#exhasta
What is a moonshot?Moonshots are high-risk and high-impact projects. They aim for 10x change, rather than a 10% improvement. The range of projects considered Moonshots include:
- NASA’s Apollo 11 which landed humans on the moon
- Google’s Project Loon that will bring internet to millions of unconnected individuals and communities with balloons
- Or the various XPRIZE competitions like commercial moon rovers or medical tricorders (the medical diagnosis tool from Star Trek)
These ideas sound amazing! Who wouldn’t want to see a world with these Moonshots? I not only want to see them and buy them, I want to be empowered to use the underlying innovations to create more and make the world a better place. This leads fellow entrepreneurs and innovators to ask an interesting question:
What is there to show for all these Moonshots aside from black-boxed products and services?
To best answer that question, we need to follow the money.
How are Moonshots funded?The history of Moonshots and their funding is a bit of an untold story. You can get a high-level overview of it in the chart below:
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn-images-1.medium.com%2Fmax%2F1000%2F1%2AGZk1E51oUg6cuemF6u6U_A.png&t=665&c=rflUf__M2TR8yw)
Three different entities have generally been in charge of Moonshots:
- Universities
- Government agencies
- Mega corps and venture capitalists
In more recent years, the development of Moonshots has fallen on the hands of mega corps and venture capitalists. Mega corps want to beat their competition and remain dominant, while venture capitalists want to an explosive return. The dot-com bubble and unicorn startups that have used the network effect to reach huge valuations are what drive this hunger.
Why do we care where Moonshots get their funding?Network effects, that’s why. Investopedia defines a network effect as “a phenomenon whereby a good or service becomes more valuable when more people use it.” Products take advantage of network effects all the time. Web apps can gain massive worldwide popularity within a matter of days by taking advantage of network effects. It’s what makes websites like Product Hunt so effective. It’s essentially a network effect generator page for apps and products.
For a mega corp, the truth is that the costs of globally managing and scaling disruptive technology doesn’t always fit the bottom line, which needs to focus on the highest paying markets that are easy to enter. Google’s lack of search presence in China and Apple’s extremely low iPhone market-share in India are particularly powerful examples given their respective strengths in those areas. The path of least resistance for a mega corporation is to monopolize the intellectual property developed and try to monetize pieces of it in their existing products or wait until they can license patents to competitors.
Monopolization and monetization can be seen as opposing forces to network effects and the nature of Moonshots. The 10x change of Moonshots inherently wants to spread as quickly as possible. Mega corps and investors in Moonshots have had to impose monopolization and monetization of their IP to recoup expenses. These trends can be seen in the importance of startup exits vs longer-term impact metrics or profitability. X, Google’s Moonshot factory, is also being scaled back, and new financial leadership would like to see more results from the Moonshots.
Why do we want network effects then?There are a number of developments that have taken advantage of network effects to augment the spread and speed of innovation while also jumpstarting new markets. One notable example is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop whitepaper.
The Hyperloop is an innovative transportation concept designed and developed in a whitepaper by Musk. The whitepaper was released in 2013 for free and SpaceX sponsored a competition to create a feasibility test of the design. The Hyperloop competition sparked the creation of more than 1000 teams that submitted applications for the competition, as well as a number of companies that have raised capital and are on their way to building Hyperloops, including Hyperloop One (raised $80M USD), Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (several contracts to build Hyperloops), TransPod (raised $15M USD).
This is the startling power of Moonshots when they’re allowed to take advantage of network-effects. We think it’s time for Moonshots to finally flourish.
This is why we’re building ExHastaExHasta is a blockchain platform that spearheads the development and distribution of Moonshots by leveraging the power of network effects and trains innovators to use them.
The idea is simple: give innovators disruptive tools so they can change the world.
There are two different elements to ExHasta. The first is ExHasta Catalyst, an intellectual property (IP) marketplace led by function(core) to develop Moonshot projects and distribute it to a worldwide network of innovators at an extremely low cost. The second is ExHasta Meridian, an innovator summit led by function(core) to train top talent and create powerful networks of disruptors.
What next?If you’d like to learn more about the direction we’re steering Moonshots in, check out
www.ExHasta.com where you can read our whitepaper, which takes a deep dive on the history of Moonshots and our development strategies.
If you’d like to be a part of the ExHasta platform, join our token pre-sale on October 19th, 2017 at 19:00 UTC and join our token crowdsale on October 27th, 2017 at 19:00 UTC on
www.ExHasta.com.