Rufus Ping posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ompW5mxa5ug

https://this.ishuman.me/

Part 1: Who are you?
Part 2: What is human?
Part 3: What can I do to help?

Part 1: Who are you?

Greetings ladies and gentlemen! My name is Max Kit Human, Max Human or just Max for short (I prefer the latter), born Maxim Kit. I'm a kid just like every one of you. I came here (here being Toronto, Canada) from Ukraine when I was almost 13 and, with a few exceptions, have been ever since. Normally I hate talking about myself (how can you ever learn anything if you just keep repeating the same stuff over and over - focus on the other person!) but for the sake of this document I will make an exception. I have some pretty big goals, and I need you guys to believe that I'm actually capable of achieving them. For that you need to know a bit of my business history. If you don't give a crap and just wanna read about the project, simply skip to part 2 below!

At 15 I started a gaming site called KGN, or Kickass Gaming Network, which you can still find on web.archive.org at kickassgaming.net. I did the same thing I always do with business: convinced a bunch of people to join me (we had a team of 8) and then started contacting some really big names to get the kind of supercharged boost we needed to start. Within weeks we were able to score awesome content, and months later were publishing global exclusives like the first ever screenshots of GTAII (a huge deal at the time - courtesy of the president of Rockstar) and awesome interviews like that with the co-founder of Bioware and many other big names. Content was king: we started the news updates earlier in the day than all the other big sites, and focused on articles, game and hardware reviews, interviews and screenshots. It was awesome. Then the dotcom industry went bust and you can guess what happened next.

Having had a taste of being my own boss, I could no longer stand high school (why would I need to learn to be an employee if I already knew I would never become one?) and dropped out. I spent exactly a year and day making sandwiches in Mr. Sub, which to this day remains the only job I've ever had as an adult (as a kid I started delivering newspapers and flyers at 13, and worked as a mover in the summers). At about 17 or 18 I ended up without a job (turned the music up a bit too loud at 3am - we were open til 4 in the club district - and the boss's son walked in) and so did my dad (he was a construction foreman and stood up for the workers when their boss, after not paying for months, announced that all their salaries were cut.. 3 months ago). Anyway, so that's how I became the president of a construction management company. By 23 or 24 we had about 75 people in total - my strategy of always focusing on big goals paid off as usual.

By 25 I realized that I was wasting my life - I was making money but not making a difference in the world, and felt unfulfilled as a result. So I decided to quit. Following the advice in Tim Ferris' wonderful book 4 Hour Workweek, I then started my 3rd company, a construction management firm blended with a dotcom, and semi-retired off the passive income 6 months later. I spent the next half a year relaxing on tropical beaches and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. When I decided to quit construction 2 years prior to my semi-retirement I decided to be a film director, and after working on it for a year or two, quit at the last moment instead of making a feature film because I realized that I'd never be able to make ENOUGH of a difference as a film director to finally make myself happy and fulfilled. So I was almost 28 by the time I realized what I ACTUALLY wanted to do: build a sister company for Google. And now here we are 3 years later.

More info: https://linkedin.com/in/maxhuman https://fb.me/iammaxkit https://twitter.com/iammaxkit

Part 2: What is human?

human started out as a design for a social network named peekr in 2011. In 2012 I realized that I wanted to make it MORE than a social network and changed the name to aocao - an ambiguous name like Google that would allow us to make ANY sorts of products. The first one we added was charitable crowdfunding. Then more ideas emerged. I walked around happy as a kite when I realized that my talent for marketing, entrepreneurship and design would soon make me a billionaire. I had more of a talent for each than most of the CURRENT tech billionaires, so it seemed like a no-brainer, and to be honest not even much of a challenge (especially in an age when even tiny companies like Oculus and Airbnb are worth billions). Then on January 25th 2014, I was smoking a joint on a stairway (hey we're being honest here right?) when an idea hit me like a bag of sand on the head: GIVE IT ALL AWAY. Make EVERYBODY the owner of this company, and rename it something that UNITES everybody. I decided to go with it then and there, on the spot. Initially thought to name it something like Earth, and finally settled on human a few hours later when I realized that people were already living outside of Earth on the ISS, and would soon populate the Moon and Mars as well.

That was over 8 months ago. Since then, human has undergone her (starting with peekr) 4th design evolution. She is now almost entirely video based, with only some GIFs, still images and text. The interface is all but invisible. She now consists of over 20 global online services such as social networking, crowdfunding, food delivery and car rentals, and 6 hardware lines including phones, tablets, virtual reality headsets, wireless headphones, smartwatches and later this decade even contacts. Following the announcement of her birth on January 25th, we had several offers to invest (although we have NEVER seriously approached even ONE investor for money) - the best one was for about 3 or 4 hundred grand at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation. There were several others. We turned them all down because we wanted a minimum of 1 million dollar investment, and at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation at the very least. It seemed (and this has only INCREASED since then!) obvious that this company would eventually be worth tens of billions (and at one point we even planned to do a 100 billion dollar IPO on Nasdaq after 2020), so selling shares at 1.2 billion seemed like a waste of money.

We went back and forth for about 6 months with the "give it all away" part - mostly as I struggled and fought myself, because doing so would mean that I would never become a billionaire. But last month, when I thought I was near death, I realized that my one regret in life was NOT going ahead with that business model, so I took a deep breath and made a plunge. I officially announced that I would be giving ALL of my shares away, except for one. It made sense. The plan from day one was to do what Bill Gates did: work for decades, make tens of billions off a huge tech company, and then give it all to charity. So I realized: if all of this money is for the PEOPLE anyway, and all I need to be happy is a decent house, car and money to travel, WHY WAIT 20 or 30 years??! By giving EVERYBODY a share I would also ensure that the company would grow SUPREMELY FAST, so I'd be able to achieve in 10 or 15 years what before would have taken 25 or 30. I knew immediately that this was the right way to go.

So that brings us to today. Today is my 31st birthday, and as you can see on my Facebook I have exactly 8 dollars and 40 cents left. Two years ago I closed my 3rd company (the passive income asset) because the few hours of work it DID require consisted of yelling at people and it was ruining my inner peace. I could not devote 100% of my attention to human with that sort of a destraction. So over the past few years I completely and totally depleted my savings, and even ended up borrowing a few thousand bucks from the fam. None of that mattered though (and still doesn't) - I got a few big people interested in the project (despite hardly even trying) and I knew that once we launched I would EASILY be able to get multi-million dollar investments. This is still the case - although we are now owned by the public, we will still accept investments - the only catch is that they come with a clause allowing us to buy back the shares at a 250% premium or the current valuation, whichever is higher, and that no more than 10% of the shares can be sold - if we want to sell more, we have to buy back some of the old ones first. The other good news is that my 3rd company can be restarted and sold for over a mil, and that I'm owed about 100 grand, and all of that down to the last penny I am donating to human. Even my car. So we're expecting to dump about 50 grand into our bank account in the coming weeks.

How does human operate? Basically the idea is that everybody who asks for a share gets a share. There are no requirements and no approval process. Everybody can only own one share, and they cannot be sold or transferred (otherwise millions of gullible people would be instantly swindled out of theirs). You can even get one if you're a kid, but your share won't have any voting power until you're 12 or 14 (exact age to be decided). So yeah, everybody gets one vote, including myself. There is no management hirearchy - there are (may be?) team leaders, but they are chosen by those they are leading, and they are more like coaches and not bosses. They have the same say as everybody else. In terms of voting power, there is no diference between myself, a salaried employee of the company, an unpaid volunteer or some random person on the street who just requested a share. All the decisions: for what we make, how to make it and how to spend the profits are made together. The people of Earth are quite literally the owners and operators of this company. For this reason, we think of it as the collective human consciousness: all the people coming together as one. Any random person you now see on the street is no longer a stranger - they are a fellow shareholder working on the same goals.

More info: https://ishuman.me https://fb.me/thisishuman https://twitter.com/thisishuman

Part 3: What can I do to help?

So what do we do now? Now we need to launch the web beta of empower charity - our charitable crowdfunding platform. We decided to launch this component of the network first for two reasons: 1) because it most directly fulfills our mission to help people, and 2) because the profits it generates will help pay for everything else, one component at a time. empower charity represents maybe 5% of our network, and we are planning to launch on nearly 10 platforms (web, iOS, Android, Glass, consoles, TVs, cars, so on and so forth) so realistically it's probably about 0.5% of the work. For the beta I also removed about 80% of its features, shrinking the total amount of coding required for our launch to just 0.1% of the total. Just the basics allowing us to launch, start helping people and start making money, and nothing else. You'll notice the included designs show only 2 pages: the main grid of empower charity, and the watch tab (the finished version will have 4 tabs in total) of a crowdfund on empower charity. And again, these are missing about 80% of the features. The total is about 150 pages.

We will start from here and keep building. Once we launch the web beta of empower charity, we will immediately start making a 3.95% commission off all the crowdfunds. Once we can afford to do so, we wil drop that to 0% and even pay the payment processing fees ourself (thereby making this a 100% free charitable crowdfunding platform), but for now we need the money. Also from day one we will start selling hero memberships to our supporters, at $4.95 a month, and accepting donations. So three revenue streams from day one, and then we launch the rest of the network piece by piece. Also this year we will start taking pre-orders for our hardware, and expect to receive tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders alone, and hopefully over 100 million in hardware sales by the end of 2015. Not to mention investments - we'll be approaching 10 tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, LG, Lenovo and others with offers to invest 5 million each at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, and also asking them to throw in a 1 million donation each on top. Long story short the money side is taken care of and we'll be fine and dandy.

This is where you guys come in. The second biggest decision we've ever made, aside from deciding to give it all away, is to also make everything we do entirely open source. Meaning the software AND the hardware. We are hoping the global open source community will adopt this project as their own (because it IS your own!) and help us build it. Worst case, we've calculated that for less than a thousand bucks we can pay a solid developer in Ukraine to put in the 40-50 hours necessary to launch the web beta of empower. Since our only expenses would be my monthly salary of only 3000 bucks to start (less than minimum wage when you count my hours), a 400 dollar deposit for a virtual office and receptionist, and the aforementioned thousand bucks (if we need it), that'd still leave something like 46 grand in the bank to spend on.. God knows what. And don't forget that the moment we're down to the 46, we will unlock the first 3 revenue streams, so a 0 will be added to the end of that number rather quickly!

So what can you to do help? Code the drat thing! And/or get your friends to. Help us launch this first piece as quickly as possible so that we can get rolling! This coming week the registrations for our for-profit and non-profit (like Google and Google.org), both owned by the public, will be completed. We're expecting the law firm to do the work pro bono. We'll imediately open a bank account with Canada's largest bank - RBC Royal Bank, and deposit all the money I'm donating in there. It will be hooked up to our site to receive the commissions for crowdfunds, fees for hero memberships and donations. As with everything else in our company, the finances will be completely transparent - we'll even ask RBC to make a special view-only publicly accessible bank account that anybody can log into and check things out. And of course, detailed explanations of what every single deposit and expense is, complete with copies of invoices and everything imaginable, will be available online. This is YOUR company - you deserve to know EVERYTHING.

So right now, there is basically no difference between me and you. I've left myself one share, same as everybody else, and as the founder I decided to give myself just two priviledges: the right to set my own salary for as long as I'm involved with the company and my pension thereafter (don't worry, I doubt I'll ever make even 10% of what Tim Cook does, or more than 1 or 2% of the 10 million a day I would have made, like Gates, Zuckerberg and many others, had I kept the company for myself). All I need is a decent house, car and money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. I don't need a 10 bedroom mansion, 5 supercars and a 200 foot yacht. In fact, chances are that after I buy a couple of houses for the elderly members of my family, and after I pay for my own, I'll end up making even less than what I just described. I don't need savings - all I need is money for life. That's why right now I'm starting off with a laughably small salary, less than minimum wage, because that's all I need to pay for the rent, food and miscellaneous daily expenses. The second priviledge is the right to veto - this is so that people don't accidentally run the company into the ground with their votes, and as soon as I see that everything is running smoothly I will give up this right. It is only temporary, and our Articles of Incorporaton will state the same.

So that's that ladies and gentlemen, that's the whole story! Please check out the video, designs and documents and let us know what you think, share your ideas with us and jump in and help! Tell your friends about the company, donate some time or money, apply for a salaried job, post about this on all the forums and social networks, call the press, or just sit back and watch and enjoy the show. Thank you all and God bless! And welcome to the collective human consciousness.

https://this.ishuman.me/opensource/docs/intro.txt