đź’’

Manifundraising

[WORK IN PROGRESS]

Manifund is selling our impact certificates — up to $1m at a $10m valuation.

ICO = “Impact Cert Offering”

(throw away all of this)

In general, I’m not actually a fan of relying on donations. Manifund is in the unique situation of operating a system that can actually make money, which provides a better feedback loop than raising donations.

So why should you donate to us (aka buy our certs?) Basically: if you want to vote for us scaling up our ambitions in this space.

It’s kind of a coordination problem: if we had more money, we’d be more excited to commit our time to this.

Or retroactively: if Manifund has helped you (or projects/people you like) a bunch in the past, and you’d like to vote to continue donating

“We” might be an unhelpful abstraction. Really “we” means “Austin and Rachel”, the only two people who work on Manifund.

What Manifund operations pay for

Mostly, our salaries.

  • I (Austin) have never taken a salary from Manifund.
  • Rachel, meanwhile, earns a salary of $140k.

Conservatively, I think the for-profit job market would be willing to pay ~$1m/y for Austin and $250k/y for Rachel.

Manifund timeline

  • June 2022: We spin up a 501c3, mostly for charity prediction markets
  • Jan 2023: Rachel Weinberg joins. We run the first impact markets test in partnership with Scott Alexander’s ACX Grants
  • Mar 2023: We announce our $1.5M regranting program
  • Jan 2024: Saul Munn, on break from school, joins Manifund fulltime.
  • Jun 2024: Manifund runs Manifest 2024
  • Nov 2024: Manifund runs The Curve

Impact cert distribution.

At a valuation of $10m:

  • 50% initial team
    • Austin, Rachel, Saul
    • Small percent for board members
  • 20% to funders
    • 1% to FTX FF (?)
      • Unclear because it was a restricted grant to run charity prediction markets; but this was important to get Manifund off the ground
    • 5% to SFF
    • 10% right now
  • Holding 30% for the future (?)

Who we aren’t gifting certs to: people we think of as our “users”, aka we’re providing them value on net

  • Donors & partners
    • Like Donor D, Scott Alexander, Donor E
    • (even though we love y’all!)
  • Regrantors
    • They are volunteering their time
      • So it feels like it might be nice to grant them some stake?
    • But also kind of already paid with the ability to support projects that they think are valuable
      • One frame: they’re already getting $250k worth of certs
      • I think, regrantors should feel free to invest their regrantor dollars into Manifund ICO
  • Grantees
    • (We love y’all too!)

What are our assets?

  • A kickass funding website
  • Pretty good connections in the AI safety and EA space. We’re trusted by donors, grantees, and a variety of other funders
  • 501c3 status; the ability and willingness to facilitate donations
  • High risk tolerance

What are our liabilities?

  • Small team, high “bus factor”
  • Some funding commitments we’ve made (eg continuing to run ACX stuff)

What might Manifund do with a bunch of money?

(Set up prediction markets on all of these)

  • Set up an EA/AI safety hub (offices, coworking) in San Francisco
  • Staff up the core product (Manifund donations site & fiscal ops)
    • Would be good to add 1-3 people. Skillsets we’re looking for:
      • Fundraising, from individuals and larger orgs
      • Entrepreneur-in-residence spinning up new programs
      • Coding, the ability to implement features
      • Ops (finance, legal)
  • Run an in-house incubator, like YC but for AI safety-ish projects

What might we do if we don’t get a bunch of money?

  • Continue operating the core product
  • Wind down operations, if the overhead of facilitating these donations is not consummerate with the impact
  • Pivot to organizing events

FAQ on certs

  • Aren’t nonprofits supposed to not have equity, or profits?
    • [a] Yup. To be clear, nothing that happens with these certs should result in profits in your personal accounts. All this cert stuff is just our way of deciding how to allocate our charity balances on our site.
      • You can think of Manifund itself as a fancy DAF that supports particularly weird assets
    • At the end of the day Manifund maintains oversight and control over all funds, to the extent required by US 501c3 law
  • Who will buy these certs later?
    • ALL IMPACT CERT PURCHASES SHOULD BE VIEWED IN THE SPIRIT OF A DONATION
    • In many worlds… no one ever
      • TODO: prediction market on whether there will ever be $100k+ in aftermarket sales of Manifund’s impact certs
    • But possible buyers include:
      • Some based individual donor
      • Some major philanthropic org like SFF or OpenPhil
      • Buybacks from Manifund itself, if any of our shenanigans manage to print enough money
      • The US government
      • Our future AI overlords, and/or God
  • So why are you doing this cert thing at all?
    • [a] I think this is just the objectively right way to assign credit in the nonprofit world
    • avoids double counting problems
    • helps donors and grantees agree on opportunity costs
      • here, I really just want an answer to “should Austin and Rachel keep doing Manifund stuff?”
    • Since we promote impact certs ourselves: good to dogfood and model good behavior
    • idk it seems fun