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Announcing First Domino - A venture studio for meta projects
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I am excited to announce my new organization, First Domino, a venture studio that incubates new high-impact projects and accelerates them, so that they can do more good in the world, faster. First Domino is supported by Coefficient Giving.
As mentioned in my last post, The Grown-Ups Aren’t Coming, much more philanthropic capital is likely coming to the ecosystem than can be handled effectively, and First Domino exists to change that.
We have open roles for both our internal team as well as to found new organizations in our inaugural round. To find out more visit our site or read more below.
First Domino is a venture studio that incubates new projects and then works hands-on with them. We identify new high-impact organizations that don’t yet exist, find excellent people to start them, and provide seed funding to get them off the ground. We are focusing at first on philanthropic infrastructure (meta projects), but may expand to other cause areas in the future.
We spend fractional time working with you in the early months on getting your project off the ground. This doesn’t only mean mentorship and advisory services, but active involvement in your project. Examples include: helping strategize with you to maximize impact, doing comms/marketing work, operations work, etc. We are generalists who have started successful startups and will work in those areas where we have a comparative advantage over you.
We will address gaps in the high-impact ecosystem that we identify through our desk research and by talking to leaders in the space and seeing their biggest needs. We will focus on ideas that we think are needed to help the overall ecosystem scale up and that can be cost effective at scale. We started with a list of over 100 ideas and narrowed it down to three, two of which are geared toward getting more talent in the space and one of which is in effective giving:
Latin America is full of skilled professionals who want their work to matter, and cost-effective organizations in animal welfare, global health and AI safety are hiring Spanish speakers there. But most effective altruism organizations geared at career transitions operate exclusively in English. Profesionales con Impacto will start from High Impact Professionals' (which I co-founded and sit on the board of) proven model and build what the region needs: a Spanish-language program, independent of HIP, that helps mid-career professionals move into high-impact jobs, start organizations or give effectively. It directly addresses the talent gap. In future rounds we expect to incubate other regional, local-language talent organizations.
To hear more and to apply to run this project, go here. Applications close Tuesday, Nov 17.
Another talent play, this project will be geared toward getting more strong candidates into talent-bottlenecked organizations through high-quality video with solid distribution. We believe that to marshal the talent we need to scale the ecosystem, we need to reach beyond the normal EA talent channels and pull in people that have never before heard of our corner of the world.
The project lead here will be the glue between film crews and high-impact organizations to understand what story needs to be told and how it should reach the most eyeballs. We are open to this being a time-bound project or its own organization.
To hear more and to apply to run this project, go here. Applications close Tuesday, Nov 17.
Legacy giving ($60 billion/year in the US alone) has been much talked about in the EA community and some people have taken stabs at it here and there, but no one has ever holistically made it their focus to address the gap. This project does just that, running many experiments with effective giving organizations to see what works and what doesn’t and then export that knowledge across the ecosystem.
We already have a founder in place for this project and are excited to get started!
We are hiring for our first role - a founders associate. You’ll be the first employee at the organization and thus are critical at shaping our trajectory. You’ll work extremely closely with the co-founders and learn the ropes of what it means to start something from nothing. You’ll be a great fit for this role if you are very strong at execution and do whatever it takes to see things through. We don’t expect you to be an expert in any one area but to be comfortable working across and completing a large array of tasks. The role is remote, full-time and we hope to have it filled by Jan 2027.
Read more and apply here. Applications close Tuesday, Nov 17.
We are very integrated in the effective philanthropy ecosystem and are designing our program to complement other actors, such as Ambitious Impact, in the space.
One founder/project lead Since we think that talent is a current bottleneck, instead of initially pulling two co-founders from the talent pool, we plan to find one person who is extremely well-suited for the organization. We will be your initial fractional co-founder and will then help them find a suitable co-founder that offsets their strengths and weaknesses.
Fractional senior support Relatedly, since senior talent is a bottleneck, we will provide fractional support of our time to organizations we incubate. This goes far beyond mentoring and includes active involvement in projects, especially in areas that complement the strengths of the founder.
Meta ideas We think a lot of infrastructure is needed to maximize impact and think this space is both the least covered by the current players and is also our comparative advantage given our backgrounds in meta. We may branch out from here in the future into other areas.
Quicker rounds We aim to get our projects out quickly and do product-market fit validations with founders in the first few months rather than long research cycles.
Some project-based work Many of the gaps we see don’t fit the mold of “org whose goal it is to scale up over time” but rather “short-term project that addresses a one-time gap and finishes”.
The founder will work on the selected project for 3 months remotely with the weekly commitment depending on the project. During this time the founder will be paid a stipend of $2-5K USD/month full-time equivalent. We will be a fractional co-founder 1 full day a week from day 1 to get the project off the ground, from strategy, marketing to operations, and including determining project viability and acquiring seed funding. After ~3 months of working together on building and validating the project, we will either spin off the organization, pivot or shutdown.
We are a current team of two and will expand in the coming months. We have both run successful meta organizations.
Devon has spent the past 10 years in executive positions at effective altruism meta organizations. He was an early executive at Founders Pledge, co-founded High Impact Professionals, was COO at Ambitious Impact, and is the author of The High-Impact Professional’s Playbook. In another life he spent about a decade in tech before thinking better of it.
Romain is an engineer by training. He was accepted into an Ambitious Impact program and went on to co-found Mieux Donner, which he has led through rapid growth since 2024. He is the co-author of Rational Altruism.
We're supported by a two-year general-support grant from Coefficient Giving in the amount of $1.88 million USD. This covers our team, operations and initial seed funding for projects. We expect the strongest projects to quickly need more than we can provide alone, so we're actively looking for co-funders who want to back them early. You can register your interest to seed fund projects here.
We are very grateful to Coefficient Giving for their support.
Applications for all three roles close Tuesday Nov 17. Know someone who'd be a great fit? Please send this post their way.
