Founders Fellowship
No application deadline
Forethought is a non-profit focused on wisely navigating the transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems.
Through our research, we've identified many important problems, and we're looking to support people to tackle these problems, and set up new projects.
As a Founder-in-Residence, you'll spend 3 months with us developing a proof of concept for a solution to an important problem, and a plan to implement it (either as a new organisation or as part of an existing one). After the 3 months, we'll offer an exit grant of 2 months, consider you for a seed grant of up to $2m, and provide ongoing advice.
The project specs
Some problems that we want to solve, with ideas on how to solve them:
- Ensuring positive AI character, via researching what model specs should say, stress-testing AI character traits like epistemic integrity, and holding developers to their model specs.
- Enabling deals with AIs: building infrastructure for credible commitments to AI systems, so that misaligned AIs have an incentive to disclose their misalignment.
- Ensuring that AI helps us to make better decisions by building tools that help society reason well and stay honest, from AI "chiefs of staff" to reliability tracking – and by ensuring that these tools get adopted by the right people.
- Ensuring that we govern space resources fairly: helping to avoid lock-in or power concentration, and shaping the institutions that will govern humanity's expansion into space, before AI-driven space industrialisation locks things in.
Projects could become new organisations, but they might also be policy initiatives, fixed-term projects, or roles within existing organisations. You can come in with a clear idea, or without much of one at all: we're excited to help you iterate towards the right idea.
Our projects page has more detail on these and other ideas: each project reflects a problem we think is important and under-explored, and that we'd be well placed to advise you on. Or you might find a different problem in our research that you're keen to solve.
What the three months look like
Every project is different, but a typical arc looks like this:
- If you haven't yet decided what problem you're focused on, spend the first month deciding on a problem. Discuss project ideas with our researchers and write up initial takes on which projects to focus on. Then iteratively test out cruxes and get feedback, narrowing down to one problem by the end of the month.
- Once you've picked a problem: draft a strategy / plan for tackling the problem / founding the organization.
- Final month: produce a prototype solution to the problem, which could be an initial product prototype, or a first draft of your first piece of research, and/or the basic structures for a new organization.
By the end of the three months, the goal is that:
- You have a minimum proof of concept for a solution to (a part of) an important problem, and plans for how to develop that further (e.g. into a new organization, or a project within an existing organization), OR
- You have found a role working on a very important project/problem
We start with an initial 3-month contract, focused on producing a basic prototype solution to the problem. We think a relatively near-term deadline is useful to work towards.
After this:
- We'll offer a 2-month exit grant, which can be seed funding for your project or a career-exploration grant if you haven't yet got firm plans.
- We'll also make seed grants of up to $2m for promising organizations.
- In exceptional cases, where your plans are very promising but you're not ready to spin out, we might offer extensions to support founders for up to a total of 12 months.
How we'll support you
You'll have a lot of autonomy: the freedom to explore and test out the areas you're most interested in, develop prototypes, get feedback, and iterate.
At the same time, we want to give you a lot of support for doing this. This includes:
Mentorship and advice:
- Mentorship through office hours with our leadership team (who are repeat founders) to advise on tricky decisions you face, and give feedback on your plans. This might cover strategic advice, takes on setting up and running a new organisation – strategy, team, fundraising, operations – and feedback on future funding applications. Mentors include:
- Will MacAskill: co-founded Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, Forethought, and the Centre for Effective Altruism.
- Max Dalton: co-founded and leads Forethought, led the Centre for Effective Altruism. Executive coach to the CEOs of Tarbell, 80,000 Hours, and many other EA organizations.
- Jessica McCurdy: previously Director of Community Growth at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Helped incubate Kairos.
- Stefan Torges: previously co-Executive Director of the Effective Altruism Foundation, Head of Fellowship at Non-Trivial and Managing Director at Macroscopic Ventures.
- Strategic advice through access to researchers who've thought deeply about the problems you're working on. You'll share our offices and Slack with the research team, and you can ask for their time, internal documents and feedback.
- Operational advice: we're happy to offer some advice on setting up a new legal entity, recommendations for potential ops hires, and introductions to fiscal sponsors.
- A library of advice on different issues that founders face: figuring out the strategy, finding a co-founder, naming an organization, incorporating, etc.
Structure and support:
- Cohort and community via weekly calls with other founders on the program plus our leadership team. Plus an ongoing Slack community of ex-founders.
- Help finding a cofounder via introductions, feedback, and advice on testing fit.
- Accountability via regular calls and milestone check-ins.
- Networks with funders, AI companies, policymakers and entrepreneurs, and introductions where they'd be helpful.
- Office space in our offices in Oxford (Trajan House) or Berkeley (Constellation), giving you more surface area with the team.
Seed funding:
- Exit grant: on top of the 3-month contract, everyone will get a 2-month exit grant which can be used as seed funding.
- Seed funding: at the end of your contract with us, we'll make decisions about whether to make an additional seed grant. We expect seed grants to be between $500k and $2m. In some cases, we'll also recommend seed grants to other funders.
- Connections to funders: we can make introductions and recommendations to major funders interested in this area, plus help you to prepare your pitch. We expect it to be fairly easy for promising projects to get seed funding in the $1m–$2m range, or more for top projects (but obviously we can't promise anything in general here).
We don't provide long-term fiscal sponsorship, so we don't extend contracts beyond 12 months. After the program, we'll be happy to provide advice / support / etc after the program ends. In some cases, an ongoing more formal arrangement like a board seat or partnership might make sense (but this isn't required).
Who we're looking for
Attributes:
- Strong strategic judgement and the ability to figure out under-scoped things
- Ambitious, hardworking, autonomous, and relentlessly resourceful
- Motivated to work on the most high-impact problems
Experience: we're open to a number of different backgrounds: prior experience as a founder is not required. Some example backgrounds:
- You have founded, run or scaled an organisation (particularly if focused on the transition to superintelligence);
- You have a strong track record within a fast-moving, mission-driven organisation; or
- You're early in your career but have already demonstrated exceptional initiative, judgement, and commitment to working on the world's most pressing problems.
This role probably isn't right for you if:
- You mostly want funding for a project you've already fully scoped (rather than to work closely with us to test and shape it). In this case, feel free to contact us and we still might be able to recommend you to funders.
- You'd prefer a stable, well-defined role.
- You'd rather do research than build something.
If you're not sure whether you're a fit, we'd love for you to express interest anyway.
What it's like working at Forethought
We take unusual ideas seriously, try to be extremely concrete about what might happen and what we should do about it, and celebrate disagreement. We are supportive and friendly, but in research discussions we lean into controversy to make intellectual progress.
For more on what it's like working at Forethought, please see our careers page.
Compensation and structure
- Salary:
- We roughly aim to match your previous salary, or 70% of commercial salaries.
- As rough illustrative ranges, we expect fellows to be on the following per year figures (which will be pro-rated for the length of your contract):
- $170,000 to $210,000 (US)
- £100,000 to £150,000 (UK)
- But we don't want pay to stop strong people from applying, including those coming from higher-paying roles: if salary is a blocker, let us know and we can discuss.
- Location: while remote work is an option, we prefer you to spend at least half of your time in our offices in Oxford or Berkeley subject to immigration constraints. We're also excited about you visiting multiple hubs, including DC and London, to build your network and find co-founders.
- Immigration: we expect to be able to arrange UK visas for this role in most cases, and may be able to support with US visas in the future.
- Start date: flexible. If you need a visa, we'll typically need around a month between you accepting and starting.
- Benefits (pro-rated; annual figures):
- 33 days annual leave, including public holidays – and a culture where it's normal to use it
- £5k/yr professional development budget
- Generous support for mental health and wellbeing costs
- Health insurance for US employees: platinum health insurance plan, with 100% coverage for employee and 90% for dependents, plus dental and vision.
Application process
We're accepting rolling expressions of interest. We'll reply if we're interested in testing fit further, but we won't respond by default.
If we do take things further, the process typically involves a call with a member of our leadership team, reviewing a short project description you've written, possibly a short work test, and reference checks. We try to move quickly.
If you have any questions, please contact lexi@forethought.org.