A Prospectus.
Being a complete statement of the business, its market, its method and the risks attaching thereto. Prepared by management. Reviewed by management. Approved by management.
Asking Company · Toronto · First edition · Printed in one colour to reduce costs
We describe a company with one employee, one product and one price. The product is a request. The price is one dollar.
We show that the resulting business has no marginal cost, no inventory, no delivery obligation and no conversion rate, and we argue that the absence of the last of these is a feature of the model rather than an omission from it. We conclude that the company is the most capital-efficient in its sector and invite correction.
The most capital-efficient company
in artificial intelligence.
Everyone keeps saying artificial intelligence will produce the first one-person billion-dollar company. It is said on podcasts. It is said in keynotes. It is said by the people who run the labs, with great confidence and no examples.
We found the absence of examples notable. So we built one, and we would now like to make the case for it seriously, because we believe it is the strongest case in the sector.
Revenue per employee
The industry's favourite metric. Ours is $149. The denominator is 1. We invite comparison on the denominator.
Gross margin
Our competitors lose money on every unit of inference they serve and expect this to improve at scale. We do not serve inference. We serve a sentence. A sentence costs nothing to serve and does not get more expensive when more people read it.
Capital efficiency
Value created divided by capital raised. We have raised zero dollars, so the figure requires division by zero and is therefore undefined. We interpret this favourably. Our accountant has been instructed to interpret it the same way and has not responded.
Burn
Two hundred dollars a month. It is one software subscription. We have no office, no compute contract, no data centre, no counterparties, and no obligations denominated in anything other than politeness.
The constraint
Every other company in this sector is constrained by the supply of graphics processing units, which is finite, contested, and becoming more expensive. We are constrained by the number of people who have heard of us. This is the only input in the entire industry that gets cheaper as you use more of it.
We are not claiming to be a better business. We are claiming to be a more efficient one, and we would like somebody to explain the difference to us in writing.
Everyone.
Our total addressable market is the human species. We are not aware of a larger one.
One in eight people.
That is the entire go-to-market.
8,200,000,000 people alive
× $1.00 each
= $8,200,000,000 total addressable market
− $7,200,000,000 we do not need
= $1,000,000,000 the goal
One in eight. Every consumer company in history would call that an ambitious but achievable Year One target. We have been at it since April and have reached one in five hundred and forty-seven million.
A correction has been noted. At 67¢ net of processing we in fact require 1,490,313,000 givers, or one in 5.5 people alive. Management became aware of this during preparation of these figures and has elected to proceed.
We ask.
The method is asking. A request is transmitted to a person. The person either gives one dollar or does not. There is no funnel, no nurture sequence, no retargeting and no second touch, because a second touch would be asking twice, which is a different company.
The request costs nothing to produce and nothing to serve. It does not degrade under load. It works in every language and on every device, including devices that have not been invented, provided they can display a sentence.
We are not aware of another product in this sector with those properties.
We have found a way to halve
the number of people required.
Our original model required one dollar from one in eight people alive. Following a review of our growth assumptions, we have identified a refinement.
We ask for two dollars.
We are aware of one objection: that a person asked for two dollars may be less likely to give than a person asked for one. We have reviewed this and determined it is not a factor in the model, because the model does not contain a conversion rate. Adding one would require assumptions we are not currently in a position to make.
The limit case. At one billion dollars the requirement falls to a single person. This is the most efficient version of the strategy and we are pursuing it in parallel. If you are that person, the button is at the top of the page and will need to be pressed once.
What everyone else requires.
Each competitor in the adjacent-ask category carries an obligation we do not.
What happens to the billion.
Set out in full, in advance, on the theory that this is the only point at which writing it down costs nothing to mean.
| Living expenses — one million per month | 1.2% |
| The founder's mother — one million per month | 1.2% |
| Distributed annually to make new millionaires | 4.6% |
| Principal, never touched | 93.0% |
The principal is the engine and is not spent. Only what it throws off is distributed. The full argument is set out in A succession plan, filed in advance, Shelf I of the Library.
What could go wrong.
Disclosed in full. Investors are reminded that there are no investors.
- People may not give us one dollar. This is the principal risk to the business. It is also, at present, the situation.
- A competitor may ask for less. We have modelled this. The floor is zero dollars, at which point the competitor holds our entire business model and none of our revenue. We consider the position defensible.
- The founder may lose interest. Historically the leading cause of failure in this category. No mitigation has been identified. Management has been made aware and did not appear concerned, which we disclose as a separate risk.
- We may be instructed to stop. By whom is not established. We have not been instructed to stop.
- The model contains no conversion rate. Disclosed for completeness. See Section 3. Adding one would require assumptions we are not in a position to make and would, on any realistic value, make the rest of this document considerably shorter.
- Concentration risk. One hundred per cent of revenue derives from asking. We have no second product and no plans to build one, as a second product would dilute the first.
- Key person risk. There is one person. He is also the key.
- Currency risk. All figures are expressed in dollars. Should the dollar cease to exist, one in eight people will owe us nothing.
- We may succeed. Management has not planned for this and has no procedure for it. The one document addressing the scenario was written before the company had any money, on the assumption that it would be harder to write afterwards.
How the money actually moves.
The preceding risks are strategic. These are mechanical, and considerably more likely.
- The payment processor may decline to process payments. Card networks and the processors acting for them maintain categories of restricted business. The solicitation of funds without a registered charitable purpose sits adjacent to several of them. We have described our activity accurately in our application, which is the only mitigation available to us and also the single thing most likely to trigger review.
- A dispute costs more than the gift. A giver who forgets the transaction and queries it with their bank produces a dispute. The fee attaching to that dispute is approximately fifteen dollars and is not returned to us even where the dispute is resolved in our favour. Successfully defending a one-dollar gift therefore costs us fourteen dollars, and our break-even is one dispute per fifteen givers. This is a worse ratio than it sounds, because we have had fifteen givers.
- Disputes policy. We have accordingly adopted a threshold. Disputes are accepted only on transactions exceeding sixteen dollars, at which level a defence resolved in our favour leaves us with one dollar — being the amount we asked for in the first place. Below that figure we will not contest the charge, on the basis that winning is the more expensive outcome. We are aware that we do not control who raises a dispute, or when, or whether any of this is ours to decide. The policy is published for completeness.
- The descriptor. The charge appears on the giver's statement as ASKINGCOMPANY. We have not been able to establish whether this makes a dispute more or less likely, and we can see the argument both ways.
- Holds and reserves. A processor observing a sudden concentration of small one-time payments to an entity with no product may place funds on hold pending review. We would like to state for the record that this describes us precisely and that we do not consider it unreasonable.
- Contingency. Should processing be withdrawn we will move to another provider, and then to another. There are more payment processors in the world than there are reasons to give us a dollar, and we expect to exhaust the second well before the first.
- The floor. In the event that no processor will act for us, the founder's position is that people have handed each other money without intermediaries for several thousand years and that the technology, while dated, is well understood.
A company that asks eight billion people for one dollar has no meaningful costs, no meaningful obligations and no meaningful defence.
We have described the market, the method, the strategy, the competition, the allocation of proceeds and the risks. Every figure in this document is real. Every conclusion drawn from those figures is available for inspection and, we suspect, correction.
The request follows.
- Population estimate. We did not conduct the census.
- Assumes each person has one dollar. Not all do. This is addressed in no part of this document.
- "Efficiency" is used throughout in the technical sense of a ratio, and not in the sense of anything working.
- Forward-looking statements in this prospectus are almost certainly false. They are included because a prospectus without them would not look like one.
- This document has not been reviewed by counsel. Counsel is the same person and has declined to review his own work on grounds of independence.