No disrespect intended, but what is the point of using terminology like “moonshot” coupled with tiny amounts of funding like $3m. If moonshot is taken to be a loose reference to the Apollo program - which I imagine it is otherwise the name is poorly chosen - then the funding amounts are off by several orders of magnitude. In 1960 the US government got its feet wet with a 900 million (in 2020 dollars) spend on the Apollo program and ramped up to a high of 40,000 million a year by 1964. The total spent on the Apollo program between 1960 and 1973 was 283,000 million or almost one hundred thousand times as much as the 3 million investment under the moonshots fund.
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
Can confirm. Most government agencies have the SBIR program which funds 6 months of work for $100k. A phase II is $750k for 2 years. The Phase I is typically TRL 3/4 (though I've had a TRL 2 contract before). You'd be surprised what you can get done on such a small budget.
I also wonder if a $15mio valuation (20% for $3m) is a good deal for founders that have a moonshot idea and a first step that is reachable within 2 years and a plan of how to get there.
I mean if I had a plausible 2-year plan on how to fix the image processing part of self-driving cars and autonomous drones, just the knowledge of how I consider that possible might be worth more than $15m to Google, Uber, Skydio, or the DoD.
So to me, this looks more like a glorified way for teams without connections but with a great prototype to get introductions to the "real" investors that'll pony up $100m+
But, say, 250m will achieve nothing for true moonshots (like the ones mentioned on the site) without political will? Honestly, the example moonshots listed on the site NEED political will to succeed at all.
Typically seed funding is to prove the concept. Series A is to start scaling it. With Apollo you need to already have a proven concept ("We expect you to have a big vision and a “Tesla Roadster”—a concrete first step") before Apollo will invest. That's what makes it a Series A.
I'm probably ignorant in this, but this program feels like normal venture capital with different branding.
Moonshots are very exciting but also have an incredibly low success rate. Investing in only five companies makes me believe that they're either setting themselves up for failure (unlikely bc these people are smart) or they're trying to fish for startup pitches with a different branding approach.
To all the voices in the thread who are commenting on how only $3m is no Apollo project: my fusion startup in the 1990s was financed with less than that (even including the inflation adjustment). Sure, we didn't make self-sustaining fusion, but it wasn't lack of money that stopped us. This level of funding may not give you an Apollo program, but it could easily give you a Robert Goddard.
The section on "Why don't more people start them" was interesting to me. One hugely important thing I don't see mentioned as a possible cause is the failure path (i.e. what happens when you fail, which is the most likely outcome). This is drastically different in 'moonshot' fields than in software startups. In many fields, a failed startup causes permanent career damage, so that's a big reason why people don't start them.
Because of this, I think the founder equity exchange program is a great idea. I would have happily diversified 10% of my stock with other founders, and it would not have de-incentivized us at all.
> A network of moonshot companies could be the modern-day version of the great research efforts of the past.
It would be super interesting to know what led YC to abandon HARC, which actually had a membership comparable to the great research efforts of the past [1], in favor of doing things this way. I don't believe they have ever said much about that, it just seemed to vanish.
>As an initial experiment, we will fund about 5 companies.
This is the most telling line in the whole thing. Why? Well, for n=5 to be a useful experiment, the success rate would have to be... way higher than 1 in 100 or even 1 in 10! They're practically asking for people who want to open fast food franchise locations.
Or maybe they use these 5 to experiment and iterate on the program, and then fund another 15-20 in 6 months from now, and by then they'll have a nice batch of 20-25 companies, hoping that one of these will become a decacorn or more.
This assumes each bet has a binary goal state [Success, Not Success] when probing endeavours often are more about manifold mapping rather than optimal sub-topology mining.
> There will be an optional founder equity exchange with other companies in the program, which will somewhat reduce the risk for founders and hopefully encourage a lot of collaboration.
This is super cool. I wonder where this idea came from.
This post is another theoretical post. Humans by nature are very risk averse. Start-up in itself is very risky with a high probability of failure. Failure in the start up world means lost time, lost opportunity, lost capital, lost confidence and so much more. For some of us we handle these risk pretty well and can perform excellent under these conditions, but for most of us, we would rather have these risk mitigated if we could .
One of the questions I have often pondered was how to succeed at this start up game in one go? How do I mitigate my risk to the point that failure is almost impossible?
Consider VC or even Y-combinator, the way they mitigate their risk is to acquire small equity in a lot of companies. The companies that make a killing pay for those that didn’t make one. Let suppose you had 10million to invest and you are investing 20k into each business for 10% equity and the probability of making 100million is 10%[These numbers were chosen for ease of calculation and only here to illustrate a point] . The probability that you don’t make back your 10million is 1 x 10^-23 reflecting a very minute risk.
In the case above, only the VCs are actually reducing their risk; the startup themselves are still faced with 90% chance of failure. I think startups should basically use the same strategies as VCs to mitigate their risk. Each startup donates 5% equity to what would be the equivalence of an insurance scheme, if somehow your start goes bust, no need to worry cause at the end of period you would be given profits from all the rest companies that participated which should be enough to get you back on your feet."
This isn't a new idea. There was such a founder equity swap program that Google was nearly a part of, but the other founders thought the valuation Sergey and Larry were demanding was too high.
This is from memory, and I tried to search for a source, but the keywords are practically ungoogleable. Maybe someone else knows more.
It's the one twist that surprised me. Is there any concern the more it "reduces the risk", the less of a direct financial stake the founder has in their own company?
I read it between the lines as some sort of fallback in the case that your particular startup fails, as most moonshots do. If every founder in the batch works out something small like 1-5% split amongst the founders of the other cos, then everyone in the batch has the potential to benefit if one does company well, and then they also have more incentive to help their other batch companies out.
Beneficial to founder, but this would be much more meaningful for employees who have much less control over the success or failure of their own company.
So what other VCs are out there funding moonshots? I'm curious, cause I'm working on a moonshot of my own.
It's still fairly early-stage (self funding, saving money by doing a lot myself + hiring Russian aerospace engineers) so if there's anyone here on HN with a spare 20k/100k/1MM they want to spend on awesome futuristic technology, my email's in my profile :)
I'm keeping the specifics of my company under wraps (to everyone but potential investors), but the idea is radically improved long distance transportation here on Earth with a near-zero carbon footprint as one benefit.
I've considered various US gov't funding options, which can be really nice (they don't take any equity & some are pretty lax with how you spend the money) but those take a while to get, and you generally need someone who's got experience writing proposals if you want to have a good chance.
Hiring Russian aerospace engineers worked out great for me so far, but I'm not sure I'd recommend the process to most startups. The biggest thing is that the geniuses that speak English well have all left Russia for various reasons. That leaves you with either non-geniuses, or geniuses with poor English. Usually, they've tried to learn English themselves and didn't get as far as they'd like, so "just hire a language coach" isn't a simple solution here. If you just want a lot of average engineer bodies, though, you can get that for cheap. I imagine it'd be ideal for something like building a tunnel or a bridge, with a lot of routine calculations and established design procedures.
The other big thing is the hiring itself. I got extremely lucky - I'm good friends with a great Russian technical recruiter living in Moscow, who was able to actually find people for me. But even with that huge advantage, it was tough.
If anyone has questions about the process, ask away - the idea of hiring expert engineers/programmers from cheaper countries has always fascinated me, and surprised me with how difficult it is.
Language barrier is not a problem in my case, I am fluent in both English and Russian. I know one can get cheap engineering talent in Eastern Europe, was more curious about your startup idea.
Anecdote 1: I have a translation of a Russian book of high school physics problems, most of which I can't solve.
Anecdote 2: Michael Spivak's "Calculus on Manifolds" is famous as the hardest math textbook an engineer will have to tackle. Well, there are major theorems in that book that are "easy" exercises in Vladimir Arnold's Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics.
As a historical note, the actual Apollo project to the moon cost $25.4 billion dollars, which corresponds to over $150 billion in current dollars. So this funding is about 4 orders of magnitude short of the real moonshot. (This is not meant as a criticism of Apollo Projects, but just to put things in scale.)
I did find it amusing though that "affordable housing" is listed as an example of a moonshot venture, considering the core reason behind high housing costs (in the US at least) is overly restrictive zoning.
Though I guess one could say it would take a venture of that scale to defeat the entrenched and gatekeeping NIMBYs and enable much more housing to be built.
That's why I like the idea of doing these sorts of projects in the deserts - where the zoning and county codes are often a lot more lenient, and you can be far enough away from anyone else that NIMBYism is almost nonexistent. I've been contemplating the idea of desert hacker communities for a long time, and may move forward with that at some point (anyone else interested in chatting about it, feel free to reach out).
I know Arcosanti (visited in 2013), and have studied a bit about its history.
Unfortunately the project has been essentially a failure. It was supposed to become self-sustaining and reach 5,000 people, instead at its peak it reached less than 100. Great idea though.
That's awesome - I like the idea that the bell-making business was baked in from the start. I think the same could be done with software development or some sort of SaaS instead of bell-making.
Cool - my email is in my profile. If there's a few people interested, we can put a small chat group together. If nothing else, this kind of thing is fun to talk about.
Ideally by purchasing property that already has a capped well on it, or by drilling a well. If you go to the right places in the California deserts, water isn't even that deep.
It's also possible to haul water in - and that's what a lot of people do. There are services that will truck in a few thousand gallons of water and put it in your tank.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to make affordable housing. It’s not like the US can’t afford it. It’s a wealthy country, look how much they have for the military.
It’s just not a problem capitalism is gonna solve. There isn’t huge profit to be made. Government could solve it.
Markets happily developed cheap powerful computers, cheap powerful phones, cheap clothes and cheap food.
In the US there is also reasonably cheap housing in large cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago and Indianapolis.
In some large cities on the coast there isn't affordable housing. All these places have market economies. It's just that in places that are really successful if you have restrictive zoning and stop people building housing that people want prices go up.
It's also not just a US thing. In Australia, New Zealand and the UK zoning is also restrictive and housing is much harder to afford.
Allow people to build up and out and markets will provide affordable housing. Restrict the supply of housing and housing prices will shoot up in successful areas.
Markets are geared towards individualised, itemised solutions. They have all kinds of perverse incentives. For example there’s no incentive for car companies to make public transport, or a cheap efficient car. Hence we’ve been seeing cars get larger and fancier instead.
In New York and other cities, financiers and banks buy up entire apartment blocks and let them stand empty to drive up property prices.
The advantage of the government is it isn’t tied to a profit system.
Government can't really solve it either, but Cooperatives are a great way to handle it in my opinion. Next to individual ownership, it's pretty much the only thing where the interests align.
You don't want to live in government housing when money is tight and some company offers a quick buck to pluck up that hole in the budget. Coops don't have that problem, they can't be sold, as they're owned by their members, which are largely also their renters.
That's what Sweden thought as well. Almost all "owned" apartments in Sweden are coops, yet there is a gigantic housing crisis in Sweden.
A lot of places around the world have problems with affordable housing. In all those places attempts have been made to solve this issue. If this were an easy problem as many people seem to claim it is (I am not saying you said this) then it would have been solved already. It is not. The people running this fund realize that this problem is a lot harder than what it looks like on the surface.
Sure, it's not trivial, but it's not a startup-solves-it issue, at least over here. Even without a lot of NIMBYism, the local administration isn't getting the permits done and doesn't open up spaces. In the metropolitan area I live in, we "need" about 50k flats a year. We're getting 6-9k. The bottle neck is in the government, and unless you replace that government with a startup, you're not going to solve "the problem".
The other problems with housing are solved pretty well by coops, even though I'm thinking of moving out of mine - providing affordable housing is nice on paper, but it also gets you neighbors that are socially challenged.
I agree, coops are the way to go with housing. They can be supported by the state in terms of low cost land rental or tax benefits.
I am always wondering why not more businesses are structured around coops and the state is not pushing this more.
But the local government answers to local residents, but new developments don't help existing local residents (home owners), it helps new residents (often immigrants or young people who can't/won't vote).
Maybe I’m naive, but isn’t this exactly the type of thing capitalism is good at doing (lowering prices)? My understanding is that greedy capitalists would love to build more, denser housing here in the Bay, but are unable to due to zoning restrictions as the parent comment suggested. Why isn’t this a problem capitalism can solve?
But local residents block new developments, using zoning and other methods, since new developments (affordable or not) lower their own property values.
There is not much money to be made by building things, at least compared to the money you can make by renting and making sure the supply is constrained.
How far along with your company / MVP do you have to be? I imagine they want to see a compelling demo, not just a plan or idea.
I'm still a little too early with my project to meet the July 11th deadline, and I'd feel ashamed to pitch too early. It's a very ambitious moonshot project, though.
20% for 3M sounds generous for some, but perhaps risky for those that are further along. What do comparable investment offerings look like?
It doesn't look like that's had a great track record in terms of actual country building. If they meant seasteading I suppose I can see why they'd avoid using that phrase but then I'm doubly confused as to why they'd point it out as a category for investment.
I'm curious as to how historically "charter countries" are significantly different from a model like imperialism, and if I'm entirely off base here what startups would qualify as a success in this category (that I've obviously clearly failed to understand.)
Because starting a country is really hard. Technical issues aside, you have to convince at least one, and ideally several, countries to accept the passport you issue and engage with you diplomatically.
Besides, there is no real history of country creation without violence to assert borders, and a charter country would assert a monopoly on violence within its geographic borders, which can displease a lot of other countries.
> significantly different from a model like imperialism
You can imagine a direct democracy anarchist commune charter country. Which is pretty opposite to imperialism.
We are working on making space more accessible for everyone, through "satellite-as-a-service" model. We will allow software developers to upload their code to our satellite, creating an application development platform in space.
You can read more about us at our website in parent comment.
Will there only be one instance of the "user segment" per Satellite, or will there be one supervisor / bus, with lots of simultaneously running user segments?
The short answer: you send us the source, we build, test and deploy the application package (binary+configuration files) to the satellite user segment.
The answer to "one or many user segments" will depend on what we will learn from that ESA mission ourselves. Some satellite instruments can be shared simultaneously, some require exclusive access and have to be accessed in sequential order.
This is awesome! It will be interesting to see if a new trend of moonshot project startups emerge, and if their returns can be comparable to software startups.
I want to see an incredibly accurate physics/chemistry simulator in distributed software.
This is the same first step needed to support automated testing materials science at a massive scale, which will unlock innovations in battery energy density, photovoltaic energy capture efficiency, construction materials, manufacturing efficiencies, etc.
AI/ML require some way to verify proposed designs, similar to OpenAI's Gym. A physics/chemistry simulator would save massive time by allowing software automation to allow software to run simulations in massive parallel.
I see this as a "human genome" sized project that unlocks massive amounts of basic science.
So, my research is focused around exactly this topic (high performance computing is one of the words you’re looking for, I believe) and unfortunately I think I’m obligated to tel you from an engineering perspective it’s basically a non-starter. There are a few reasons why:
1) Very high-fidelity codes which you’re describing, accurate at the molecular (atomic?) scale are typically never usable in any meaningful sense for macroscopic scenarios. This is usually because they’re either too computationally expensive, taking too long to run even on huge supercomputers, or because we actually don’t know how to bridge the gap between the small and large-scale physics behavior.
2) It’s unclear what you mean by “incredibly accurate”. Different fields have different definitions of what accurate means (as well as different kinds of physics they’re trying to take into account) so your ultra-accurate simulator in one domain might be very off in another. From reading your comments it seems you’re most interested in materials science. That’s not my direct field of expertise but if they’re anything like every other field of science/engineering, there is a very strong division in the field with regards to what kinds of simulations are used where.
3) This is something people usually don’t think about, but stuff like materials research is protected not just by proprietary laws but actual government export control laws. So not only will such a distributed system be looked at with raised eyebrows by corporations, but the US government might move in to shut it down if there’s suspicion that the distributed information is getting to nodes managed by foreign nationals.
In short, there are a plethora of issues related to the scope and objective of what you’re proposing. It would require a Herculean amount of effort for an unclear payoff, unfortunately.
That’s fair, the term is usually abused out of context. Let me give a bit more context: the amount of effort required would probably be up to a trillion dollars, just to be generous. You’re talking about making a generalized physics solver at-scale after all, a lot of domains we don’t even have a good model for how things work. It’s dangerous to assume that the scientists working on these projects/simulations don’t use generalized physics solvers just because they’re not ambitious. It’s almost universally because reality is messy and difficult to model in full, so approximations and compromises have to be made otherwise you’ll never get anything done. I find that mathematicians and theoretical physics peeps tend to fetishize universal solvers in this way, but the long and the short of it is those guys only fetishize it because they live in a perfect physics world where inconvenient factors are abstracted out to a coefficient and they just say “that’s an implementation problem”. Making simulators which can actually be trusted is difficult, time consuming, and sometimes completely counter-intuitive. So I wouldn’t call what this person is suggesting a “moonshot” per se, I’d more call it “attempting to create God”.
What's wrong with all of the simulators that already exist? There are books upon books written about this subject. (I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with them, just asking what's missing between what already exists and what you want to see.)
>What's wrong with all of the simulators that already exist?
They're displacing the real thing.
I like incredibly accurate physics/chemistry in reality.
There's so much room for improvement in some fundamentals that would lead to more ideal simulations, seems like some of today's simulations are a bit premature.
Unsure if you are familiar with the project, but Folding@home [0] might be an approximate blueprint for this. Large scale physical simulations of protein structure dynamics, distributed all over.
I've heard of it, among others. But they are inevitably very specialized applications of what I was hoping would be a general physics simulator (and more detailed at the molecular level than one of the modern game physics engines).
I think it's interesting that humans can participate in the process of finding relevant solutions, but I think it's more important that any agent can be used to find and test solutions to specific physics/chemistry problems.
My hope was to do for low-level physics what OpenAI does with video games -- using them as simulators for problems and to create competing agents to solve that problem.
If I were to do that, I'd use Julia for it. This is a great post about why it's important to have specialized programs -- you can make simplifying assumptions that speed up computation. Multiple-dispatch in Julia allows to hide the complexity under a uniform front-end.
http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/algorithm-efficiency-come...
I think the generalized version is important for the most accurate (if slow) simulation specifically because it doesn't make the core assumptions that lots of existing specialized simulators make.
This is for the same reason you can't use almost any existing airplane simulator for calculating space travel far beyond the parameters of {gravity near the surface of the Earth, air friction far from STP at sea level, time elapsed as the velocity of the craft approaches the speed of light, heat as the aircraft approaches temperatures far beyond its rating}. A very narrow simulator can make approximate values for these items at the cost of not being very flexible for a wide variety of testing. Example: being able to test the properties of a ton of materials at near 0 Kelvin or near their boiling point would be far cheaper and faster if they were in a digital simulation than if we had to hire specialist workers to find the pure material and create the environment required to mimic those settings.
Which brings me back to why I posted it here, in this moonshot thread and not just some fan article about a flight simulator. I think a general physics simulator is like basic science -- it's a foundation upon all of the other layers of the stack of existence on Earth is based (ignoring temporarily the more complicated things like consciousness, gods, and other philosophies). If someone sinks the cost for the simulator, they could potentially take a royalty of all of the material science breakthrus of all new innovations found using the simulator.
I think the key would be having a technique to discern when approximations were valid & specialize the right code for the right part of the problem. For instance, if the program mistakenly tried to run the airframe using DFT instead of FEM, it would never get anywhere, but DFT might be exactly what is needed to model the outcome of cosmic ray bit flips in the nav computer transistors. If the simulation is able to make judgement calls like that, it's pretty much a artificial general intelligence.
Based on the name and it not being mentioned at all, I guess this is US only? In general, websites seems to always mention the countries where you can apply from, except US websites that simply assumes everyone is in the US or otherwise knows it's restricted to the US.
Cheers to this. Startups and the ecosystem in general (funding) seem increasingly drawn to incrementalism -- largely unimaginative solutions to low-stakes problems but with a high perceived exit probability.
> A company 1) focused on a significant technological development or complex coordination and 2) that could have a transformative impact on the world.
> EXAMPLES:
> Rapid response vaccines, non-carbon energy, solar geoengineering, VR/AR, biological manufacturing, new education formats, new medicines, affordable housing, and charter countries.
What are some examples of current or past startups that could have qualified for Apollo?
One challenge is that there’s an implicit third requirement for moonshots: 3) transformative potential must be recognizable at the start. Thus, a company that sells BASIC interpreters for the Altair might be missed.
"BASIC interpreters for the Altair" doesn't sound impressive, but "a computer on every desk, Microsoft software in every computer" was Bill's actual pitch and is a bit better.
> Rapid response vaccines, non-carbon energy, solar geoengineering, VR/AR, biological manufacturing, new education formats, new medicines, affordable housing, and charter countries.
I think none of these are moonshots except "new education formats"
I think this is a problem.
Moonshot doesn't have to be, we wish this existed.
It should be, this field hasn't had much work and no one has gone down this path, it's about exploring a new world.
VR/AR are done to death for instance and will continue to be done. Someone will just loophole this with a interesting X (that's done to death) and add the word VR to make it sound like a moonshot.
Moonshoot idea - setup a framework that allows people to accurately identify moonshots.
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
3m will achieve none of that.