- My main 10-year goal is to create an organization/"lab" for developing tools for online speech. e.g. if/when Yakread is sufficiently profitable, I'd like to hire other people part-time to continue developing it, and encourage them to work on their own projects in the remaining time (probably use interest in that as a hiring filter). In addition to the part-time job, I can provide some mentorship, access to any connections I have.... As employees' projects become more mature, if they're suitable as businesses, the employees/founders can switch to working on those full-time. the idea is to make a bunch of little companies that split off of Yakread like amoeba, with shared resources where it makes sense. And ideally, most of those companies perpetuate Yakread's part-time job + research/invention culture. - This is getting into the weeds a bit, but Biff is IMO an important part of this--it's not just another project I happen to be interested in. Biff is designed to help people in the early stages of projects like these be as productive as possible, while continuing to be productive as the projects mature. Clojure in general is well suited to small, highly productive teams, and I think that's a good fit for the part-time work/lots-of-small-companies culture/organization I'm trying to create. There may be some network benefits too; e.g. if most of the companies in this organization use Biff, employees can move between companies easily; it may be easier to onboard new employees assuming Biff has a strong community + learning resources; that sort of thing.

- Zooming out on the previous point: the authors of the tools-for-thought essay emphasize that both research and product cultures need to be merged. The high-level questions like "what kinds of tools for online speech are needed?" are important, and equally important are implementation details like which development tools to use. The organization needs to have a strong product culture and be able to deliver software quickly; it's not just a research lab. - If this model actually works, I'd like this organization to scale up/scale out as much as it can, and ideally even inspire the creation of other similar organizations. This is where the tools for online speech/thought turns into a viable career path. Could this be a good college alternative? It's a shame to spend so much time working on artificial assignments when you could be working on real problems.