These are all good reasons. 

I think 5he biggest reason you've missed against starting a for profit is risk of failure. It's really really high, maybe 5x or 10x that of a non profit. 

Again I really like your argument, and think that despite the rush of failure, more EAs should be trying their hand at for profits. 

Wave is a beautiful company.

Just don't name it Ajar AI or Anthropomorphic :D

100 percent agree. I dont understand the entire post because I don't know the context. I don't think alluding to something helps, better to say it explicitly.

Don't be inclined to trust my in-the-field experience, Zipline has plenty of that too!

I just had a read of their study but couldn't see how they calculated costing (the most important thing).

One thing to note is that vaccine supply chains currently often unnecessarily use trucks and cars rather than motorcycles because, well, GAVI has funded them so they may well be fairly comparing to status quo rather than other more efficient methods. For the life of me I don't know why so many NGOs use cars for si many things that public transport and motorcycles could do sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper. Comparing to status quo is a fair enough thing to do (probably what I would do) but might not be investigating the most cost effective way of doing things.

Also I doubt they are including R and D and the real drone costs in the costs in of that study, but I'll try and dig and get more detail.

It annoys me that most modeling studies focus so hard on their math method, rather than explaining now about how they estimate their cost input data - which is really what defines the model itself. 

Yep Snakebite is one of the few slamdunk usecases for me here. Until we design a cheap, heat stable antivenom I think drones that can get there in under an hour might be the best option in quite a wide range of places.

Zipline have been around for about 10 years I think - boy do they have the cool factor. One big issue is that they can only carry as really tiny amount of stuff. Also the  places where they can potentially save money have to be super hard to access, because a dirt cheap motorcycle which can go 50km for a dollar of fuel can carry 50x as much weight.

My lukewarm take is that hey have done well, but as with most things haven't quite lived up to their initial hype.

Love this.Has there really not been an RCT on floor replacements yet? That surprises me as it would be a relatively easy RCT to do. EarthEnable from Rwanda just won the 2 million dollar Skoll award doing this at scale. 

GiveWell must have considered it I would have thought? 

"being funny is a virtue, being edgy is not" is pretty darn insightful, I'm going to use that in future as it rings so true with my experience.

 And in my limited experience when humor is combined with epistemic humility (forgive the jargon :D) I have seen some beautiful moments of breakthrough with EA ideas.

Thanks so much man, these are awesome reflections and a great post to wake up to!

I would imagine there are some replicability issues... 

Love the post 🤩

Lead alliance could so go for this

I don't think she's saying that people shouldn't think and plan responses, I think it's more that endless naval gazing about timelines and rapidly shifting responses isn't the most useful response