My 200 Year Plan - Rudland Capital - $27 Trillion "Social Good" Fund

Mar 3, 2020

I wrote a vision statement around 2016 for what I wanted to leave behind when I die. This was after watching a Jeff Bezos talk where he explains his "Regret Minimisation Framework" where you zoom forward to 80 and look back at your life, what would you want to contribute/achieve? Exactly, how small are you thinking?

Mine is a $10B fund that has no outside investors that invests into new startups and charities that improve the world. Conscious/Social capitalism.

I personally thought no-one would understand this idea and that it was "too big" for anyone to understand. Especially when I was broke and the startup I was building at the time was struggling and causing massive stress #TheHardThingAboutHardThings

In 2017, I saw the (now) famous talk by Chamath Palihapitiya at Stanford where he cuts the shit and tells the truth about the world.

Simply put: 150 capitalist men run the world, politicians are puppets, don't hate and try to change the game, master the game with ethics, get the fucking money, get a seat at the table and then change the world.

It was literally like staring into a mirror, his view of the world was identical to mine. Maybe I wasn't so crazy? So I emailed Chamath. Without paraphrasing, here's the actual email I sent him on Mon 20/11/2017 at 12:46...

Hi Chamath - this may come across a little strong, but I had to send you a very honest note on this. I just caught a talk you did at Stanford - I’m completely blown away, this has hit me at the core of my being. It’s like a mirror of my entire being and how I think about the world. The reason it has hit me so hard is because I thought I was the only person who thinks the way I think. I don’t know a single person that has the world view that I have. The only difference I can see in my plan vs yours in the capital allocation. For this to work I think it’s best to have no investors (demanding annual returns) and build a machine that’s nearly-100% automated so my sons-sons-son-son cannot screw it up or become an evil dictator. So my plan is as follows: place 50% of capital into a world stock index and 50% into new companies that match a nearly identical criteria of SocialCapital. The reason for 50% allocation into world stock index is about guaranteed long term compounding rate. The only way to beat these 150 people is to beat the compounding rate over the long term and never lose money, thus never sell, ever. S&P 500 has returned 4.44% asset growth and average 2% dividend since 1871. I believe globally this will be about the same. Also as funds get large (over $50B) it becomes nearly impossible to beat the index. As a side effect of successful VC - the companies we create would most likely join this index too. To put this into perspective, the funds starts with $10B in year 1, the $5B we deploy into world stock index will be about $27.5T by year 200 ($2Q by year 300). The 2% dividend receive each year from the world stock index holding will 100% (nearly) be deployed into new companies. By year 200 it means $550B per annum would be deployed into more social good companies, and so on. This is not including any of the companies that would be invested into with the other 50% of AUM. Thus the entire machine will become larger than any other asset in the world but it will take 200 years. Thank you for what you are doing - never stop, it will change the world. I’ll be at the table with you too, one day. Kind regards, Ash.

Read that email a few times to fully understand my 200 year plan for Rudland Capital. If you still don't understand, read it again. My entire plan is right there.

Ironically at the time of writing this SocialCapital had outside investors, after this email was sent, he gave back the funds and now runs the fund 100% with his own capital. This decisions makes a massive difference. Very happy Chamath did this.

3 reasons:

1. I need to put it out into the universe, it's important there is more RudlandCapital & SocialCapital's in the world. If someone else reads this and decides to build the same, the world will improve.
2. This will be cool to read when looking back
3. While searching my email today, I realised I've been so stupid all this time. Chamath Palihapitiya actually did respond to me, not recently but 2 hours after I sent the original email in 2017. I never knew 😟 So I'm not so crazy then??

Here's the screenshot:

If you read this Chamath, thank you for the response. It means the world. BTW, I'm still working on it 👊

Thanks for reading, Ash.