Patrick Collison bought our arguments and suggested some of his own:
Patrick’s excited about The mnemonic medium can surface “proof of memory” social signals and by our ideas around Connecting prose and its surrounding Twitter conversation.
Most conferences/publishers are about marketing, not about ideas; Patrick suggests that we, like Stripe Press, might help make more positive-sum idea-sharing contexts.
One fun suggestion for facilitating social, active engagement with the climate material: “fantasy climate policy,” akin to fantasy baseball.
If Brand, Kay, Fuller, etc. represent “California Humanism,” this project may be about trying to express “California Humanism v2.” (a brand of Transcendental narrative). Patrick suggests that v1 was too focused on micro, not enough on macro: the Whole Earth Catalog can help you build a geodesic dome, but all the dome cities failed as societies.
Patrick’s primary worry for us as a non-profit is having the wrong donors—being subtly captured by their goals, rather than pursuing our own. Indeed.
Patrick indicated that perhaps Stripe could support our climate media project via their new negative-carbon-as-product efforts. That’s likely not a great idea, but it’s an encouraging signal to hear him suggest.
Patrick suggests we talk with Alexander Berger. Good!
He worries about the danger of our not fitting into any specific bucket for funders. He imagines that marketing ourselves as a “category of one” would be effective in some cases but certainly not in all.
Patrick suggested an addition: we should start a podcast. He liked Michael’s long-brewing idea of a podcast capturing deep technical conversation between experts, not “performed” for an audience.
When asked about Ladder Media will likely need operational help, Patrick reported finding that the set of good ops people who also really grok big ideas is extremely small. He suggests we’re better off finding someone who generally “gets it enough to like it,” but who doesn’t have to be a deep creative partner.
For instance, we might debundle the search:
He suggests that McKinsey-ites (with 1-3 years there) are a good source of operational capability.