Updated Patreon goals!

As a heads up, we have updated our Patreon goals, as part of some other updating we're undertaking! We've learned a lot since the original goals were written, and these goals more accurately reflect what we are doing as well as what we can do at future funding levels. 

Changes:

We're aggressively pursuing in-house research. When the previous goals were written (over 2 years ago!), we did not anticipate so many people being able and willing to volunteer and help out with in-house research projects. Our volunteers are helping make strategically critical advancements possible, and that's letting us directly perform research way sooner, and much more cost-effectively, than we expected. Thank you so much to our volunteers - seriously!

We've found that $4,000 grants for providing funding to external researchers are effective! We've awarded 2 of them already, and the first one we awarded already resulted in a journal publication. This means that we don't have to save up $50,000 or more to do a larger grant.

Internal research will continue to be a large focus of our activities. In particular, we can ensure internal research is closely aligned with our strategic goals. There's a lot of useful research that can be done in-silico or remote/online, such as strategically critical software, and organizing knowledge. We've identified gaps in what the traditional/academic enterprise addresses, and it's both necessary, and possible, for us to fill in those gaps!

We're no longer considering any meaningful investment account/endowment at this time. That's because our expected Return on Investment of cash is far higher than money set aside. (That said, if we are lucky enough to receive a windfall, we'll hold that windfall as an investment to make sure we use the funds effectively and scalably).

Thank you so much!

Zennith