Motivation

These past fifty years have seen an Information Technology revolution with profits from productivity gains going to the top 1%. Since the early 1970s, their wealth has steadily increased relative to everybody else. For the most part, the rest of us are still getting along albeit with somewhat lower expectations than our parents and grandparents. But it is not all bad. Had the middle economic classes benefited from IT’s productivity gains, there’d be far more counterproductive goods like high CO2 emitting McMansions, SUVs, and jetting off to golf.

While the rich have the means to innovate, not all have a good appreciation of what they, and we, need. They may want supersonic private jets and beds in first class; we need bunk beds in economy class. Billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Gates get the press, but they do not have a monopoly on the best ideas. We all aim to make our highly engineered civilization sustainable, but it is easy to miss the mark. Musk still touts (albeit just marketing to college grads) a wildly counter-productive, existential-angst-driven goal of colonizing Mars in his lifetime. Gates seems unable to get free of the taint of schemes such as Microsoft's OS/2 bait and switch in the 90s, and now the suspicion of engineering pandemics for gains in vaccine stocks. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg appears to envision users lounging in gaming in virtual reality devoid of exercise and human touch. 

Traditionally, technical breakthroughs have been funded by the military. We need an alternative way to fund great ideas, especially those on the other side of those super-wide “Valleys of Death” venture capitalists deem unbridgeable. On the far side lie taller mountain ranges, metaphors for much higher price/performance, quality of life, and hopes for the youth: a promising future for increasingly beautiful and complex life on Earth.

Plan

JFC hires senior professionals, usually engineers and academics, to create competitions that forge first-to-market start-up teams, and fast followers that keep the competitions going.  

Since the JFC is a non-profit foundation, the funds are quasi-public. Each payout will put work in the public domain.

Investing

A donation of X dollars will qualify an investment of X dollars in a fund run by ME, JFC’s VC. Pledge now to donate and invest in the first-in-class and first-to-market teams that graduate from JFC’s competitions.