Note: just a rough proposal; we’re very flexible with how to structure this!

What Manifund offers

• 501c3 fiscal sponsorship
  • 501c3 tax deduction gets donors back ~40% on each donation — more if it’s via donating appreciated securities (eg stock or crypto)
  • Very popular with donors! The $1.5m for regranting, & $1.3m for ACX Grants benefited from this
• Payment processing
  • We’re set up to accept money from DAFs, bank transfers, and crypto
  • We’re set up to pay out funds to individuals, nonprofits, and companies anywhere in the world
• Hosting proposals publicly
  • We’ll set up a custom page for this, like https://manifund.org/causes/acx-grants-2024
  • This lets grantees get follow-up funding (eg AI Safety Camp raised $50k entirely crowdfunded), or get additional publicity (eg the Lantern Bioworks proposal hit #1 on Hacker News)

What Manifund costs

• 5% of donation volume, to cover our time & services
  • Most fiscal sponsors charge 6-14% - see PPF and HackClub
• Some restrictions on where you can grant to
  • Primarily, have to be eligible for a US-based 501c3 to grant to; the biggest thing this cuts out is some forms of lobbying
    • (eg with ACX, we divided it up so that Scott directly handled some of the lobbying-adjacent grants)
• Transparency
  • The grants must be eligible for posting on our website, at least at the level of a paragraph of description (and ideally, with the full grant proposal)
  • On a case-by-case basis, we’re willing to eg grant pseudonymity to specific individuals

What Dwarkesh would be responsible for

• Fundraising
  • I expect this wouldn’t be too hard given your existing connections, but happy to talk through how we approached it at Manifold, Manifund, etc.
• Finding grantees & promoting the program
  • I also assume just announcing it on your Substack/Twitter would be good; maybe then doing a podcast episode?
• Funding decisions
  • Could be “Dwarkesh just makes all the decisions himself” or “Dwarkesh sets up some kind of rating & review process and pulls in judges” or sth else, it’s your call

Question for Dwarkesh

• Do you want your grant program to be…
  • “people-first” (eg Emergent Ventures)?
  • “idea-first” (eg ACX Grants)?
  • “prize-first” (Vesuvius Challenge)?
• What kind of people/ideas/causes would you want to grant to?
• Where do you see your comparative advantage with your grant program? (ie why aren’t people just applying to EV/YC/something else?)