I’m Isaak, the lead organizer of Future Forum. Specifically addressing the points regarding Future Forum:
By “ask for money (often retroactively)”, I am referring to the grant made to the Future Forum (a conference held Aug 4 − 7, 2022).
I don’t know whether retroactive funding happens in other cases. However, all grants made to Future Forum were committed before the event. The event and the organization received three grants in total:
Applications for the grants were usually sent 1-3 weeks before approval. While we had conversations with funders throughout, all applications went through official routes and application forms.
I received the specific grant application approval emails on:
Feb 28th, 2022, 9:36 AM PT,
July 5th, 2022, 5:04 PM PT,
July 18th, 2022, 11:28 AM PT.
The event ran from August 4-7th. I.e., we never had a grant committed “retroactively”.
Cleaning up their mess included getting a new venue last minute (which was very expensive), which took them into large debt, and then, reportedly, being bailed out by Open Philanthropy (retroactively).
Knowing that the event was experimental and that the core team didn’t have much operations experience, we had a budget for “logistical issues/fires” beforehand. This budget covered all of the additional expenses, including CEA’s expenses. We never went into debt or were bailed out by additional grants.
That being said, and beyond the scope of the original post’s concerns: Indeed, we didn’t plan thoughtfully for the neighbors. They were already sensitized because the venue had multiple parties over the weekends before. Thinking that Future Forum was some new party and not knowing it was a relatively quiet conference, they called the police. We were forced to leave the first venue and swap into a new venue by day 3.
CEA stepped in on day 1 and without them, the event would’ve been over on day 2, and day 3 and day 4 of the event wouldn’t have happened — for which we’re incredibly grateful.
I claim responsibility for not having foreseen and planned for this issue, and I also claim the default responsibility for all other operational issues and mistakes.
The points regarding the funding of Future Forum being retroactive are not true. All of this doesn’t reflect on OP’s grantmaking strategies and the other points addressed in the post.
Hi, I’m Leilani. I run the org that was brought on to help with Future Forum in the final weeks leading to the event.
I wanted to verify that no grants were applied for retroactively by Future Forum or Canopy. All funding was approved prior to the event. All OP funding was also received prior to the event. At no point have we been in debt.
Additionally, we are eternally grateful for the CEA events team and our volunteers for all their help. It was a stressful and unexpected situation that we would not have gotten through without them.
Hi, I’m Patrick Finley. I want to chime in here, because I think there’s a number of fairly ridiculous claims below about Future Forum (in addition to the original post). I also think Isaak’s response above is overly generous/conservative, and want to share my opinions on just how far the delta is between this post+comments and reality.
I attended Future Forum and it was easily the best conference/event I’ve been to in Bay Area in the vectors that matter (ie, quality of conversations, people, speakers, new connections, etc) and frankly its not close (I’ve been to EAGs & others). I don’t mean this as a knock to others (the standard at EA&adjacent events seems pretty good), rather this was unusually great.
The negatives I heard during the event and afterwards were about behind the scenes stuff that didn’t seem to affect the actual value to attendees much (including the below). Eg I was at a hotel, and had a nice comfy bus take me to a new venue bc of issues w/ neighborhood. Not sure how this makes the event worse if you’re talking about the purpose of the event vs things that don’t matter for attendees.
The event went from idea to reality in like 3 months. Isaak founded a team, fundraised and ran it in that time. IMO it was the most talent dense event I have seen. Isaak was 20 and had moved to the US like 2 months before founding. If your takeaway is “Isaak & team now have a bad reputation”, I think you need to re-examine your talent/reputation model.
“organizer asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work”—this seems to refer directly to Isaak. I watched most of the talks he mediated, and didn’t find this to be true at all. Perhaps this comes from, for example, experienced AI folks not realizing the questions needed to also cater to people new to AI. Something like ~half of FF attendees weren’t from an “EA” background.
FWIW I know some of the speakers and can personally attest the ones I know claimed to be personally impressed with Isaak. Anyone who’s spoken to Isaak knows he’s well capable of asking the right questions, and the take that he asked a bunch of dumb and basic questions can be debunked pretty quickly by talking to him for ~10m.
(also IMHO this is kind of an aggressive statement from someone who didn’t attend)
Doing great things tends to involve surprises and constant failures along the way, I think some folks below might be miscalibrated on what that looks like. Neighbors started a big fire, and the FF team moved the 300 person event to a big venue in San Francisco over night. When I heard this it was a massive positive update on the future forum team. That is seriously impressive.
The team pulling all-nighters to make this happen is exactly what building great things looks like—I’m confident if you polled the volunteers & core team you’d find a majority answer something like “it was one of the best experiences of my life” (this is a bold claim—fact check me). Note this is different from an unhealthy culture that tries to work people to death constantly for no good reason. It’s a strong signal that much of the team decided to pull an all-nighter to make the conference great. See https://patrickcollison.com/fast
“organizers were so bad, people had to step in to clean up their mess.
To me, event bad = the value was poor. ie, people didn’t show up, bad speakers, waste of time. This did not happen, and doubt almost anyone who attended would feel it did.
Comment below says people stopped showing up after day 1/many people didn’t return bc no value. This is not true, perhaps ask folks who attended. It’s normal for a conference to not have regular full-capacity attendance the whole time, especially when its 4 days. Future Forum seemed full & busy the entire time throughout to me.
Noting the neogenesis house has parties a lot, both before and after Future Forum. Given that data, the neighborhood complaints/police stuff were surprising, and not obvious to predict. Handled shockingly well. (At the time I thought, “eh, I would’ve seen that coming”, now having been to neogenesis many times, I would not have seen that coming—they have large gatherings a lot without issue. I admit the FF fire was surprising in retrospect)
Retroactive funding claim seems to be just false without any supporting logic? Unless I’m missing somewhere that might’ve led one to think there was retroactive funding?
Noting I also think retroactive funding when surprises come up is not necessarily some awful thing. If it had been that FF saw a big prob and desperately needed help, I think it makes total sense to help them (ie I think “let it fail” is a terrible approach) -- this is not the same as making it standard to expect bailouts...
Only gonna slightly chime in on original post’s main point—the whole relationships with funders thing—aside from like sexual relationships and other things mentioned, it seems pretty normal and good to have orgs build relationships with their funders… ie I don’t understand how the Holden<>Atlas thing above is an issue. I’m on board with the whole striving for a good culture thing, but some of these comments to me sound like utopia/not how the world works.
“Much more that went wrong”—just texted ~10 friends who went (many are now close friends I met at FF for the first time) and couldn’t find any other significant complaints, and all agreed venue change didn’t hurt the value to them.
Wrote this bc comments like “X had to step in and clean up their mess” seem incredibly off base. Bringing in help to put out a fire is exactly the right thing to do. Keeping in mind context—first time event, first time organizing team, incredible talent of attendees, incredibly good speakers, etc, its pretty shocking to me anyone’s takeaway could be “wow these guys made a mess and others had to clean it up for them”.
Again, IMO this was the best conference I’ve been to, but even if it weren’t, comparing this as a “mess” to EAG’s that have been going on for a long time (ie tons of experience) is kind of an odd take.
Hi, I’m Zeynep! As someone who volunteered at Future Forum I want to give my piece as well. I completely agree with Patrick’s response below, the conference was exceptionally good and the majority of attendees from my experience feel the same way.
Although things did go wrong, as they easily can with any event, a lot of the volunteers worked very hard to fix the situation. This included staying up all night to fix the venue. I would like to highlight that when we found out we had to switch venues, we were given the option to not take part in moving equipment. Many volunteers agreed to help out regardless, and did not back out, and this in itself shows how much value even we as volunteers felt the event had to give. It may look trivial on paper, but staying up all night to move an entire venue is not for the faint of heart.
Although stress levels were briefly high, everything was handled exceedingly well internally and I was personally told by attendees that they did not feel that the venue change was an issue. As someone who has been to many many many conferences, I would say that the event was a huge success. Everything other than the venue change—from the food to the talks, ran without any hiccups, which is ridiculously impressive when you have witnessed things go very wrong in other events. I firmly think that the entire staff + volunteers deserve a big round of applause.
I’m Isaak, the lead organizer of Future Forum. Specifically addressing the points regarding Future Forum:
I don’t know whether retroactive funding happens in other cases. However, all grants made to Future Forum were committed before the event. The event and the organization received three grants in total:
Applications for the grants were usually sent 1-3 weeks before approval. While we had conversations with funders throughout, all applications went through official routes and application forms.
I received the specific grant application approval emails on:
Feb 28th, 2022, 9:36 AM PT,
July 5th, 2022, 5:04 PM PT,
July 18th, 2022, 11:28 AM PT.
The event ran from August 4-7th. I.e., we never had a grant committed “retroactively”.
Knowing that the event was experimental and that the core team didn’t have much operations experience, we had a budget for “logistical issues/fires” beforehand. This budget covered all of the additional expenses, including CEA’s expenses. We never went into debt or were bailed out by additional grants.
That being said, and beyond the scope of the original post’s concerns: Indeed, we didn’t plan thoughtfully for the neighbors. They were already sensitized because the venue had multiple parties over the weekends before. Thinking that Future Forum was some new party and not knowing it was a relatively quiet conference, they called the police. We were forced to leave the first venue and swap into a new venue by day 3.
CEA stepped in on day 1 and without them, the event would’ve been over on day 2, and day 3 and day 4 of the event wouldn’t have happened — for which we’re incredibly grateful.
I claim responsibility for not having foreseen and planned for this issue, and I also claim the default responsibility for all other operational issues and mistakes.
The points regarding the funding of Future Forum being retroactive are not true. All of this doesn’t reflect on OP’s grantmaking strategies and the other points addressed in the post.
Hi, I’m Leilani. I run the org that was brought on to help with Future Forum in the final weeks leading to the event.
I wanted to verify that no grants were applied for retroactively by Future Forum or Canopy. All funding was approved prior to the event. All OP funding was also received prior to the event. At no point have we been in debt.
Additionally, we are eternally grateful for the CEA events team and our volunteers for all their help. It was a stressful and unexpected situation that we would not have gotten through without them.
Hi, I’m Patrick Finley. I want to chime in here, because I think there’s a number of fairly ridiculous claims below about Future Forum (in addition to the original post). I also think Isaak’s response above is overly generous/conservative, and want to share my opinions on just how far the delta is between this post+comments and reality.
I attended Future Forum and it was easily the best conference/event I’ve been to in Bay Area in the vectors that matter (ie, quality of conversations, people, speakers, new connections, etc) and frankly its not close (I’ve been to EAGs & others). I don’t mean this as a knock to others (the standard at EA&adjacent events seems pretty good), rather this was unusually great.
The negatives I heard during the event and afterwards were about behind the scenes stuff that didn’t seem to affect the actual value to attendees much (including the below). Eg I was at a hotel, and had a nice comfy bus take me to a new venue bc of issues w/ neighborhood. Not sure how this makes the event worse if you’re talking about the purpose of the event vs things that don’t matter for attendees.
The event went from idea to reality in like 3 months. Isaak founded a team, fundraised and ran it in that time. IMO it was the most talent dense event I have seen. Isaak was 20 and had moved to the US like 2 months before founding. If your takeaway is “Isaak & team now have a bad reputation”, I think you need to re-examine your talent/reputation model.
“organizer asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work”—this seems to refer directly to Isaak. I watched most of the talks he mediated, and didn’t find this to be true at all. Perhaps this comes from, for example, experienced AI folks not realizing the questions needed to also cater to people new to AI. Something like ~half of FF attendees weren’t from an “EA” background.
FWIW I know some of the speakers and can personally attest the ones I know claimed to be personally impressed with Isaak. Anyone who’s spoken to Isaak knows he’s well capable of asking the right questions, and the take that he asked a bunch of dumb and basic questions can be debunked pretty quickly by talking to him for ~10m.
(also IMHO this is kind of an aggressive statement from someone who didn’t attend)
Doing great things tends to involve surprises and constant failures along the way, I think some folks below might be miscalibrated on what that looks like. Neighbors started a big fire, and the FF team moved the 300 person event to a big venue in San Francisco over night. When I heard this it was a massive positive update on the future forum team. That is seriously impressive.
The team pulling all-nighters to make this happen is exactly what building great things looks like—I’m confident if you polled the volunteers & core team you’d find a majority answer something like “it was one of the best experiences of my life” (this is a bold claim—fact check me). Note this is different from an unhealthy culture that tries to work people to death constantly for no good reason. It’s a strong signal that much of the team decided to pull an all-nighter to make the conference great. See https://patrickcollison.com/fast
“organizers were so bad, people had to step in to clean up their mess.
To me, event bad = the value was poor. ie, people didn’t show up, bad speakers, waste of time. This did not happen, and doubt almost anyone who attended would feel it did.
Comment below says people stopped showing up after day 1/many people didn’t return bc no value. This is not true, perhaps ask folks who attended. It’s normal for a conference to not have regular full-capacity attendance the whole time, especially when its 4 days. Future Forum seemed full & busy the entire time throughout to me.
Noting the neogenesis house has parties a lot, both before and after Future Forum. Given that data, the neighborhood complaints/police stuff were surprising, and not obvious to predict. Handled shockingly well. (At the time I thought, “eh, I would’ve seen that coming”, now having been to neogenesis many times, I would not have seen that coming—they have large gatherings a lot without issue. I admit the FF fire was surprising in retrospect)
Retroactive funding claim seems to be just false without any supporting logic? Unless I’m missing somewhere that might’ve led one to think there was retroactive funding?
Noting I also think retroactive funding when surprises come up is not necessarily some awful thing. If it had been that FF saw a big prob and desperately needed help, I think it makes total sense to help them (ie I think “let it fail” is a terrible approach) -- this is not the same as making it standard to expect bailouts...
Only gonna slightly chime in on original post’s main point—the whole relationships with funders thing—aside from like sexual relationships and other things mentioned, it seems pretty normal and good to have orgs build relationships with their funders… ie I don’t understand how the Holden<>Atlas thing above is an issue. I’m on board with the whole striving for a good culture thing, but some of these comments to me sound like utopia/not how the world works.
“Much more that went wrong”—just texted ~10 friends who went (many are now close friends I met at FF for the first time) and couldn’t find any other significant complaints, and all agreed venue change didn’t hurt the value to them.
Wrote this bc comments like “X had to step in and clean up their mess” seem incredibly off base. Bringing in help to put out a fire is exactly the right thing to do. Keeping in mind context—first time event, first time organizing team, incredible talent of attendees, incredibly good speakers, etc, its pretty shocking to me anyone’s takeaway could be “wow these guys made a mess and others had to clean it up for them”.
Again, IMO this was the best conference I’ve been to, but even if it weren’t, comparing this as a “mess” to EAG’s that have been going on for a long time (ie tons of experience) is kind of an odd take.
Hi, I’m Zeynep! As someone who volunteered at Future Forum I want to give my piece as well. I completely agree with Patrick’s response below, the conference was exceptionally good and the majority of attendees from my experience feel the same way.
Although things did go wrong, as they easily can with any event, a lot of the volunteers worked very hard to fix the situation. This included staying up all night to fix the venue. I would like to highlight that when we found out we had to switch venues, we were given the option to not take part in moving equipment. Many volunteers agreed to help out regardless, and did not back out, and this in itself shows how much value even we as volunteers felt the event had to give. It may look trivial on paper, but staying up all night to move an entire venue is not for the faint of heart.
Although stress levels were briefly high, everything was handled exceedingly well internally and I was personally told by attendees that they did not feel that the venue change was an issue. As someone who has been to many many many conferences, I would say that the event was a huge success. Everything other than the venue change—from the food to the talks, ran without any hiccups, which is ridiculously impressive when you have witnessed things go very wrong in other events. I firmly think that the entire staff + volunteers deserve a big round of applause.