The Focus Fusion Society Forums Financing Fusion List of billionaires and informational packet

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  • #699
    amcnea
    Participant

    I came across a list of the top 100 billionaires on wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_billionaires_(2009) ]. Is there any sort of informational packet or dog and pony show that could be sent to them (or their people)? It seems like it would be chump change for any of those individuals to finance the entire project. Also, many of these people are known philanthropists.

    Anyways, if there is not already, I would suggest the creation of an informational packet which could be used for such purposes. Something that isn’t technical at all, but tells 1) What Focus Fusion has the possibility of accomplishing, 2) What are the phases of development, 3) How much each phase of development will cost and how long it will take, 4) When/how we will know if the phases are a success or failure. 5) And, what EXACTLY we are asking of them (the billionaires).

    Just from looking at the list I would say about 50 of them or more speak English. Anyways, that would seem like a good place to start. And the worst thing they could do is say no or ignore us.

    #5478
    Dr_Barnowl
    Participant

    Warren Buffet would seem to be the mostly likely source of funding in the top 5 ; he has a consistent habit of buying long-term prospects, and pledged $50 million to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (which exists to reduce nuclear proliferation).

    Since FF will probably reduce nuclear proliferation by outmoding all those fission reactors producing plutonium it would seem to fit with his philanthropic urges.. as to whether he’d consider it a worthy investment, I don’t know. He seems to “buy large”, but the FF budget would be chump-change to him.

    #5480
    Phil’s Dad
    Participant

    Just be careful you stick to the rules about who you can seek funding from.
    The last thing we want is a distracting legal case to fight.
    The short information pack (maybe a downloadable pdf) is a good idea though.

    #5482
    amcnea
    Participant

    Just be careful you stick to the rules about who you can seek funding from.
    The last thing we want is a distracting legal case to fight.

    Umm, what rules? And where can they be located?

    #5484
    Rezwan
    Participant

    I just spent all day Monday at a fundraising workshop offered by the Support Center for Nonprofit Management. The title: “Getting General Operational Support”. It was very informative.

    First – as you note,

    I would suggest the creation of an informational packet which could be used for such purposes. Something that isn’t technical at all, but tells 1) What Focus Fusion has the possibility of accomplishing, 2) What are the phases of development, 3) How much each phase of development will cost and how long it will take, 4) When/how we will know if the phases are a success or failure. 5) And, what EXACTLY we are asking of them (the billionaires).

    LPP has a brochure, and it has gone out to some people. Not all that it should go to, by any means. But developing materials, tailoring them, updating them, and most importantly tracking down people to send them to, following up, phone calling, all that is skilled work that takes time and $. I suppose we could take the list and do a mailing to 100 billionaires. The brochure’s done, we’d just have to print 100, plus postage. Cover letter? Call first and after?

    So you see, first we’d need to raise some modest funds for a billionaire-targeted fundraising campaign. And I’m not sure the brochures or more expensive “packet” would do the trick.

    And the worst thing they could do is say no or ignore us.

    Yes, most likely they’ll ignore a cold mailing. This kind of thing needs personal attention.

    I’m all for having billionaires on board. Not least because it will give prestige to the venture and get other people more interested in participating. And for LPP, ease up on the tight budget, speeding up the experiment.

    But the workshop had a lot of interesting points to make on fundraising strategy:

    1) It’s best to diversify your portfolio of investors. One big investor makes you over-reliant on them. Also, they tend to want a lot of control and glory. Corporate donors want their name everywhere, etc. That might lead to some of the legal problems mentioned.

    2) For any grant application, or appeal to big fish, they like to see how solid you are as an organization, how much people care about the issue. How supportive is the core of people interested in this venture? If you can’t muster support from the folks closest to the project, why should they support you? Eventually, with enough core support, you might get the big fish to put up “matching grants”.

    3) On average, organizations get 80% of their funding from small and medium donors. (They said this in the workshop, and I don’t doubt it – it’s been LPP’s experience as well).

    4) Building an organization, and getting people to donate money, takes a lot of time. You have to build the organization, build trust, make it a real vibrant place where people are truly involved in the mission.

    5) This time and effort costs $. A lot of money raised is just spent on raising more money. Then, a lot of money is spent on unglamorous things like salaries, heating bills, office supplies.

    6) Many potential donors like to ignore those costs and put restrictions on the money. The most restricted funds tend to come from government or specific grants. The least restricted (and most useful) funds come again, from small and medium donors.

    7) It’s not really about getting money from people. It’s about developing relationships, finding people who are as passionate about this idea as you. Getting them involved in whatever capacity they can get involved. Eventually, someone will know a billionaire. But by then, hopefully, you won’t even need the billionaire ex machina device.

    Not that I’d turn down the billionaire’s offer of funds. That would be mean.

    Of course, I’m thinking about FFS as a nonprofit organization with a mission. You’re thinking about investors in the LPP experiment – a for profit endeavor. It’s a similar thing. Takes a while to build the relationships, and the big fish follow the little guys. Small and medium investors save the day. They’re the bread and butter, man. They’re solid.

    Now, the only problem with this that I see is that “micro-investors” or, non-accredited investors who want to chip in funds to the experiment, will get nothing back from their investment. They can only donate. So, this tends to discourage people from donating. Let the big fish be a free rider on my dime! Hah! Let them come up with the whole thing. This issue has always bugged me.

    After the workshop on fundraising, taking advantage of the handy NYC location, I met with an organizer of the Cornellians in Entertainment networking group. We talked about the crazy world of film financing, the crazy economy where the big guys seem to be playing a number of ponzi schemes and not really trying to make money available to businesses or innovators. And then getting bailed out by taxpayers. It’s the same issue. I think the “accredited investors” model doesn’t really work for the economy. We’re setting up a Cornell meeting about it in the new year to discuss “micro-financing” and the rules and institutions that might make it work. A lot of similarities in the sciences and in the creative arts as far as funding high risk ventures (movies flop, inventions get beaten out by other inventions, etc.)

    Anyway, if you have a close, personal connection to a billionaire, by all means, set up a meeting! Get us in the door! But I suspect there’s a more sustainable, community building, organic, feel-good payoff from appreciating small and medium donors.

    #5485
    Rezwan
    Participant

    I will have to track down that brochure and make it more easily accessible on the site. Not even sure if there’s a link to it now.

    The site development continues…

    #5486
    Breakable
    Keymaster

    Alternatively it might be a good idea to make yourselves more available to the medium and small investors (bread and butter).

    #5495
    amcnea
    Participant

    Of course, I’m thinking about FFS as a nonprofit organization with a mission. You’re thinking about investors in the LPP experiment – a for profit endeavor. It’s a similar thing.

    What exactly is the relationship between FFS and LPP? If this is already discussed somewhere can you point me to it please?

    Now, the only problem with this that I see is that “micro-investors” or, non-accredited investors who want to chip in funds to the experiment, will get nothing back from their investment. They can only donate. So, this tends to discourage people from donating. Let the big fish be a free rider on my dime! Hah! Let them come up with the whole thing. This issue has always bugged me.

    Can something be done about this? I don’t know what the law is or how this can be handled but here is a hypothetical. Could FFS collect micro-investments from registered users, and hence keep information about 1) the Micro-Investor and 2) the amount invested. FFS Could then group this money together into amounts large enough such that shares of LPP could be bought @ $50 per share. Finally FFS could have a broker whom is an “accredited investor” and can purchase the shares from LPP.

    Would that be realistic? Or is there just to much red tape to actually do something like this?

    As for doing the tracking the users and amounts invested, this can be done easily with paypal. It is called IPN or Instant Payment Notification, and paypal will automatically contact your server whenever a payment is made. Anyways, I have written code to do this about 2 or 3 times now, and it isn’t that hard. I went ahead a found some stuff on Paypal IPN and ExpressionEngine. It says it can do it using off the shelf parts: http://expressionengine.com/docs/modules/simple_commerce/sc_cp_ipn.html

    #5496
    Breakable
    Keymaster

    FFS is non-profit. So basically no profit can be happening there.
    Maybe some mutual fund could be started to do that, but its a lot of work, and requires a lot of knowledge. Any bankers around here?
    What about starting fusion (and not necessary only Focus) mutual fund?

    #5500
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    Professional investors like clean equity structures. They also like airtight control and quick profits. I see the sale of at least one manufacturing license as a much more viable route for all parties. A company with $10M to $20M on the table is very likely to be running their own engineering programs in parallel to LPP’s program. All we need to do is show thermal energy unity, and that we’re closing rapidly on electrical unity.

    #5502
    Rezwan
    Participant

    amcnea wrote:
    What exactly is the relationship between FFS and LPP? If this is already discussed somewhere can you point me to it please?

    See https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/category/C26/ – scroll down to what is lpp and how is it related to ffs?

    Now, the only problem with this that I see is that “micro-investors” or, non-accredited investors who want to chip in funds to the experiment, will get nothing back from their investment. They can only donate. So, this tends to discourage people from donating. Let the big fish be a free rider on my dime! Hah! Let them come up with the whole thing. This issue has always bugged me.

    Can something be done about this? I don’t know what the law is or how this can be handled but here is a hypothetical. Could FFS collect micro-investments from registered users, and hence keep information about 1) the Micro-Investor and 2) the amount invested. FFS Could then group this money together into amounts large enough such that shares of LPP could be bought @ $50 per share. Finally FFS could have a broker whom is an “accredited investor” and can purchase the shares from LPP.

    That would be illegal, because we’d be promising something that we aren’t allowed to promise. I’ve spoken with lawyers at the SEC about this. It’s just not possible. Micro investors can donate, but you can only invest if you have a lot of money. The rich get rich, the poor are patronized. Much can be done about this, unfortunately, it’s all long term stuff that won’t really affect current needs. If LPP were to go public, anyone could invest. It’s at proof-of-concept stage, though, so can’t really be taken public. But it’s now that it needs the investment money.

    I think there is a space now for developing a campaign around making micro-investment, pre-public stock offering, legal. Given the track record of Wall Street, and the fact that taxpayers had to bail out the system with 700bill, we already are the micro investors that prop the whole thing up.

    The thing is that science experiments are inherently risky investments. The SEC is trying to protect people from losing money. The primary goal, thus, is protecting investors, not making $ available for innovation.

    I think the argument to the SEC would be somewhere along the lines of: by allowing micro investors to invest in scientific innovation, or, say, film – and limiting it to small amounts so that no one gets over-excited and loses their shirts on this – and with full disclosure and warnings that investment may not return any dividend, caveat emptor, etc., and administering this through an online system like ebay or paypal that keeps track of the investment amounts, and also allows oversight of the people receiving the money (to enable better decision-making) – you’ll have a transparent system that is primarily about getting money to people with ideas, with less focus on making money, but which may, paradoxically, end up generating a lot of quality “black swans”. In other words, we would expect that a lot of the investment opportunities in such a system would be flops, but several might succeed and become stars. We could test such a system for a while, and see if this sort of micro-investment, wisdom of crowds, no investor too small program does any better than the ponzi-scheme floating bad-loan generating wall street fat cat thing we have going on now.

    We’d have to look at winners and losers in both systems overall. It would be a great social experiment.

    At the very least, with the micro investors funding smaller innovators (inventors, artitsts and designers), you’d create a lot more jobs that would help diversify and enrich the local economy. Like the physicists at LPP. They get a salary. Their salary goes right back into the economy as they rent or buy a house, car, stuff for their families. Then they might invest their savings into some bonds, stocks, and back into the micro-investments of other inventors they think are cool…

    It’s about circulating money and ploughing it back into the hands of innovators, creators, artists, scientists, etc… That money always gets back into the economy. Money is like electricity. Currency. The best system allows for the most efficient circulation. I don’t think the system we have now fits that bill. Interview of Matt Taibbi by Stephen Colbert:

    Stephen: You say that Goldman Sachs takes advantage of bubbles that they helped create.

    Matt: Wall street really used to be about helping investors find good business opportunities which in turn would create jobs. Wall street had an important part in helping stimulate the real economy. What’s happened in the last 20 years is that it’s really turned into one ponzi scheme after another, tech stocks, mortgages, commodities bubble last year. It’s turned into a purely speculative economy, it’s really basically a casino now where Wall street makes a ton of money, but no real jobs are created.

    I think this system is bankrupted, and that micro-investment is the way of the future, the true invisible hand of the market. There will be speculation with the micro-investors, but certainly more jobs will be funded at the micro-level, and more innovative activity would take place at this level. I think a lot of laws are against it, but given the technologies of today, they can’t be justified any longer (justification being they protect investors).

    Anyway, looking for more ammo for this line of argument

    #5504
    Phil’s Dad
    Participant

    You might find this list interesting. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/specials/article5816774.ece.

    While I was giving some thought to the micro-investor question I got an e-mail from one of the people on the first page of the above list. I’ve known him for a while and had sown the FF seed with him. He tells me his brother has set up a company that looks to invest in “relatively early stage clean technology”. He has instructed them to look into FFS / LPP. I will keep you posted.

    #5505
    Rezwan
    Participant

    Phil’s Dad wrote: You might find this list interesting. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/specials/article5816774.ece.

    Excellent! Yes, there are some quality, well meaning million/billionaires out there. I still wouldn’t cold call them. (OK, I guess the list is small enough to cold call, I’m just whining). Still, it comes down to personal connections….et voila:

    While I was giving some thought to the micro-investor question I got an e-mail from one of the people on the first page of the above list. I’ve known him for a while and had sown the FF seed with him. He tells me his brother has set up a company that looks to invest in “relatively early stage clean technology”. He has instructed them to look into FFS / LPP. I will keep you posted.

    And now, back to my current preoccupation: the site still isn’t presentable in my view. The earlier mentioned “dog and pony show” is not in full dress.

    Then again, going back to human relationships, that’s not what it’s about either. Eric’s open to having folks come down and seeing the lab and meet in person. That would be the way to go.

    And if they want to find out about FFS and the education/advocacy/social aspect of the quest for fusion, as its rep, I’d be happy to meet in person. Coffee. Lunch. What have you. We’re right next to New York City, although this quiet New Jersey suburb is also lovely.

    And finally, just because some handy billionaire ex machina situation arises to save the day, don’t lose site of that micro-investor thing. There’s a lot of power in that idea. Worthy of pursuit in its own right.

    #5628
    Warwick
    Participant

    Breakable wrote: FFS is non-profit. So basically no profit can be happening there.
    Maybe some mutual fund could be started to do that, but its a lot of work, and requires a lot of knowledge. Any bankers around here?
    What about starting fusion (and not necessary only Focus) mutual fund?

    Rezwan wrote:

    Now, the only problem with this that I see is that “micro-investors” or, non-accredited investors who want to chip in funds to the experiment, will get nothing back from their investment. They can only donate. So, this tends to discourage people from donating. Let the big fish be a free rider on my dime! Hah! Let them come up with the whole thing. This issue has always bugged me.

    Can something be done about this? I don’t know what the law is or how this can be handled but here is a hypothetical. Could FFS collect micro-investments from registered users, and hence keep information about 1) the Micro-Investor and 2) the amount invested. FFS Could then group this money together into amounts large enough such that shares of LPP could be bought @ $50 per share. Finally FFS could have a broker whom is an “accredited investor” and can purchase the shares from LPP.

    That would be illegal, because we’d be promising something that we aren’t allowed to promise. I’ve spoken with lawyers at the SEC about this. It’s just not possible. Micro investors can donate, but you can only invest if you have a lot of money. The rich get rich, the poor are patronized. Much can be done about this, unfortunately, it’s all long term stuff that won’t really affect current needs. If LPP were to go public, anyone could invest. It’s at proof-of-concept stage, though, so can’t really be taken public. But it’s now that it needs the investment money.

    Quality discussion folks.
    I know that there are unit trusts that allow the investor to indicate what they want the money put towards – out of public shares that is. Therefore I wonder if it is inconceivable that such a fund would be willing to invest in a private company if enough members suggested it. Here in the UK the one I was looking about was I think called the CIS Sustainable Leaders Growth Trust (and you don’t have to be rich to become a member, you can invest with just an ISA). (I also have the impression that a firm called Hendersons Global Investors that have a hefty ethical funding arm.)

    #5634
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    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.

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