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World Optimization
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Podcast: Lincoln Quirk from Wave

by Elizabeth
1st Aug 2025
Aceso Under Glass
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World Optimization
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Podcast: Lincoln Quirk from Wave
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[-]stavros2mo30

Just a short note to say I appreciate the resource you created, I've learned valuable things from it. I was impressed by the level of journalism involved in the Habryka/Open Phil piece - the little editor's notes were excellent, and I wish this practice was the norm, and I have some inkling of the amount of work that must have gone into them.

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For two years I had the good fortune to work at Sendwave/Wave (they were one company at the time), a company that made remittances cheap and workable in certain African countries.  I am prouder of working at Wave than of the rest of my programming career combined, and a good bit of my research career as well. Every day I finished work knowing that I had helped save very poor people time and money, by making it cheaper and easier to send money home from abroad or domestically. So I was deeply excited to talk to my ex-boss and co-founder of the company, Lincoln Quirk, on this final episode of the podcast. We talk about a the details of starting a company and the economics of how remittances and mobile do enormous amounts of good while making a profit. 

This is the sixth episode of my podcast with Timothy Telleen-Lawton, and probably the last. This was a worthy experiment but ultimately not accomplishing what I’d hoped, and honestly I’m just tired of criticizing things. Timothy couldn’t make this recording, but he pops in at the end to stay goodbye. 

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