We’re thrilled to announce the FTX Foundation's Future Fund: a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d love to fund, but it’s not exhaustive—we’re open to a broad range of ideas. We’re particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Our areas of interest include the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biorisk, improving institutions, economic growth, great power relations, effective altruism, and more.
If you’d like to launch one of our proposed projects, or have another idea for a project in our areas of interest—please apply! Please submit your applications by March 21 to be considered in our first open funding round.
UPDATE: Our first open funding round closed on March 21, and we are no longer accepting applications. We do not currently have any plans to resume accepting applications, and we do not know if or when we will do so. If we decide to start accepting applications again, we will announce this decision on ftxfuturefund.org and with another post on the EA Forum.
We can’t wait to see your applications!
Some further details:
- On the same apply page, you can also express interest in working with us, recommend a grant or investment to us, or recommend a prize for us to launch.
- We fund non-profits and for-profits alike, so long as they are aligned with our mission. We aim to respond quickly, ask for the information that is needed and no more, and keep you posted on when to expect a final decision. We are willing to make big bets, and we respect grantee autonomy. There is no limit on how much you can apply for.
- You can read about our principles and approach to funding on our website.
In addition to our request for projects, today we’re launching:
- Our Regranting Program. We’re offering discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. Our hope is that regrantors will fund great people and projects that weren’t on our radar! We’ve already invited the first cohort, and we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor.
- Our Project Ideas Competition. We’re announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to our website—submit your ideas by next Monday (March 7)!
Our team is Nick Beckstead (CEO), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Will MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.
About the FTX Foundation
The Future Fund is part of the FTX Foundation, a philanthropic foundation funded primarily by Sam Bankman-Fried. When Sam was 20 years old, he set out to to “earn to give”: make as much money as he could, in order to give away everything he earned to charity. He initially worked as a trader, then founded FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange.
FTX Foundation is also funded by major contributions from Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh.
Our 2022 plans
For people who want to follow our work closely, here is some more on our initial focus and priorities.
We are just getting started and we'd like to fund a lot of great projects quickly. So our primary goal for 2022 is to perform bold and decisive tests of highly scalable funding models. We think this is important for helping us make the most of our resources.
The initial strategies we’re testing are highly decentralized:
- The first strategy is to simply describe very clearly a broad range of projects we'd be excited to fund, and offer open applications for funding. We're hoping this generates many exciting proposals for us to fund.
- The second strategy we’re testing is a regranting program. We hope this program will help us identify great grants that we would have missed, enable new people to launch exciting projects, and find and empower people who could be strong grantmakers.
- The third strategy we're considering is offering large prizes for outputs we want to see. We hope to launch these later this year, though our approach and expectations here are less developed.
A fourth strategy we'd like to test is proactively recruiting founders for the projects that we'd like to see launched. This could well end up being our main focus for the year. Our ideas about how to pursue this are currently pretty early-stage, but we're considering: organizing workshops, direct head-hunting, and incubating the projects in-house. Depending on how we approach this, it may be necessary to do some significant prioritization in order to decide where to start.
A few elaborations on our approach:
- We're starting with highly decentralized approaches that seem like they can be tested quickly and seem like they can produce a lot of output with limited time investment from us, if they work. We also like the idea that these strategies give others opportunities to cover our blindspots.
- It's important to us that we make it fast and easy for great projects to get funded. In addition to directly serving our mission, we think this will make our experiments more decisive. This may be challenging, and over this year we’ll keep iterating on our processes with that aim in mind.
- We don't have dedicated program officers in any of our areas of interest, and we are keeping a broad focus for now. We're making this decision in part because we think it will help with our learning. A major source of uncertainty we have is how many good project ideas we would find if we investigated these areas of interest more deeply. Before strongly selecting areas to specialize in, we like the idea of testing the waters.
We hope that after these tests are completed, we will have a strong sense of how well these funding models work. If they work well, we will continue or scale them. If bold experiments fail, we hope that will give us strong conviction that we should be trying something entirely different. If decentralized approaches fail, we'd also probably update in favor of more funder-led approaches to getting the projects we care about launched.
Wrapping up
We’re happy to answer questions, though it might take us a few days to respond due to other programs and content we're launching right now.
We’re so excited to work with all of you, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!
Dear friends, dear Sam Bankman-Fried, hello!
Someone said: the shackles of habit begin to be felt when they are hard to break. Therefore, we have come up with and have already developed a vaccine against mental illness - an application with a creative product, located at the intersection of creativity, science and technology. It is much more profitable, more effective and easier to prevent a serious illness from the beginning than to heal for a very long, expensive and painful time later. And it's not a fact that you'll be healed. It is much more effective to initially nurture mentally healthy people, even if they live in a dysfunctional family, a dysfunctional area, or are not well off, than to go to a psychologist for years and still not sure what will help. In addition, a mentally unhealthy person not only lives painfully, he also tortures his loved ones, and the whole society suffers and suffers.
I am convinced that all of humanity's problems stem from insanity, ignorance and unconsciousness.
It all starts with supposedly harmless fears in childhood, over the years all these fears, limitations and delusions only develop and intensify, turn into anger and aggression, from here we see: child bullying, depression, violence and bullying, mass executions, domestic violence, suicide, war.
And everything that we, society, do in a very limited way - the struggle with the consequences, which can be fought endlessly, and as in the situation with fears, the situation will only get worse.
But, of course, in order for the work to be effective, it is necessary to work on all fronts at the same time, and immediately, correctly, “reconnected” to those who are already in trouble and to help and encourage, otherwise it will become an endless process.
Since everything starts in childhood, and the most universal, versatile and effective antidote to all evil is creativity, we started making a project:
App -
interactive animated series on developing emotional intelligence and mental health for children ages 4 to 12 to the global market.
The production of such content, such a project, in Russia is several times cheaper than in America or Europe.
The child will not just passively observe, but will be a full-fledged accomplice of what is happening: he will answer simple questions in a test format in real time, he will change the scenario of events and become a co-creator, etc. Thus, the child consolidates the acquired knowledge, learns to think and analyze, to make decisions independently, to influence the course of things, to take responsibility, to look for causes and not to name consequences, to overcome fears and not to run away from them, and learns to think critically.
Education can only overcome poverty, while mental health makes a person truly happy, successful, and rich. A mentally healthy person can learn and develop lifelong with love, an educated person usually only up to the age of 23 and then "under pressure". I'm not talking about the consequences we draw from the lives of mentally ill people.
Traditional medicine in general, and psychotherapy in particular, does not and cannot bring the desired results: first, a psychotherapist is not available to everyone; secondly, and this problem follows from the first, when everything is fine in one area and everything is not very good in the neighboring area, envy and misunderstandings, disagreements arise, and this is an even greater evil; thirdly, in traditional medicine, unfortunately, there are many charlatans and simply incompetent specialists; Fourth, as you know, traditional medicine cures one and spoils the other.
For some reason, we are initially wary of people. There are probably many reasons, here are some of them: parents from early childhood tell us - do not open the door to strangers, do not name your address, do not talk to strangers on the street, do not get into a car with strangers. Society initially teaches us distrust. And even if a person has the opportunity to turn to a psychologist, there is an understanding, desire and need for his help, he goes to him with distrust, without even realizing it. And since we want everything at once, here and now, we demand quick results. But the psychologist must first overcome this mistrust, this resistance. A month passes, a lot of time, effort and money have been spent, but there are still no results, the ice has not yet been melted, trust has not yet been won. And the client says: come on, you just spent my time and money. It doesn't work.
The supply of such knowledge and skills through creativity and technology does not meet this resistance, there is no initial mistrust. There is no stranger who still has to earn trust, everything is beautiful and cheerful, everything is very friendly. And everything that a child sees, and even an adult, goes directly into the subconscious, without encountering any resistance. Consciousness does not resist, there is no reason for this, it does not see the danger.
And all physical complaints are only a consequence of mental illnesses, since they arise and arise precisely on the mental level.
In addition, it is financially very profitable. Unfortunately, this is a huge problem worldwide: According to experts, by 2025 every third person on earth will suffer from depression.
We have to work immediately on all fronts, from all sides at the same time, for as large an audience as possible. This is the only way we have the chance to really change something. Changing this globally in a small, single area doesn't change anything.
Mental illness is the biggest killer of human potential. Imagine how the world will change if not 1-2% mentally healthy people live in it, but at least 11-12%.
We will unite in one product: spiritual development, mental health, education, upbringing, entertainment, technology.
And for the implementation of our unprecedented project we need financial support.
We want to help people, connect the spiritual world with the material. To give mankind the rules that will make them happy, en masse, everywhere.
Pitch deck by link - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_0gLHA6MU0MhROPRBeJOOXgUmET-M3FG/view?usp=sharing
With respect and hope for attention and support,
Viktor Smolin
spare mail: smolinvv@mail.ru
Telegram / WhatsApp +7 902 893 08 10