OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI can help bring about “incredible richness,” and he wants to make sure that such richness is shared. Towards that end, Altman has embraced the theory of his nineteenth-century political economist Henry George. During his lifetime, he worried about the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few following the Industrial Revolution. George postulated that greater equality would be enjoyed if the economic value of land belonged equally to all members of society.
Altman similarly believes that in a world where jobs are less likely to generate economic value, land taxes can supplement income taxes and ensure that all individuals’ wealth rises as land (fixed assets) rises in value. He’s also leading a seed round at a 6-month-old startup that represents a step in the same direction and has money in his mouth.
At first glance, the outfit called ValueBase sounds pretty mundane. We plan to use the land preference model to create lump sum appraisal modeling and property appraisals. ValueBase says it can automate many of the assessments of both land and buildings for local property tax assessors by feeding data from weather balloons and aerial photography vendors, among other sources, into its algorithms. increase. The characteristics of the buildings and the land on which they are located have little to do with it.
ValueBase co-founder Lars Doucet says the goal is to flip the model a bit. “If you understand that land is one of the key drivers of value, you don’t necessarily have to crawl through people’s windows, shoot inside their homes, and take all these invasive pictures. Being able to assess land on the fly would be more accurate because we would have access to properties of the land such as distance to school, distance to work, how noisy the street is, how much pollution there is, whether there is a good environment. Views — all of these are very readable without going into properties, which makes calculations easier.”
This is a sensible approach for many reasons. For one thing, working with local property tax assessors could help assessors more clearly explain to home and building owners why they were assigned a particular value. There is a nature. ValueBase may also become more valuable to cities as more tax assessors retire. (Mostly middle-aged white men in the US)
ValueBase’s strategy is also self-service. Access critical data that can be used to create more commercial applications, such as brokerage firms and mortgage lenders.
In any case, Doucet argues that ValueBase has a higher mission. By learning as much as possible about all parcels in the United States and abroad, we hope to pave the way for public works in specific locations. “If someone asks, ‘What’s the value of land in Idaho?’ ‘Can you tell me in a parcel?’ We’d be the first people they’d want to call about it,” he said. say.
It’s hard to imagine anyone asking such a question, let alone ValueBase, which currently employs only four people spread across North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas.
Still, if Altman is right about the exponential rate of change we’re collectively facing, that could change, and clearly he’s willing to bet on that.
Hydrazine Capital, a fund managed by Altman and business partner Ryan Cohen, led a $1.6 million round at ValueBase. Former Github CEO Nat Friedman, serial entrepreneurs Sahil Lavingia, Erik Torenberg and others attended.
Above: Will Jarvis, CEO of ValueBase, front and center. Doucet is on the far right.
