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Idea: Universal CRM

Next-gen “community”, unifying Mox/Manifund/Manifold/Manifest:

Motivation:

  • Breaking out of the “Dunbar’s number” limit on building community & running events
  • Extend the snap judgement thing one does when scrolling through Partiful and deciding who to invite
  • Many good event organizers want to find relevant people (cf METR hackathon, Ricki’s events)
  • Imperfect modeling of others leads to problems with sales, marketing (cf passing along leads for events)
  • Manifold & Manifund create salience, interactions, knowledge of people

Pitch:

  • Build an extremely detailed view of who you are and what you want, based on your public interactions, writing
    • As the Christian God: all-knowing, all-caring, unique relationship with you
      • (When they say “building god” many mean “supersmart”, but God is more than that)
  • Be able to hold all of this within a coherent system, query-able, powered by LLM
    • High-fidelity simulations of your persona?
      • Preserves your attention when you have too many opportunities to take
      • See: Workshop Labs or Worth the Candle utopia assistants
  • CRM on steroids; highly targeted opportunities
    • Consider the data Google/FB/etc has on you. But: Google only monetizes this to the tune of $100/pp/y via ad spends.
      • Deep knowledge of people should be worth so much more than that.
      • E.g. Manifold Jobs; high value in knowing rates of growth
    • Rather than very specific opportunities fragmented across different verticals (jobs vs shopping vs information vs love), could be unified, building a more holistic picture of people
    • (maybe this is the direction OpenAI is going down?)
  • names
    • “meta-social-network”
    • online presence
    • whoami
    • lodex — lodex.ai is available
      • good: rolodex, lodash, lode
      • bad: a bit 1990s
    • uniq
    • query

Imagine:

  • The superpowered matchmaker that can immediately find your partner for life
  • Recommends events like Manifest or communities like Mox for you
  • Finds you cofounders, jobs, roles, next steps

Potential MVPs:

  • Mapping out the EA ecosystem (individuals, orgs) based on Manifund/Mox/Austin’s rolodex
    • Lightest version is a tool that’s just useful for me
  • Building out a thing for ACX Grants, helping w/ review
  • Consolidate the 50 CRMs we have right now
    • Helping with our own pipelines for eg Manifold hiring, Mox fundraising, Mox Populi, etc
    • Imagine auto-populating a CRM from existing data in one go. Airtable-like. Query the chat “Find me recommendations for people who can do Manifold eng”
      • “Suggest people I know who I should invite to Manifund Regrantors Showcase”

Questions:

  • Public data, vs private data?
    • One useful thing is the web of links (Linkedin, socials, blogs), all scraped and ready to consume. Like Wikipedia for individuals.
    • Another useful thing is the private info that only certain people have

Extensions:

  • Mapping personas for orgs and communities too
    • Could be meme-y: “Mox-chan wants more events”

Appendix/Musings:

  • Event series to host: boring business skills
    • Build a CRM; send cold emails; structure a standup
    • (in the age of LLM?)
  • Should always be automating your job.
    • How to create more Manifolds? Create more Moxs?
      • Or: Create more The Curves?
    • (or: improve efficiency of existing systems)
  • Bottleneck is sometimes more reachouts, accountability
  • There’s value in doing things by hand — mostly, in that the things you supervise/own are the things that you can more easily modify, have loaded into your context
    • “What to load into your context”

Convo with Claude, my takes:

Let's go with:
  • Public data only to start: Linkedin, socials, Manifold/Manifund public profiles
  • Start with the extended EA/AI safety scene. (So probably EA Forum/LW are high value too, as well as personal blogs)
  • Our existing CRMs are almost all Airtables.
  • I'd want this thing to stay automatically up to date

I'm wondering what a generalized approach is to storing this kind of data. I imagine it'd start with records for each individual, a set of associated links, and then we'd scrape that, store it, and provide eg a daily snapshot?

I also want searching over these to both be LLM-accessible (so: vector?) and also fast. Maybe using super fast inference things like Cerebras to query and run results?