Excellent review.
I was a little disappointed with Zvi’s review, since it was very clearly against Callard’s Socrates, which was deconstructed and reinterpreted into something (in my opinion) very different from the actual Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s almost impossible to have an understanding of something, that is good enough to respond to, from secondhand sources that aren’t explicitly trying to explain the thing. Callard isn’t trying to give the reader a good understanding of Socrates, they’re trying to make “The Case for a Philosophical Life” (the byline of the book). So any response to Callard, that talks about “Socrates” is going to annoy people who are more informed on the subject, since the Socrates being disagreed with is a controversial interpretation of Socrates that loses much of what makes him interesting in the first place.
And then real problem is that this interpretation then supplants the “real” Socrates when Callard communicates it, other people respond to it, and the memory of the discourse of the interpreted Socrates in the audience is now this deformed version that doesn’t correspond well to the original. I wonder how many other things are like that.
Wow, excellent write up!
In many ways it seems like Nectome is the other side of the coin to a company like Until Labs. Backed by Peter Thiel, their technical accomplishments in the field are basically nothing. At least judging by this interview a few months ago with their CSO. They did some very basic preservation of neural slices, but they managed to raise $58m with the intention of achieving successful organ preservation and rewarming. A good strategy since that allows them to be a biotech company first, with all the respectability and business opportunities if it works out, while aiming at human-scale cryopreservation in the long run.
It may honestly be worth discussing a partnership with them. They are flush with cash right now, their funding by characters like Thiel is largely based on that long-term mission of cryopreservation of humans, and they don’t really have any meaningful accomplishments (yet) towards that mission. What they do have, which Nectome clearly lacks, is that they’re business savvy, are good at raising money and have good PR.
I have interacted with Aurelia online a few times before in discussion related to aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, but I was always left unconvinced. This article here did quite a lot more to convince me than those interactions had.
Otherwise, it’s almost painfully obvious there’s low hanging fruit on the business/marketing/operations side that they’re not doing, which is a terrible sign for them achieving long term ambitions. Off the top of my head;
The third picture on their home page features prominently a dog’s ass and balls. Scroll to the bottom and this is literally dead center of the page.
There’s no high-level person who’s the “face” of the company. They should pick that person and try to do at least 2 podcasts/guest posts/interviews, etc. per month.
There’s no “Team” page on their website. Each person and their expertise should be prominently displayed.
There’s no “press” page or press email on their site (press@nectome.com), only their blog. This post and the Asterisk magazine article should be featured prominently. People care a more about what other people say about your business than what you have to say. Asterisk is written by Song, but it’s a level of endorsement when a publication is willing to promote you.
There’s no “plan” page on their site. They should clearly lay out where the company is now, where it will be in “X” period of time, and where they eventually intend to reach. This lesswrong post basically lays it out well.
There’s no layman’s explainer of their technology on their site. Only their research papers.
Their contact button opens up your email client, it doesn’t take them to a contact page. There’s no phone number, and their contact email isn’t shown on the page.
Their “discounted” plan seems desperate, reducing confidence in their success. With the money they received already, they weren’t able to get beyond the research stage, now they’re offering their product at a 90% discount from what their expected costs are. This is a terrible signal, and they’d probably have a much easier time raising donations from wealthy individuals, with a preservation thrown in for donations after $20k. Just really bad framing here that makes them look desperate for cash.
They have no “membership” option, nor a sign up for updates (I guess their Substack?)
nectome.substack.com doesn’t index on google for nectome.com. Google ranks blog articles hosted on the actual site much higher than Substack, and any benefit of a popular nectome article won’t feed back into nectome.com’s SEO. Google considers them different sites. They should be writing articles on a blog hosted within nectome.com answering easy to rank for questions. Use a Semrush 7 day free trial to identify cryonics questions/keywords) then hire a company on Upwork (pay $600 - $700 and they will easily get you on the first page of google for any term less than 30 difficulty).
Most importantly, there’s no low-commitment way to sign up! They’re asking for $20k, which, given that they don’t have any facilities, is basically asking for nice people who believe in them? That’s fine for a few people like the author of this post, and can work if they know some very wealthy people already, but it is unlikely to get many random sign-ups.
Take tomorrow.bio as an example. They have a $50/mo membership, and fund the preservation with life insurance, which for a person under 40 is quite cheap. That’s an extremely low commitment, leads to some buy-in early on, and allows them to bring those “commitments” to potential investors as customers with ongoing revenue.
Tomorrow asks for a $50/mo subscription you can basically cancel anytime, and when they actually end up needing to follow through with their promise, there’s a huge life insurance payout waiting for them. Nectome wants $20k upfront, and they’re basically accepting a $230k shortfall should anyone die in the interim. This would make anyone skeptical that they really have any intention of following through. Malice or incompetence, the numbers don’t add up!
And I’m sure a lot of other stuff I’m not thinking about, as I think the above is enough for a comment. I’m critiquing them a lot here, but this post brought me a long way to believing in their method of preservation, so I genuinely do hope they succeed. Of course my advice should be taken with a grain of salt as an internet anon, but I hope @Aurelia and @CharlieT reads this. Some of my critique is opinion, but most of it is just the basics of running a business with an online presence. If I was them what I would do;
3 Days: Change the third picture. Add a “team” page with short bios and pictures. Create a press email (it can be an alias if you use g-suite or whatever). Add a “contact us” page with email, press and phone number.
7 Days: Add a plan page. Add an explainer page of the technological edge. Create a blog hosted on your site (Sanity is good for this).
30 Days: Create a “sign up” or “Learn more” or “Choose life” button or whatever that collects name, email, phone number, add membership pricing, and start speaking to life insurance agencies. Research what agency provides the service for Alcor and call them, they’re almost certainly not exclusive to Alcor. Get a list of keywords and hire an agency to get a blog post “answering” each relevant keyword ranked on the first of google. Pick your company’s “Face” and start messaging relevant podcasters, blogs, etc.
Like, most of this could be done by one person in an afternoon depending on how AI-savvy they are, let alone by a team of very smart people in a month.