Excellent idea, Warwick.
Getting back to the millions of small investors idea, I bought a physical book yesterday called The Viral Loop. Obama’s communications and fundraising plan were detailed very early. Seems that if you have a few million people chipping in only a buck or ten, you can go back for more almost as often as you wish. But if he’d asked the Faithful for $100M he would have flamed out.
Also, none of those contributors was looking for any kind of equity- just meaningful change.
Being a non-profit could make it trickier, but the first few million would pay for the engineering program before you’d have to figure out how to invest the surplus. Maybe desalination plants in countries nobody’s ever heard of.
