Re: [LONG} Funding Cypherpunks Projects

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 3:35 pm -0400 on 9/3/97, Tim May wrote:


> I almost deleted these messages from Bob, but have decided to say a few
> words about financing companies "to help the Cypherpunks cause."

Frankly, I wish you had, we seem to get along better that way, something I
keep forgetting,  but here goes...

> To the contrary, I never write political and socioeconomic essays with the
> expectation that someone out there will be "making something for me."

So, you just write them in vaccuo? I doubt that. Nobody writes things so
that no one ever will ever read them. Especially when they post them to an
immediate potential audience of thousands, and their words are permanently
archived for posterity in at least 10 places. :-).

Even if you posted them here so no one would act on your suggestions -- the
best ones out there, I might add, because you've thought about all of these
things longer and harder than practically anyone in the world -- they still
have value, which is why I, for one, asked for them.


> But generating "VC funding requests" is most definitely not even in my Top
> Ten of reasons.

Of course not. However, it doesn't keep your best thinking on this from
having economic value, nonetheless...

> From Day One, I have not shied away from talking about interesting building
> blocks.

Which is why I asked for your opinion, besides to set a rhetorical trap for
you, of course. :-).

> I agree with this. Certainly for all of the chants about "Cypherpunks write
> code," and the several years worth of (apparently) several dozen folks here
> writing code of some sort, what are we really left with that has had a
> major effect?

Nothing. That's because it costs money to do, and the best people have to
work for a living. Well, most of the best people do, anyway. :-).

> Most of the code apparently being written either never makes
> it into products, or is buried deeply, or just evaporates (as code tends to
> do, a la bit rot). PGP, SSH, the remailer code, and a few other such
> achivements are what lasts.

Agreed. Just think, there would be more effort put into the exercise of
writing code if people could see reward for the risk of their time and
neurons. Frankly, for the best coders _qua_ coders, probably, the only
reward, after the inherent satisfaction of doing good work, in my opinion,
is money. Like Rhett Butler said in GWTW: "People say that money doesn't
buy happiness, but it usually does, and when it can't it can buy the most
interesting substitutes." I see your life, including your door-side stack
of assault rifles, to be reasonable proof of interesting substitutes at the
very least, myself. :-).

> I don't trash such efforts. Rather, I think it means that it is vitally
> important that we think carefully about what code is interesting and
> important. This beats the hell out of people just starting in at coding for
> the sake of coding.

Indeed. And, I claim that the very best barometer of what works is what
sells in the market.

> First, this grossly oversimplifies the process of funding companies.

If *I* knew what *you* knew? Someday, when I can afford the body armor, you
can give me the breifing. :-).

> Methinks Bob has read about Jim Clarke's decision to fund Andreesson and
> Company too many times. Rarely (very rarely) do the VCs hire people to
> write the code for some vision.

Well, frankly, I'm not after VC money, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

> Second, writing code is cheap, and requires almost no capital. No
> factories, no chip making machines, no clean rooms, etc. Just a bunch of
> people with ideas doing it themselves.  Nearly all successful software
> companies started out with almost no working capital.

Agreed. However, there is opportunity cost, measured not only in the time
invested on something else, but the return on the investment of doing that
other thing. "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative." As my old
Mizzou econ prof liked to beat us with. Frankly, if you're doing things for
the glory of the revolution, or to make the world free from nation-states,
or the joy of flight, that's cool, but it don't pay the rent. It may
temporarily focus your efforts more than if you're just trying to pay the
rent, certainly, but it won't actually keep the wolves from the door nearly
as well as a ducat or two will.

I other words, it may have been the joy of flight which motivated the
Wright Brothers, but it was coach fare to Cleveland which built the DC3 and
got the rest of us actually in the air.

> (By contrast, I've watched several "idea" companies which had the "grand
> vision" first and then sought to hire the hired guns to write the code. All
> four that I have followed failed.

Certainly a bass-ackward way to do it. Unfortunately, that's the way Disney
did it, or L.B. Mayer did it,  or Gates, or Edison, or Parekh did it. They
had a picture in their head of the way the world worked, or should work,
they did things, as cheaply as possible, which should work in that picture,
and they were right. They still invested something, is my point, whether it
was their money or their time, or their inspiration.

Just because your friends spent so much money doing what they wanted to do,
Tim, or doing the wrong thing because they didn't know how, doesn't mean
that economic enterprise shouldn't exist at all. There's something to be
said for heuristics, obviously, but I think your sample size is too small.

> A handful of
> these programmers seem to be truly gifted...the rest are, well, hackers. OK
> for churning out code with well-defined specifications (and even then the
> well known Brooks' Law sorts of factors can make some of them grossly
> unproductve). The few who seem really gifted would be fools to work for a
> pittance for me--and I'm not willing to give them their easily-gotten daily
> consulting rates for months on end, etc.

Frankly, gifted programmers are not the people who make money, Tim. Robert
Noyce may have been a gifted scientist once, but in the end it was his
ability to motivate people ("...don't expect to come here and have me solve
your problems. It's *your* ass.") that mattered. That and his ability to
understand the opportunities in his market.

> Fourth, in my years of Cypherpunks involvement, I have never seen any
> reasonable investment opportunities. This is not to say there have not been
> any, especially with the benefit of hindsight.

Probably because as one of the few people around who understood what
constitutes an investment opportunity, you didn't create one?

> Side note: <snip> What about C2 Net? <snip> He probably--and I haven't
> checked with him on this--knew that the best opportunities were funded on a
> shoestring, by those involved directly, by those living the dream, and that
> diluting his ownership with outside funding would be a mistake. And this
> shoestring operation was able to more nimbly move to take advantage of
> opportunities, e.g., dropping the original focus on being a kind of "local
> ISP" (which is what I perceived the original CC to be) and to instead focus
> on SSLeay/Stronghold stuff.

Sameer is exactly my case in point. He decided, at the outset, to make
money, with as little investment as possible, from cryptography. He kept
looking, no, *creating*, opportunities in cryptography until he figured out
that financial cryptography was literally where the money was, and now he's
riding that pony for all it's worth.

Gates, Carnagie, Morgan, all those guys did the same thing.

> Other companies have sought funding in a grander way. E.g., PGP, Inc. I had
> no desire to invest in them, for various reasons. I wish them well, of
> course.

I look at PGP, Inc., as the second round of funding for Phil's Pretty Good
Software, Inc.. They have a product, they have a market, they have (mostly)
a managment, they needed money to go after much larger competition, like
RSA/DSI, and people with money trusted that they could do it. And, it's a
good bet, after a false start, that that's the case...

> Eric Hughes has a company, "Simple Access." To tell the truth, and in spite
> of Eric being a longtime friend of mine (since 1990 at least), I really
> have no idea what they do. The "www.sac.net" site is remarkably
> uninformative. Perhaps by design. In any case, I don't think investing
> money in this is what I want to do.

Rumor has it that they don't pay their bills, and have been stiffing
various suppliers ever since they started up. "You should think like an
illegal actor" indeed. I understand that there's enough in unpaid bills
from around the country at this point to call in the Feds, of all people,
onto SA, but most of the people holding the bag are politically opposed to
calling the cops. Kind of works out nice for Eric and Hilby, though it
makes for an interesting incentive to build one of your eternity-style
deadbeat servers, now that I think about it. It might explain why, in
addition to the reasons you've already outlined above, they haven't
actually gotten anything off the ground. What goes around comes around, and
all that.

> And there's Electric Communities (www.communities.com), containing several
> past or present Cypherpunks. I have a lot of hope from them, for
> "Microcosm," but,again, this is someone else's vision. It's too soon to
> tell if they have a killer app on their hands. If they do, then business
> magazines will write sage articles on the wisdom of the VCs. If not, as the
> odds must say is likelier, just by Bayesian odds, then they'll be
> forgotten, and the VC money will have just evaporated.

Agreed. However, you have to remember that probability works both ways. The
expected value of an investment, be it VC or not, has to be greater than
zero, or the money won't go there. That, I believe, is why we have
investors in technology, in particular cryptography.

It's why I also think that the largest investment opportunities in
cryptography will be in financial cryptography, which, I expect, requires
all the fun things that people here want to implement, anonymity,
unbreakable encryption, reputation sanction, the works, to exist in order
to work well. More to the point, all of this stuff will exist because it
will be the *cheapest* way to transact business on the net, probably by
several orders of magnitude over the way it's done now.

It's also why I think you, Tim, would be one of the best financial
cryptography investors on the planet. If you decide to "create" an
opportunity or two.

> Fifth, what I have seen from all of these experiences is that the popular
> impression of VC funding, that someone has a good idea, then finds a VC
> angel to provide seed funding, then worker bees are hired, etc., is
> basically wrong. Or at least a recipe for disaster.

Pretty much agreed. Like the old jewish shopkeeper's maxim: "First thing
you do, you get the money." That means customers, not investors. However,
in order to get customers, you have to have something to sell, which
requires an investment of some kind. Chicken and egg, maybe. That's
probably why some investors are willing to break the cycle if you can show
them where the money's going to come from. Frankly, if you sell them a
story instead of a market, they deserve to lose their money on you, and you
deserve to not get anyone's money anymore.

> The best growth opportunities come from nimble, mostly self-funded small
> teams that can learn in an evolutionary way, changing focus as failures
> occur and learning from mistakes. The worst growth opportunities come from
> "grand vision" situations.

Absolutely agree. Except of course, that those nimble self-funded small
teams have the most coherent "grand visions" in their head of anyone in the
market. They know what the world should be so well that even if nobody will
invest in their idea, they can make money with it.

"The first thing you do, get the money." However, coming from Intel, did
you notice that Intel had investors? Admittedly, software startups don't
need *that* much, money, as you've said. As long as the principals see
there's money to be made from their efforts in the long run. Or they want
to change the world. And, frankly, I think financial cryptography is the
best of both; you're getting paid to change the world.

> Sixth, we often forget that "history is written by the winners." We ask the
> five star general what his strategies were, forgetting that he became a
> general because he survived the battles and triumphed. Sort of like asking
> the Lottery winner what her strategy was....one will get answers, but they
> probably won't be useful.

Post hoc, ergo, propter hoc. Certainly. Warren Buffett talked in a Forbes
issue on portfolio managers a few years ago about a country of 268 million
chipanzees, where everyone is given a quarter, and every day the chimps
would pair off and flip coins, winner take all. After 28 days of
increasingly high-stakes "competition", a single winner would emerge, and
write a book titled "How I made $68 million in a month, working just
seconds a day".

However, like I said before, if the expected value of a given investement
is positive, then you can make money investing in enough investments just
like it, Tim, as you, of all people, know. It's not a zero sum game. That's
why it's called investing, and not gambling...

Lots of people who just go through the mechanics of "active" portfolio
management might as well invest in an index and let other people think
about such things.

However, Tim, my claim is that, as someone who knows more than practically
anyone else about this field and what it could do, you have the, forgive
me, "grand vision" thing down better than almost anyone. You invented most
of it, for starters. :-). It's one of the reasons this list is what it is,
vitriol and all. ;-). A selling point of the Schnelling Point, to torture
the language more than a little.

> Asking Jim Clarke or Bill Gates to opine on his strategies for success is
> not quite as pointless, but is not real useful either. Ask also Manny
> Fernandez about Gavilan Computer. Or ask the financiers of Ovation,
> Processor Technology, Mad Computers, Symbolics, Thinking Machines, Trilogy,
> or a hundred other examples of companies that burned through a billion
> dollars of hard-earned investor money.

I'm not so sure about that. Clearly, people like Clarke, or Gates, or lots
of other people, for that matter, know how to make money just by investing
their time and intuition into something. That skill is mostly learned, I
think. Gates' parents and family taught it to him, for instance, and it's
clear that somebody taught Clarke as well, or he wouldn't have been able to
do Netscape after SGI. Whether Clarke, or Gates, for that matter, can
continue to do so is anybody's guess, but clearly, they're making it
happen, or we wouldn't be talking about them.

I also believe that lots of other people who know almost what you know
about cryptography could learn a little about making a business, pick up a
lot of that financial cryptography that's on the floor, and make the stuff
we all think should happen faster than if they just wrote code for the
cause and hoped that people would use it. Money makes a good proxy for
measuring success, and it buys stuff too...

> Seventh, I have no doubt that if I issued a cattle call for programmers to
> write C code for some pet project I'd get some bites. The "burn rate" for a
> supported programmer is higher than the salary, of course. (Many will work
> for a share of the company, plus a living wage, but this of course means
> incorporation....not a simple matter of just offering to hire programmers.)

Yes, you have to actually spend money (in some form, even time) in order to
make money. And, frankly, if you spend enough time doing something well,
you'll probably make money too, in spite of your reason for doing things.
PRZ is a great example of this, which actually proves my point.

> Those small software companies I mentioned burned through $5 million in 3
> or so years, with nothing to show for it. And they sure did have the grand
> vision.

Well, if you count the odds of a single company succeeding, that's about
what you expect, right? However, if you looked at, say 30 of such
companies, even picking them at random would probably pay for your losses
from the ones which hit.

> Sorry, but I have no desire in even "giving away" a million bucks,
> let alone several.

I don't think I said anything about giving money away. I said that you, of
all people, know significantly more about cryptography, financial
cryptography in particular, that you would be a person who could make real
nice money investing in it. Unlike most investors who will be investing in
strong crypto and privacy, you are in a very good position to create your
own opportunities, instead of waiting for them to present themselves.

> In 1993 I elected to help fund a small startup with an
> extremely promising technology. <snip> And that $65K investment
>necessitated my sale of
> $100K worth of various stocks, inclduding Intel, due to the income tax laws
> being what they are. That $100K worth of stock would now be worth $600K,
> roughly, given that Intel has gone from $15 to $100 in that period. C'est
> la vie.

The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. But, like Heinlein said,
"Of course the game is rigged. But, you can't win if you don't play."

> But is sure makes me more cautious about funding little startups.

Amen.

> And I for damned sure won't write out checks for people I only casually
> know from this mailing list and from occassional Cypherpunks meetings!!!)

I doubt that that's the way *you'd* invest in crypto at all. Nobody but
fools would do that. However, you, not being a fool, do know what to invest
in, and, more to the point, you'd be more likely to make the stuff you want
to happen if you were actively engaged, i.e., invested, in the process.
Given what you've done in your life so far, that is.

> I could easily spend $500K (costing me an actual $700K before taxes, less
> some tax deductions as a business, possibly) hiring a staff of several
> programmers for slightly more than a year. Then it'd be gone. Would a
> "product"  be ready? You tell me the odds.

Frankly, I think they'd be pretty good. Given what we've agreed before
about what to code being the most important part of coding. I also expect
that others with more money than time, would kick some in to make it happen.

> And what would come out of such an effort? I've watched a certain American
> living in Europe burn through most (and maybe all?) of his fortune, and
> (some say) his family's fortune, and he had the best of pedigrees and the
> best set of ideas there is. Now many of us quibble with the choices he
> made, in licensing, etc., but this should be a cautionary tale to anyone
> who thinks such funding is easy.

You're talking about David Chaum, of course. And hindsight, which is always
bullshit (my hindsight in particular ;-)), says that he should have worked
on financial cryptography, a field he invented, and let other people try to
be banks, and then software companies, and now credit card associations.
Dolby is his business model, not Citibank, or VISA.

> I'm not being defeatist. I know that sometimes a $500K investment could
> turn into tens of millions. It sometimes happens. But usually not, even for
> the proposals that get funded. (And VCs tend to look at 10 to 30 proposals
> for every one they actually fund, so the odds in the Cypherpunks pool ain't
> real great that even a single proposal would reach the funding stage, let
> alone turn into another Netscape or Yahoo.)

I think that the time has come to change the conventional wisdom on that.
In my opinion, there is enough cryptography out there, particularly
financial cryptography, that can be funded to see what sells. Stuff which,
by your own admission on this list as far back as 3 years ago, needs more
money than people can donate time for, though not as much as you thought
back then.

> No, I'm not a defeatist. But I worked very hard for many years, saving a
> large fraction of my paycheck and saving my purchased stock (including
> stock options, which were not as lucrative as popular myth might have
> it...what made them now worth so much money is that I didn't sell them when
> they became available, as so many of my coworkers did). I don't intend to
> blow through half a million or a million bucks a year funding some grand
> vision,

I think we're getting to the nub of things, here, and maybe a way to hone
the point a bit. I'm saying, for a lot of technology, that it may not cost
$500K. It might, because of the diseconomies of scale for internet software
and the lack of barriers to entry for the extremely clueful technology
folks out there, be possible to get a fully functional product to market
for as little as $250k, if you could figure out a way to standardize most
of the administrative/legal/financial cruft so that the current crop of
20-something proto-crypto-entrepreneurs could concentrate on getting stuff
done quickly. That, in fact, is what a bunch of us want to do with this
e$lab thing we're kicking around.

However, Tim, someone like you doesn't *need* something like e$lab (if
anyone does at all :-)). You already *know* how to invest in something
properly. You *know* who all the good people are and where all the bodies
are buried. And you clearly know how to squeeze a buck until it hollers.
Hell, you can even fight off an assault of black-nomex-clad ninja bill
collectors. :-). Finally, you probably could do it for significantly *less*
than that $250k...

Someone like you could go out there and find, or, better, build, something
which is just sitting at the edge of the cliff, full of kinetic energy
already, and kick it off onto the market's head. There's shitloads of that
stuff out there right now, and if you thought about it, you'd know more
about what to do, and how to do it, than anyone else. Anyone.

And, I claim, that *that* is the only way to *deploy* any of the stuff on
your list in any *useful* fashion quickly enough to stop the kinds of
totalitarian statism that seems to be afoot this week. If you make
something which saves people whole bunches of money and which uses strong
cryptography to do it, then privacy through strong cryptography isn't just
a good idea, it's a business necessity. Again, you're the person who can do
this best, I think.

> especially when there seem to be few grand visions that are
> realistic.

As the one person I know whose reality distortion field is bigger (and more
coherent, I might add) than mine (I'm also modest to a fault; ask me...), I
find this hard to believe. *Make* a grand vision which is realistic, if you
don't like what's out there. Frankly, you already have one. Just add money
and stir rapidly...

> (Plenty of zealots, though.)

So it seems. ;-).

> The Pagemaker team wrote it on a shoestring. No VCs until much later, when
> a product existed. (BTW, similar to the models for both PGP, Inc. and
> C2Net, where actual products are actually being sold or distributed.)

Exactly. However, in the case of Pagemaker, the shoestring was *paid* for.
That's why he made out like a bandit. Because he knew exactly what he
wanted, hired the programmers, told them what to write, and paid them for
their work, he *owned* the code when he was done.

This is exactly what I see you doing.

Same thing with C2NET. My bet is that, for the moment, at least, Sameer
owns it *all*, and, frankly, most of the people who work for him are just
happy to get paid to do what they love to do, because nobody's investing in
the market right now the way Sameer does. When people start to really
invest in the market, Sameer's going to have to offer stock options, like
Gates did, to keep people. But he's never going to need to get actual
investment from anyone ever, if he plays his card right. Of, course, like
Gates, he might have to go public someday if he's got too many option
holders. That's a nice problem to have, as I've said before.

My point, Tim, is that you could take any of the projects on your list, or
just the best one, and fund its development as cheaply as possible, on a
shoestring, and do exactly what Sameer or Gates did. Though obviously not
on the same scale as Gates, of course, but certainly the same mechanical
process, and with more than enough return on your investment.

> As it happens, I knew Adam Osbourne.

Great. So you know how to do it then.

> The problem with your "rhetorical traps," by your own admission, is that
> you just don't know what you're talking about in most cases, at least
> insofar as startups and funding go.

You may be right, and, frankly, at the moment, all I can do is bark at the
end of my rope about it. :-). Your uncanny talent for ad hominems aside, I
believe that my *analysis* of the situation is still valid, no matter my
motives or credentials to make it. Frankly, there are people with more than
enough credentials agreeing with me on a lot of this stuff. However, that
and a nickle, etc...

That analysis is that you, Tim May, the person who knows more about this
class of stuff than anyone out there, would, in my (completely unworthy
;-)) opinion, be an ideal person to make the right stuff happen. You have
the (if you'll pardon the aspersions on your character) "vision", you have
the knowlege, -- you even have the money -- to create your own
opportunities in cryptography, especially in financial cryptography, which
is the lever long enough to lift the world, as it were.

And it's a shame you don't just up and do it.

> I recall your "hothouse" VC proposal (I
> may have the name wrong, but the idea was the same as one of those hothouse
> schemes, with offices for budding entrepreneurs, etc.).

Yup. It's called e$lab, for the time being, and it's supposed to be modeled
on IdeaLab in Sacremento, and ThermoElectron, here in Massachusetts, and
it's purpose is to put together as many financial cryptography companies as
possible.  Thank you the plug, however backhanded. Just spell my name
right, or not, and I'll be happy. Any mention you can walk away from, and
all that...

> Maybe in another post I'll give my views on why such hothouse schemes are
> lousy ideas.

Wonderful. Love to hear it. Be prepared to stand in line for a little while
at the microphone, though... :-).

> But if yours is up and running and headed for success, I'll be
> happy to stand corrected.

I'd be happy to stand and correct you, someday, hopefully soon. If it
works, that is. Another nice problem to have. Certainly e$lab represents my
willingness to put people with money and business acumen together with
people who know financial cryptography until the people who know financial
cryptography have enough business accumen to teach it themselves.

Whether e$lab ends up a 'hothouse' in the model we've all come to know and
love remains to be seen. It doesn't mean we get to quit, though.

Sameer's original idea for C2NET didn't work, or his second, either, for
that matter. Microsoft isn't Traff-o-Data anymore. However, the "grand
vision" is still there, and I'm just as convinced that it's right as they
were of theirs...

> John chooses to do the things he chooses to do. He has more interest in, or
> faith in, the legal process. I have more interest in, or faith in, the
> expository process. I write about 100 times as much as he does. To each
> their own.

Indeed. Maybe we're circling around another important truth here. Mark
Twain made his name, and lots of money, writing. You don't need money, but
you've made your name by thinking, writing, and talking, for the most part.
Mark Twain spent horrendous chunks of his personal fortune on a supposedly
revolutionary printing press, or maybe it was a precursor to  the
typewriter, something like that. His famous quote, "Put all your eggs in
one basket. And watch the basket." comes from that experience.

Heck, maybe all *I'm* good for is shooting my mouth off too. (That and
conning people into doing fun projects, hopefully for money.) It would be
nice, someday, to have done a little more than that, though.

It could be that you're not tempermentally suited to invest your time,
effort, and money into strong cryptography as a business, even if you did
know more about where the future is and how to do it cheaper than anyone
else, as I believe you do.

> I won't get involved in Bob's seeming challenge to me to start matching
> John's investments.

I'm not challenging, per se. That's a little more effort than I'm capable
of. Wheedling might be more apt, but that's an undignified appelation for
my good intent, here. ;-).

> It costs money, but almost certainly not VC money. Take just one example,
> an offshore credit reporting agency not bound by U.S. restrictions under
> the FCRA. There is no need for a VC to fund this...this is best done "on a
> shoestring" by someone who starts small and expands.

Exactly my point. I think, myself, that venture vapital is probably an
industrial phenomenon, caused by transfer pricing inefficiencies in a
hierarchically organized, government controlled, capital market. (But,
that, of course, is an indecipherable jargon-pile for another day.)

I'm sure that someday -- after someone *else* makes a bunch of money
bootstrapping various successful financial cryptography companies --
venture capitalists will invest in financial cryptography. Maybe, if we
make something like e$lab work, somebody in the venture capital business
will want to play there some day, too.

Hopefully, if need to have a second round at all, shares in e$lab would be
stable -- and large -- enough to be more in line with straight up
institutional investment than venture capital. Again, a nice problem to
have. And maybe one we don't even need to have. e$lab may only be of a
certain size. Certainly if the investment's small enough and the returns
are large enough, and if every person in china gave us a nickle... :-).

> (Think of how Amazon.com got started. Lots of similar examples.)

Indeed.

> Personally, I would only get involved in such a thing if I lived offshore,
> as the government could otherwise come after me (even for funding such a
> thing). But the interesting pros and cons of such a project are well worth
> discussing. Maybe someone out there will do it.

I think that lots of what you want to do don't need to be done offshore,
and, remembering that whatever you do offshore still hangs your ass here
Stateside, if it can be proven, it doesn't help to be there much. People
like one of the Duty Free Shops partners, and a commodity trader in Zug,
Switzerland (Not to be confused with ZOG, Palestine :-)) come to mind. In
addition, there are lots of foriegn nationals trying to make some of this
"regulatory arbitrage" stuff happen as we speak.

Anyway, you yourself have said here, many times (check the archives ;-)),
that technology has to be built which is jurisdiction independant, anyway.
Besides, you've also said here, many times (check the arch<BIFF! Ouch!...>)
that living offshore, except maybe for the nice weather in Anguilla, is not
what it would be cracked up to be for someone like you, anyway...

> (This space reserved for someone to chime in about Vince Cate's ISP
> operation in Anguilla.)

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, etc...

> Why don't you knock off the "Put up or shut up" kinds of remarks? It's
> never a good basis for investment, to respond to "dares."

My apologies. I'm not entirely sure I was "daring" you to do anything. And,
I agree that responding to a "dare" is not a rational investment strategy.
However, I bet that if you put some of your considerable expertise in both
investing and in cryptography, that you could figure out away to make a lot
of the stuff that we talk about here on this list real.

(Maybe, if I'm not careful and I keep bugging you enough, even assasination
markets. ;-))

> I'll say what I want to say. Maybe even someday a good investment will
> appear. But from what I've seen of the folks at gatherings I meet them at,
> few of them would be good candidates for a VC-funded approach.

Nope. More like a hands-on, bootstrap, create your own opportunity
approach, which is what I'm talking about. Something you could probably do,
and probably do better than anyone else out there, by virtue of having
created this "vision" we all want to see happen.

> No, what it shows is the power of small entrepreneurs doing very local
> things, with the things that succeed being all that we remember (the losers
> are forgotten).

Agreed, but again, that's not the point. The point is, that for a given
amount of money, time, and determination, more money is made than is
invested over all. And, frankly, I do not believe that people like Sameer
is "lucky" (heh...) anyway. He made his luck by not giving up on making
money with privacy and cryptography. What he found was the most money can
be made in financial cryptography, which is, oddly enough, the way to make
the most privacy happen as well. Funny how that economics stuff works...

> Yeah, well let us know when "e$lab" gets really rolling.

As Telulah Bankhead said to Chico Marx under lewd circumstances: "And so
you shall, you old fashioned boy"...

> Personally, I
> think you undercut your own significance by the heavy reliance on cutesy
> names centering around "$" in place of "s," as in "e-$pam" and "e$lab."
> Cutesy wears thin fast.

Cutsey may be as cutesy does, but heavy reliance on it or not, it's not
nearly as skinny a gambit as periodically calling for "somebody" to
suitcase nuke Washington, however pleasant the prospect may be to some of
us on occasion.

> In the meantime, knock off with the dares.

Admittedly, I did not play fair back there. When one bangs on the cage of a
900 lb gorilla with a stick, one should expect a little shit thrown in
one's face in return...

I mean, not that you're a gorilla or anything, Tim. Or 900 pounds. Or even
throw shit, for that matter, but, well, maybe I better quit, now...

> Maybe we should just mutually ignore each other for a while.

Sounds like a good idea. I keep forgetting that when we try to engage in
civil discourse, I say something that pisses you off and my throat gets
ripped out...

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/