The goal of any organization 🏢 is to pool resources (human and otherwise) towards a common goal, which a single person wouldn't be able to achieve. That goal could be to connect people 👥 (Facebook; LinkedIn), to explore space 🚀(Blue Origin; SpaceX), to make knowledge more accessible 🌐(Google), to create electronic consumer devices 🖥️(Microsoft; Apple), to democratize supply chain 🛒(Amazon) or to make intra-city commute easier 🚕(Uber; Ola). Companies align these goals somehow to the art of money 💰making so the people working there can be sustained with a good salary, as well as to cover the costs of buying assets or constructing infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage/status/1491657488214622210?s=20&t=NhzVPKDoI4_6081QP3MdnQ

But what if your goal can be achieved by 👤one person (you alone)? If your goal is to maintain some open source code 👨🏻‍💻repository, you'll probably either keep a day job and work on your project at night, or you'll go freelance in a manner very similar to how successful companies pull off a balancing act between working for money and working on their end goal. Finally, you could also seek donations for your open source project, or have a link on your website so people can "buy you a coffee ☕". This is not unlike how some social entrepreneurs rely on corporate social responsibility or government funding to support their staff.

Finally, there's one other alternative to supporting yourself while working on a solo project. Instead of aligning it to a money-making venture or one that seeks donations, you could align it to the goal of adding to human knowledge 📖. This puts you in league with academia, which is nothing but an extensive framework to let such one-person-startups (called PhD students) sustain themselves while working on a long term project. Academia does so by either linking them to research grants loosely aligned with the thesis of the student, or by assigning them to tutorship duties - which is why research is largely accomplished in large universities. Lately, the money-making alignment has also crept in, at least for some emerging technologies like artificial intelligence 🤖, where giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. fund industrial research labs, in a bid to get patents, or to attract new talent, or for some good old PR.

Within this chain of thought, I find quite a few gaps to fill in. For example, what happens to one-person initiatives which do not add to human knowledge? What if I want to build a Chrome extension that maintains a reverse index of all the content you've ever seen (an expanded history) and lets you search effectively over them? My only options are:

1. work on it on weekends, keep the day job - takes much longer than required
2. apply to a European (3 year long) PhD program to conduct research on known-item search, perhaps in an information retrieval lab
3. form a startup and find a way to monetize it - most easily done with ads

If only there was an academia-like community which let people work on not-exactly-research projects for a flexible amount of time! The community's job would have been to ensure sufficient funding flows in from government 🏛️, venture 🏢, or philanthropic 🏦 sources - while also ensuring quality management of the incoming students.

Lastly, there are some such alignment platforms out there already. For example, YouTube 📽️ can be thought of as one such community which converts "popularity / reach" to "monetary income" without the creator having to worry about the linkage. Colin Furze, a YouTube personality, makes arbitrary projects in his backyard - such as Wolverine claws 🐾 or an Iron Man suit 🤺 - which most certainly are neither marketable nor are in any way adding to human knowledge. But the sheer interestingness of his projects give him a large audience - which YouTube then converts into dollars 💵, giving a share 💸 back to Colin.

The moral of the story is: if you have an initiative in mind, look for different alignment platforms which can help you work on it full-time. Someone interested in traveling the world often takes to blogging ✍🏻 or vlogging 🖼️ on Instagram / Pinterest / YouTube to make up a source of income. But not every initiative might be interesting enough to garner millions of views or followers. In that case, you must turn to other platforms, such as academia. Figure out what incentive (views, research publications, etc.) are you best at maximizing - and then find a platform that converts that metric into real 🤑 money.