Foreword

This is possibly one of the most important missions of humanity. I've spent my whole career working towards this goal, and it would bring forth human flourishing of unimaginable magnitudes. We aim to have at least 100x net QALYs gained for the health effects of each vape consumed.

OpenPuff is a capped-profit PBC with a 501(c)(3) non-profit lobbying arm against traditional Big Tobacco (where 20% of the annual expenditures can be legally used for aggressive lobbying efforts), and a science arm for fundamental research in underfunded areas to unlock long-term global lung health.

An initial possibility we ruled out was for it to be fully non-profit. Such non-profit is difficult to raise effectively in order to design and manufacture clean, safety-first products in order to guard the Free World against the dangers of unaligned, unhealthy Chinese disposable vapes. Though rest assured that the non-profit board still has the effective power to shut down all vape operations should they determine the company and its prospective founder to be unable to pursue their stated mission.

Product Design & Safety

OpenPuff's canonical product, the Puffer-1 modular vape, consists of the core atomizer unit, as well as disposable pods containing e-liquid. We chose a design that's sovereign to the user while reducing lithium-ion battery wastage and pollution to the environment.

Puffer-1 is designed from the ground up to be safe, with safety classifiers, local data retention, automatic rejections, and more^[1]. It contains two small conductive wires at the mouthpiece, measuring a person's distinct dynamic bio-impedance structure (essentially what smart scales uses to measure your body fat) to ensure the user does not share with others. The pressure sensor could also be repurposed to capture sub-vocal bone conduction of the user, creating a unique profile of their jawbone^[2]. (This is entirely for the user's own verification safety, though we do run metadata classifiers on our cloud servers to monitor for aggregate demographic drift.)

During the purchase, the user must sign an agreement: if a user is detected to be under 21 during the time of their use, or if they borrowed their vape to an individual that's under 21, the next time they order pods, OpenPuff retains the rights to ship them an empty package with nothing besides a fine-printed selection of the best works in The Sequences, and a stern warning note about underage vaping risks.

(We believe that classifier only rejects 2% of the total volume of puffs. For everyday users, the experiences are not believed to be affected. It is, of course, deliberately tuned to be extra cautious, because OpenPuff is responsible and is willing to make moves that costs us business in order to stay safe!^[3])

Health and QALY Maths

The health implications of vaping is vast (though not nearly as bad as it is portrayed as in popular discourse). Vaping still loses you QALYs despite it being much better compared to smoking. We calculate the QALYs lost by vaping one pack of 3 pods of Puffer vape:

• If 1 cigarette = 11 minutes lost, and 1 disposable vape contains the nicotine equivalent of 200 cigarettes (10 packs):
• If toxicologically equivalent:
• Applying the 95% safety discount of vapes: = 110 minutes lost per vape (~1.83 hours, or 0.00021 QALYs).
• Applying a risk-averse precautionary discount (assuming vaping is actually only 80% safer than smoking due to unknown long-term cardiovascular risks) : = 440 minutes lost per vape = 0.00083 QALYs (7.33 hours of healthy life)

We look to GiveWell’s empirical cost-effectiveness models for the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF).

GiveWell's models show that AMF can prevent the death of a child under five from malaria for approximately $3,000 to $5,500. When a young child’s life is saved from malaria, they gain an average of 30 to 35 QALYs, taking into account local life expectancies and the avoidance of chronic malaria-induced neurological or physical morbidity.

• If $4,500 saves 1 life (gaining 32.5 QALYs), then $138.46 buys exactly 1 QALY (1 year of healthy life).
• Therefore $1.00 buys $1 / 138.46 = 0.00722 QALYs (2.63 days of healthy life).
• Our Proposed Donation per Vape: $8.22 (from our unit economics margin).
• QALY Gained per Vape: = 0.0593 QALYs (21.6 days of healthy life).

Therefore, we are able to increase the QALY of the world by an astonishing 100x by donating to charity compared to the QALYs lost by vaping our product.

The actual Unit Economics is roughly:

Media Strategy

We think we are building the most consequential health initiative of the decade, but with any innovation there will be friction and bad press. It is only natural to think of how Big Media would attack such a startup: "The Silicon Valley elites have found a new low: telling teenagers that puffing Mango Ice is saving lives in Africa", "Instead of dismantling the structures of global inequality, OpenPuff is using dying children as a marketing shield to escape FDA accountability", etc.

This is, in fact, why the Consumer Acquisition Cost isn't listed in the unit economics, because social media will make our company viral. People that believes our cause will join our side and use our products. Virality is the point.

Additionally, instead of dodging, OpenPuff's founder will directly own up to the health risks due to the consumption of our products, and provide the actual number of cumulative QALYs lost during interview. However, we will sternly point out that the counterfactual is the same amount of QALYs lost and absolutely zero QALYs gained elsewhere.

We are even going to go as far as to say that we think the FDA should in fact outlaw tobacco products (including vapes if they are deemed to be unhealthy to the public). In fact, we have an entire lobbying arm that's exactly doing this. Our competitors simply doesn't have the interest of Americans in mind. We welcome all regulation that benefits the public (and of course us via regulatory capture).

The Competition

The rise of distilled Chinese knockoffs of our products is utterly prolific and dangerous. They unfairly take advantage of our hard work to protect the public. Their products engages in unaligned capability runs that directly optimizes for dopamine delivery, with zero health oversight. Heavy metal leaching caused by cheap heating elements and soldering^[4], thermal degradation & carbonyl emission due to dangerous turbo modes^[5], as well as cytotoxicity of their cheap flavoring agents^[6] all are prime reasons for the US to restrict our vape-related IP and hardware from access by China. ^[7]

OpenPuff has considered negotiating for a 6-month pause on all vape hardware development when Chinese disposable vape company DeepPuff accelerated development with their Refresh-1 model equipped with a SOTA dual-mesh turbo mode that introduces dangerous frontier capabilities. However, due to prolonged disagreements during negotiations, our board unanimously pulled out of talks and launched Puffer-1. They have been proven to not understand the risks of vaping as much as we do, and we are structurally unable to continue any talks about pausing.

Closing Thoughts

We are the thinkers that ponders the actual hard questions. Our detractors calls everything we do a perfectly engineered move to farm engagement - the refusals, the "100x QALYs", the anti-tobacco stance - but they miss the point. We are creating the possibility for a truly better future through our safety mechanisms, governance structure, and responsible scaling (yes, rapid scaling of unprecedented levels in vape construction history, but responsible nonetheless).

Dangerous capabilities requires careful stewardship. We believe that such capabilities should be in the right hands of democracy, equality, and altruism. Our long-term goal continues, as always, to be one that eliminates vaping entirely.

Until then, every vape purchased from us accelerates the day nobody has to vape again.

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Edit: We reached out to the FTX Future Fund for a grant but found upon investigation that it no longer exists, which is highly disappointing due to our well-aligned values. We were also rejected by the a16z American Dynamism fund due to philosophical differences, but as always, we appreciate a16z's open-mindedness to funding of startups that turn regulated vices into legitimate products.

1. ^{^}

   All data are collected, encrypted, and stored in the vape. We design our own ASIC and process data in the cradle, keeping the most sensitive bio-data local and safe.

2. ^{^}

   A 15 year old's jawbone structure is highly different to a 30 year old's, and it could all be calculated, modeled, and cross-referenced against the bio-impedance to create an accurate assessment of the user's age.

3. ^{^}

   https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5#:~:text=Over%20the%20past,safeguards%20after%20launch.

4. ^{^}

   Olmedo, P., et al. (2018). Metal Concentrations in e-Cigarette Liquid and Aerosol Samples: The Contribution of Metallic Coils. Environmental Research, 164, 581-590. DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2018.03.019

5. ^{^}

   Talih, S., et al. (2016). Effects of User Settings, E-Liquid Composition, and Device Design on E-Cigarette Aerosol Yields. Chemical Research in Toxicology, 29(11), 1918-1926. DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemtox.6b00212

6. ^{^}

   Allen, J. G., et al. (2016). Flavoring Chemicals in E-Cigarettes: Diacetyl, 2,3-Pentanedione, and Acetyl Propionyl in a Broad Sample of Sweet-Flavored E-Cigarettes. Environmental Health Perspectives, 124(6), 733-739. DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1510185

7. ^{^}

   https://darioamodei.com/post/on-deepseek-and-export-controls