WorldCoin

20 min readMar 25, 2022

Andreessen, Khosla and Altman Team Up

By Keith Teare • Issue #303 • View online

Editorial

It’s hard to avoid being impressed by the vision of Worldcoin. Sam Altman wants to create a human-centric coin that can be distributed to every person on earth regularly. It is Universal Basic Income using a new currency. This week, thought leaders in venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, joined others in investing in Worldcoin and valuing it at $3 billion. That is $0.40c for every person on the planet, the future beneficiaries.

If Worldcoin can execute its vision it will be sending hundreds of dollars a month, or more, to these people. And if merchants start accepting Worldcoin as payment, the company will become the biggest company on earth.

The key to success is validating each human and ensuring that only humans get the coins and that they only get each distribution once. Worldcoin’s site explains how a retina scanner called the Orb will be key to that, as will smartphone ownership.

Eventually, we plan to produce more than fifty thousand devices per year.

This is where Worlcoin’s vision clashes with its execution plan.

Fifty Thousand Orb’s a year will not be enough, or fast enough, to fulfill the exciting and audacious vision of the company. And the $100m raised this week is far from enough to change that. It’s a great start and wouldn’t lead me to that thought were it not for the “eventually” and “50,000 a year”. Those words imply the real plan and the vision are quite far apart.

I may be alone but Sam, please raise several $billion and do this fast and at scale. It can be done. The core has to be merchants globally being happy to take WorldCoin as payment, otherwise owning it will be meaningless. The real value is the value to exchange for tangible needs like food, housing, clothing, education, leisure…