Hey there, I’m Austin, currently running https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com!
Austin
Karma: 4,917
When you donate can matter more than where
Money, taste, dealflow, hustle, trust
Blog Revival Project
Perhaps another example: it seems suboptimal that Joey Savoie, after having created a successful product in Charity Enterpreneurship, is not rich as a result. Sure, he can leverage his connections and skillset and reputation to start a philanthropic advising org (Elevate) and continue to direct funding towards where he things might be impactful, but instead, what if he had just become rich, and had the ability to fund things without having to persuade his donors?
Thank you for these comments! I very much appreciate the public engagement, and care a lot about figuring out what’s true here. I’m responding quickly, and framing things strongly with the understanding that there’s much more room for nuance everywhere.
[quick edit, I realized I wrote the below for a “cG grantmaker” and you specifically work in Longview now, apologies. my unsolicited prescriptions for Longview are probably a bit different than for cG but I think the general points hold?]I agree with “tails come apart”, it’s not obvious that the biggest corporations are the most impactful, like I wouldn’t allocate more philanthropic capital to NVIDIA or SpaceX. But even these examples are illustrative of something good about forprofits, which is that allocation of credit between individual humans is much much better in forprofits—Jensen Huang or Elon Musk are much much richer than the median employee of their org.
Why should an impact-minded founder care? Because if they push really hard and actually succeed at doing something impactful, they then have to go and pray that the grant evaluators up above agree with their assessment. While cG and founder missions are kind of aligned around wanting good impact in the world, they’re also not fully, and I/Manifund endorse founders having more leverage over funders, on the margin.
Why should you, cG grantmaker shepherding the AIS ecosystem, care? Because without good credit allocation, people end up in confusing work situations, working on problems not suited to their ideal use of talent, doublecounting impact, negotiating on much fuzzier norms around “who was responsible for a specific project” being tracked in a social layer rather than in the clean numbers of equity and salary. Social layer is good for where AIS is today, but doesn’t scale to handle 100x growth.
Grantmaking seems likely to become able to fund more aggressive growth and larger scales.
Okay, but what happens to the founder managing a $100m/y charity? Will cG and 501c3 law allow them to draw a proportionally larger salary?
There’s one kind of EA answer which is “who cares, I was going to donate it to charity anyways, so it’s equivalent to have this money be in my personal bank account vs in my charity vs in cG”. I find elements of that answer which are compelling and noble and good, but also elements which are suspect wrt ecosystem-level feedback effects. I think it’s important that successful individuals (and orgs) gain more ability to then influence what happens next in the ecosystem, and $ and equity are good numeric ways of building that feedback mechanism.
(also, seems good to nerdsnipe the non-fully-EA-aligned founders into working on problems we think are good)
One thing that has made the forprofit tech scene work is that, when a founder exits, they have extra $ to invest, and also experience running new orgs; they can the angel invest into the next generation (and also provide advice, connections, etc). I think mirroring this inside EA would be good. For example Ryan Kidd running MATS could have much more discretionary capital/ability to fund random projects that he thinks are promising but aren’t “MATS Fellow” shaped, but doesn’t by default. Fixing this is part of why Manifund runs AI safety regranting.
I’ve vaguely heard that cG is exploring doing more regranting (in the form of discretionary grant budgets to individuals with experience/taste + dealflow), and hope this is true!
Grantmaking seems likely to become significantly faster and higher volume, making fundraising a much lower portion of a founders time.
I will be happy if & when this happens because it probably means I could stop working on Manifund and then go and found a thing instead. But I’m currently bearish on philanthropic funding becoming much less painful.
To raise a recent example, our fundraising for our own projects (Surplus and Mox) has been annoyingly bogged down in classic traps of philanthropic funding norms, namely “funder chicken”. X asks “why isn’t Y funding you instead” and Y asks the same question in reverse and we’re waiting weeks to months to litigate. Grantmakers are already pressed for time and nobody has the chance to coordinate properly, and end up deferring too much.
There are clever mechanisms that are being proposed and used (funding backstops, matching offers, loans, etc) and also infra-level changes coming (Lightcone’s doing a cool new S-Process thing, Manifund and grantmaking.ai are other kinds of trying to enable coordination). But fundamentally I like the forprofit norm of funders fighting for allocation in rounds and trying to compete on valuation & speed, rather than the nonprofit game of hoping somebody else steps in.
It seems weird to me for someone to countenance this fact and conclude that one should therefore try to be a for-profit instead, pursuing a very different kind of capital.
I want them to pursue philanthropic capital, at the end of the day! But I don’t think the philanthropic funding ecosystem has good norms around seeding & incubating new orgs, compared to the tech startup ecosystem.
My general proposal is that big philanthropic orgs like cG should move towards being assessors of impact, similar to the final buyers in AMCs like Stripe Frontier or Operation Warp Speed. While distributing 501c3 funding, you can put up large prizes and award retro funding for concrete specific good work undertaken. (This is very not trivial fwiw, and does require teams of smart grantmakers to carefully reason through “what happened” and “how do we count it”.)
But inside this ecosystem, new orgs should default incorporate as for-profit PBCs or C-Corps. And there should be a wide dispersion of intermediate funders (thnk preseed/seed/series A/B/C etc), who may be set up as 501c3 or standard forprofit, but either way providing funding to the new orgs in the form of standard forprofit equity investments.
Tech forprofit venture funding is already operating at the 100x scale that AI safety philanthropic funding hopes to get to, and so I think copying their homework (where reasonable) is wise. Again, my strong prior is that market economies perform better than centrally planned ones, at scale.
My guess is that currently cG overall is trying to instead move down in size and get into earlier-stage funding and incubation. I think more early stage funding and incubation is great, but also outside cG’s core competency (eg have the people who are now in charge of those programs, previously founded successful orgs?), and I’m unsure whether it makes sense to house all of these initiatives under a single cG banner, vs have a somewhat more diversified ecosystem.
Appreciate this post! One more funder I’d include is https://saifbio.org/, from Geoff Ralston (formerly president of YCombinator). We recently spoke and they’re particularly interested in funding more biosec work!
(Note that Carol is the primary author of this piece, but couldn’t add me as editor/secondary, since their EA Forum account is brand new; would appreciate a fix from mods.)
Don’t default to nonprofit
I think the strongest case for this is if you’re aiming for “ramen profitable”—deliberately keeping burn low while you explore ideas, so that you’re not beholden to finding a job immediately, or pitching a funder on something legible but not moonshot-y.
But I think there’s ultimately a lot more upside to be gained from being more productive/impactful, than money you can possibly save by being frugal. Toy model: you can at most reduce your own expenses by 1x, but you can increase earnings/impact by 10x or more. So I encourage people to move to the boomtown for their field (SF if you’re in AI, Berkeley/London if safety, DC for governance, NY for finance, etc).
See also Paul Graham on cities.
Agreed, part of the thesis of https://surplus.dev!
Find funding, fast
Can we bring back the old comment collapse behavior, ie collapsing a top level comment collapses the subreplies? I find it much harder to go through the comments section without this.
(perhaps @Toby Tremlett🔹 ?)
Podcast: Austin and Oli on funding & incubating projects
Thank you for the retro! As we’re planning out our own incubator for for-profits that do good (Surplus), I really appreciated the section on “advice for other incubators”. We are indeed providing seed funding ($100k), and are focusing on software as a vertical (and specifically AI for epistemics, community infra, and informative websites), so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to improve on Founding to Give. It’s also a 3-mo IRL cohort in SF!
Surplus: for massive public good
Sixteen schemes for AI safety
I’m unfortunately not interested in providing feedback on primarily AI-generated work or replying to AI-generated comments (Pangram flags the entirety of your response as AI-generated).
If you have specific questions or critiques you will write in your own words, I’m open to reading & engaging.
Hey! In response to what we judged to be low quality LLM submissions, we changed the Airtable view to only feature submissions we thought were past a particular quality bar (not strictly a filter on LLM usage, but there was definitely some correlation.)
Yours was not the only essay we filtered from the Airtable view, I would estimate about half were filtered.
I continue to be optimistic about LLM assistance for producing good essays, but I’d say the base rates are not great unfortunately.
I agree disclosure is for the benefit of the reader—I’m saying that, as a reader, I disprefer having to skip through a sentence at the top of many new posts disclaming that they used LLMs for copy editing and feedback.
I think the main thing I care about is “were large sections of this written directly by LLM” which I would prefer as first sentence so I know when to not read (which is actually the policy as written here, though I only realized that as of writing this comment). But—it appears that the default warning box has started scaring people into disclosing all forms of LLM usage at the top of essays, which I argue is a bad norm.
cG has a lot more money to give away than this, due to growth in Dustin’s portfolio + pending Anthropic etc money, so it’s not clear that the 1B commitment trades off much against all those other causes you listed.