Welcome to the new home of the Leverage monthly newsletter! Since we skipped October, November, and December of last year, this is the first update for our supporters in a while. Happily, there’s a lot of great news, so please read on.
Quantum Biology Victory — In December, with support from the Leverage team, the QuBiT team raised $6.8 million for quantum biology. This breaks the bottleneck in the field and ensures that the instruments needed to test the Quantum Biology Hypothesis will be built. We’ll be writing an account of what happened from start to finish so people can learn more about quantum biology, Decentralized Science (DeSci), the Quantum Biology Ecosystem, and, of course, Leverage.
New Business Model — In January, the Quantum Biology Institute, led by Clarice Aiello (with Geoff Anders as acting CEO), opened its new lab. Shortly after, the Leverage team met with the Quantum Biology team in LA and agreed on a partnership, with Leverage providing paid science support services for the next 2-3 years. Helping teams conducting revolutionary science is a new business model for Leverage, which reduces our reliance on donations and points the way towards lasting financial stability.
New Potential Clients — With the quantum biology fundraise as a clear calling card, Leverage is now working with multiple future clients, all of whom are working to radically advance one or another field in science and technology. Once we secure a few more clients, Leverage will be financially self-sufficient. We expect to start work with at least one new client in February.
Wrapping Up 2024 — The first week of January was devoted to wrapping up business from last year. We finished the annual report for 2023, which was long overdue. We also prepared a report for the board for the Q4 2024 board meeting. That document summarizes Leverage’s activities over the October-December period, so is helpful in lieu of the skipped newsletters. Dan Graham also completed a draft of our case study on Stephen Gray’s identification of electric repulsion as an important electrical phenomenon.
Annual Retreat 2025 — For this year’s retreat, the team went somewhere we thought would be warm, namely, sunny Palm Springs. We spent four days in Palm Springs and did a day trip to LA to visit the Quantum Biology Institute lab in person; originally we had planned two days, but changed our schedule because of the LA fires. Overall, the retreat went really well. We decided to do one introspection-related piece per quarter, shore up the history of science research, and put most of our effort into Bottlenecks. We considered a variety of new fields to focus on, such as low-energy nuclear reactions, carbon capture, and neuroscience, beyond our work in quantum biology.
Changes to the Institute — At the retreat, we also gave ourselves raises and promoted Oliver to Chief Culture Officer, with some changes waiting for approval from the board. We deprecated the remaining structure from the 2019-2023 era, which includes Oliver’s old Research Communicator role. We dissolved Design as a separate function and added Business Development as a sub-function of Fundraising. In the week after the retreat, when we finished making adjustments, we decided to reboot the newsletter, now on Substack, and we designed a new way to track our daily tasks, progress, and to-dos.
Planning Ahead — One of the biggest changes, however, which we have planned for 2025 is that we’re going to be setting our own schedule to a much greater degree. That means we’re going to plan a lot of things, including retreats, board meetings, and especially Bottlenecks 2025, much further in advance. This is a great relief to the entire team; trying to schedule around other people, rather than taking the lead ourselves, has been very frustrating over the last few years.
Next month, we’ll be working with the Quantum Biology Institute to help them get set up on recruiting and culture (Oliver), operations and legal (Melinda), and communications and future fundraising (Geoff). In fact, we’ve already gotten started. The lab is open and Geoff is there with the team right now, helping to get things moving fast.
Until next time,
The Leverage team