scientists were unified by a noble goal. Money don't buy that. Without such a goal, you'll get a hundred scientists each pulling in his own direction in order to get rich.
Have you ever seen an academic department?
Surely the lab scientists and engineers would assert that they need a bigger budget than the mathematicians, and so on.
To be fair you only need to pay sustenance or opportunity cost so closer to 100k per person should be fine especially outside of USA
I figured the $1m would also fund the equipment and supplies they'd need.
Here's what works for me:
1. Already found X highly motivated scientists and engineers.
- in my case people that must like chemicals, electronics, software, stuff like that
2. $1Mil funding x X but it's got to be paid back in 5 years so a viable business model needs to be initiated right away even if the technology is as much as a year out from possible release or commercialization.
- each person needs to be worth a million over 5 years, that's hard enough to find, it would be more of a needle in a haystack to find experimentalists where it's good to sink a million per year for a decent length of time, but that can be worked up to. If serious research is involved, stealth must be an option
3. Put them in X number of buildings.
- works better than you think, and "nobody's" doing it
4. Some of these are profit centers from day 1, so you could even put franchising on the table ;)
- you'd be surprised what people who've already invented a lifetime of stuff could do with the kind of resources that can enable a motivated creator who has yet to make very remarkable progress, so leverage both
2 replies →
The hard part is picking the right people.
The way to do it is the way top engineers and scientists were recruited for the Manhattan Project. You go around to universities and talk to the professors, who will know who the highly motivated people are.
That would have worked back then but post-internet you should be looking for the people who had drive to achieve or build something without the academic structure there to force them to do it.
Universities are the place for low agency people in todays world.
What I look for in engineers would be what I’d look for here: “I have no idea how to do that, let me get started.”
Yeah, there's thousands of university with that kind of people and budget. It's not that fun