I’m excited to share that I have co-founded a company - Selva - where we’re making an ecosystem for science!
Together with Andrew Shwartz and Anthony Cortese (two incredibly experienced business & finance pro’s) we’re trying to revolutionize science for the 21st century. I know that sounds ambitious, but it’s true: as the printing press was a major transition in the evolution of science, we’re aiming to redesign scientific information-sharing and rewire the funding of science in ways that we believe can dramatically improve the fairness of academic publication & funding while boosting the value of scientists, the funding of science, and the ability of scientists to save the world.
Our goal at Selva is to connect scientists with one-another in a social medium with no bots, trolls, anonymous jerks, or hostile foreign powers of Twitter. We also aim to not be boring like LinkedIn!
We’ll be keeping a blog to share our vision, our platform, and our latest developments. Feel free to check it out here!
If you know anybody with a PhD or in a PhD program and eager to get paid to make scientific content, have them sign up through our web page here! If you know any investors who might be interested, email me at alex@agoracommunity.co and let’s chat!
I’ll keep writing the occasional personal blog here, but a lot of my time and effort is going into this new project. Those of you who have known me throughout COVID know of my profound & unyielding love of science - I’m taking all the love I have of science and for scientists, and putting it into this effort to make a platform that makes life better for scientists. I hope that this platform can improve discourse and, by the next pandemic, I hope this platform can help scientists coordinate better as a community to deliver cutting-edge findings and respectfully share diverse perspectives to help the world’s many people receive the best and most representative scientific consultation they’ll need.
I love you all, and can’t wait to share more with you!
-Alex
P.S. (11/18/2022):
I recently left Selva. I played a dominant role guiding product development, but, prior to launch, had consistent disagreements with another co-founder on core issues. The other co-founder was consistently non-inclusive of the full diversity of the scientific community and I didn’t believe the company would, under their leadership, be a good thing for science. The other co-founders took the nuclear option of repurchasing unvested shares. I’m fine with that because, while their business was my idea and scientists care deeply about credit-sharing, I stand by my love of the scientific community & commitment to inclusion in science and won’t work for a platform that I feel fails to operate under the ethical systems that bind our world of scientists together.
Rather than delete this post, I wanted to preserve it as a record that the core vision of a scientific medium was my idea - the other co-founders wanted to “improve discourse” until they met me (the formal name of Selva is “Improving Discourse LLC”, and the entirety of Selva is now owned by two people with bachelors degrees in business who did not conceive the idea of a scientific medium, who did not design the scientific medium, who have little to no knowledge of scientific systems, and who I believe are very likely to operate the business in a way that ends up being detrimental to the larger goals of science that centers scientists in an inclusive manner.
I learned something important. Be very picky about your business partners. I hope we can find better ways to connect scientists with business partners in a manner that centers the interests of scientists & their ideas.
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This sounds like a very exciting initiative! Are there corrected links for the Selva website? The current ones still point to Agora, which no longer exists.
Thanks,
Gavin