Hey there~ I'm Austin, currently building https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
The act of raising funding from "EA general public" is quite rare at the moment - most orgs I'm familiar with get the vast majority of their funding from a handful of institutions (OP, EA Funds, SFF, some donor circles).
I do think fundraising from the public can be a good forcing function and I wish more EA nonprofits tried to do so. Especially meta/EA internal orgs like 80k or EA Forum or EAG (or Lightcone), since there, "how much is a user willing to donate" could be a very good metric for the how much value they are receiving from their work.
One of the best things that happened to Manifold early on was when our FTX Future Fund regrantor offered to cover up to half of our $2m seed round - contingent on us raising the other half from other sources. We then had to build the muscle of fundraising from regular Silicon Valley angels/VCs, which especially served us well when Future Fund went kaput.
Manifund tries to make public fundraising for EA projects much easier, and there have been a few success cases such as MATS and Act I - though in the end most of our dollars moved come from our regrantors.
If you are a mechanical engineer digging around for new challenges and you’re not put off by everyone else’s failure to turn a profit, I’d be enthusiastic about your building a lamp and would do my best to help you get in touch with people you could learn from.
If this describes you, I'd also love to help (eg with funding) -- reach out to me at austin@manifund.org!
Thanks for posting this! I appreciate the transparency from the CEA team around organizing this event and posting about the results; putting together this kind of stuff is always effortful for me, so I want to celebrate when others do it.
I do wish this retro had a bit more in the form of concrete reporting about what was discussed, or specific anecdotes from attendees, or takeaways for the broader EA community; eg last year's MCF reports went into substantial depth on these, which really enjoyed. But again, these things can be hard to write up, perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good enough, and I'm grateful for the steps that y'all have already taken towards showing your work in public.
Thanks for the questions! Most of our due diligence happens in the step where the Manifund team decides whether to approve a particular grant; this generally happens after a grant has met its minimum funding bar and the grantee has signed our standard grant agreement (example). At that point, our due diligence usually consists of reviewing their proposal as written for charitable eligibility, as well as a brief online search, looking through the grant recipient's eg LinkedIn and other web presences to get a sense of who they are. For larger grants on our platform (eg $10k+), we usually have additional confidence that the grant is legitimate coming from the donors or regrantors themselves.
In your specific example, it's very possible that I personally could have missed cross-verifying your claim of attending Yale (with the likelihood decreasing the larger the grant is for). Part of what's different about our operations is that we open up the screening process so that anyone on the internet can chime in if they see something amiss; to date we've paused two grants (out of ~160) based on concerns raised from others.
I believe we're classified as a public charity and take on expenditure responsibility for our grants, via the terms of our grant agreement and the status updates we ask for from grantees.
And yes, our general philosophy is that Manifund as a platform is responsible for ensuring that a grant is legitimate under US 501c3 law, while being agnostic about the impact of specific grants -- that's the role of donors and regrantors on our platform.
I'd really appreciate you leaving thoughts on the projects, even if you decided not to fund them. I expect that most project organizers would also appreciate your feedback, to help them understand where their proposals as written are falling short. Copy & paste of your personal notes would be great!
It's hard to say much about the source of funding without leaking too much information; I think I can say that they're a committed EA who has been around the community a while, who I deeply respect and is generally excited to give the community a voice.
FWIW, I think the connection between Manifest and "receiving funding from Manifund or EA Community Choice" is pretty tenuous. Peter Wildeford who you quoted has both raised $10k for IAPS on Manifund and donated $5k personally towards a EA community project. This, of course, does not indicate that Peter supports Manifest to any degree whatsoever; rather, it shows that sharing a funding platform is a very low bar for association.
Appreciate the questions! In general, I'm not super concerned about adversarial action this time around, since:
Specifically:
This looks awesome! $1k struck me as a pretty modest prize pool given the importance of the questions; I'd love to donate $1k towards increasing this prize, if you all would accept it (or possibly more, if you think it would be useful.)
I'd suggest structuring this as 5 more $200 prizes (or 10 $100 honorable mentions) rather than doubling the existing prizes to $400 -- but really it's up to you, I'd trust your allocations here. Let me know if you'd be interested!