Manifund is a philanthropic startup that runs a website and programs to fund awesome projects. From January to now, we wrapped up 3 different programs for impact certificates (aka venture-style funding for charity projects): ACX Grants, Manifold Community Fund, and the Chinatalk essay competition.

Overall, we’ve learned a lot and are happy with the projects we’ve funded, but are less excited by impact certs than before — it's been hard to get investor interest, and we still haven’t found a use case where certs led to better funding decisions. For the next quarter, we’re trying out a bunch of things (including Manifest, regranting, and prize challenges) while looking to get product-market fit.

What we’ve been working on in Q1

ACX Grants 2024

Manifund hosted the 2024 round of ACX Grants, which included both direct funding to some projects and an impact market for any project that opted-in and did [...]

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Outline:

(00:50) What we’ve been working on in Q1

(00:54) ACX Grants 2024

(01:27) Background

(02:20) ACXG Direct Funding

(03:12) ACXG Impact Market

(07:49) Micro-Regranting Program

(13:57) Manifold Community Fund

(17:40) ChinaTalk Essay Competition

(20:54) People Updates

(22:14) Site Updates

(23:11) Where we’re headed in Q2

(23:36) Manifest 2024

(24:07) AI Safety Regranting

(24:35) Mixtral Challenge (with Trenton Bricken and Dwarkesh Patel)

(25:11) Fiscal sponsorship

(25:37) EA Funds collaboration

(26:01) Manifold Charity program

(26:16) Other

(26:19) People we’d love to chat with

(27:02) Links and callouts

(28:22) Ambitious ideas we’d be excited about

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First published:
May 1st, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AzoopyYgzNimBJDdY/manifund-q1-retro-learnings-from-impact-certs

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Manifund Q1 Retro: Learnings from impact certs” by Austin Chen

LessWrong (30+ Karma)