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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Being a good entrepreneur requires skill at transforming abstract ideas into action, self-promotion skills, domain knowledge in the industry you start your business, willingness to take risks, emotional stability, inclination for hard self-directed work in the face of discouraging criticism, intuition for how the economy works, sales skill, negotiation skill, planning skill, scrappiness, comfort with failure, etc. Most of this stuff is not required for researchers. And yes, it takes lots of time too.
In any case, SI already has lots of supporters who are trying to make money by starting businesses. In fact, their old president Michael Vassar recently left to start a company. The people working at SI are pretty much those who decided they were better fit for research/outreach/etc. than entrepreneurship.
Thanks, this makes sense!
Saving the world doesn't require any of those qualities?
Depends how you're planning to save it. If your plan involves you writing brilliant papers, maybe not.
SI has some folks with the qualities I described, like Louie, who sold his web-based business several years ago. They also have a number of entrepreneurs on the board. And as you suspect, these entrepreneurs' skills are useful for SI's mission to save the world. But they're not so useful that SI wants everyone with those skills to join them as an employee--they have limited funds.
SI does think about how to best allocate the human capital of people concerned with UFAI. But if you have a thoughtful suggestion for how they could allocate their human capital even better, I'm sure they'd love to hear it.