Context. I am compiling a list of things startups are allowed to do. , which is going for the things that are options people don’t know about, basically. And you were one of the first people I asked because you had done a whole bunch of things that Anyone could have done and no one was stopping anyone from doing, but I hadn’t seen other people think about. And previously you gave me a list of these and I had a bunch of followup questions. So we decided to talk in person synchronously.
[00:00:33] Publicly sharing salaries
Elizabeth: Okay. So the first, one of the things you gave me was you publicly share salaries and I’ve worked for a company that internally shared all salaries and all notes, which I thought was mostly useful, but was imposing costs just doing it within the company.
How does that work when it’s completely public?
Austin: Yeah. And I’m curious for background, how big was the company that you were at? Which shared notes sorry, salaries publicly.
Elizabeth: It was under 20 people when I joined and was over 50 when I left.
Austin: I see. Interesting.
Elizabeth: And you would definitely seeing the systems we use change as the company got bigger.
Austin: Yeah, I myself would be quite interested in seeing how well this salary transparency thing scales. So we started it when we were, very small. I think we’ve had it since we were, three or four people at Manifold when just the co founders plus maybe one or two early employees.
And we just have stuck with it. I think that the salary thing is a is a small instance of a broader decision which I think I had—I pushed for very early on with Manifold, which is to make all of our information as public as possible.
It’s not just the salaries and the meeting notes. We also have our source code is open source. Our we have most of our conversations. In public on Manifold or on discord. We still have some privately in our own, private discord [00:02:00] channels or in person in the office. But once upon a time, we had almost all of our, a discussions open on discord.
So the salary thing was in some sense, not trying to shake the boat rock the boat or something that, but rather just the extension of a strong belief that I held, which is that transparency is quite good for our company. And the generator of that was watching other kinds of bootstrap companies, especially do the quote unquote “work in public” approach towards building their startup or building their bootstrap company.
Working public is this mostly online movement where people share their revenue numbers, their work in progress, their products that they’ve been working on in a very transparent, open way. I myself have learned a lot from other such companies. And I also noticed that it made me a lot more positively predisposed to those companies as I watch the internal, the guts of how their company ran.
So then when I was starting on Manifold, I noticed that the more that we talked openly to our own users and to the public about all the small decisions behind how we decided to run Manifold, the more they engage with us. And as a B2C company that is looking for attention and mind share and trying to get people excited about what we’re excited about prediction markets.
I just found it very instrumentally useful for Manifold, the company’s, goals of getting people excited about prediction markets to just talk a lot more just to be sharing everything that we could about how we operated from how we decided on features and our planning process to the finances behind raising funding and the salaries as well.
So, Yeah, I—think that’s go for it.
Elizabeth: This got more users paying attention. I’m guessing it got you more feedback. You’ve also said previously, this ended up being good for recruiting and funding because it was just very easy for people to learn more about you.
Austin: Yes, [00:04:00] I think that was the case.
I think especially our first hire, for example, Ian, showed up on our Discord and spent a bunch of time chatting with us over Discord. And I believe he was impressed with Just the way that we talked about things and just engage with the community. The very tight knit feeling between the core development team at Manifold and its users.
I think you can start off as a Manifold user and then decided to join our team as a result of that. I think that was probably one instance of this kind of being open, being transparent working out really well to go back to the salary bits. I think it’s not just that In general, I think transparency is good.
I think transparency on finances is also very good. Some of this I think comes from me having worked in places tech Google, where there can be actually very large differences in salaries as a result of negotiating ability. Patrick McKenzie has this very A famous very good blog post about how you should negotiate your salary if you’re working in tech because by default, many people don’t, but by default it’s a thing that you should consider very heavily because there is a lot of money on the table available for you.
And I personally benefited a lot from that. I also benefited a lot from sites levels.fyi. Which publish basically tech employees go on levels.fyi and self publish their own salaries based on what company they work for, what level they work at basically how much seniority they have.
It’s a really awesome database, I think that shows off, what is possible in the world. And I think it encourages people to switch companies, join companies that are offering better rates. In a way that maybe without the existence of this kind of transparency but let’s do a less good allocation of people to companies, people by default recruiters have a lot of this kind of insider information about how much different companies are paying, but the general public employees do not.
So I thought the way that levels that I thought I made this even the playing field made this information more available was very noble—a public good. And I guess I wanted to encourage the same kind of things when we were running our own
Elizabeth: So [00:06:00] when I worked at there were two companies that did that sharing internal salaries or at least level information Yeah one of the reasons I really liked it as an employee was I could say Oh, I think I’m between Alice and Bob in usefulness.
I should be between paid between Alice and Bob. Let me talk to my boss about that, which is exactly the thing a lot of companies are afraid of. Has that happened to you guys?
Austin: I don’t think it has. Nobody has gone to us and said this other person is making this much. And as a result, I should be paid this much.
Our compensation philosophy is already that we should try to pay pretty generously both with cash and with equity. And that comes out of more broader philosophy that’s very maybe 2020s tech of just your people are the most important asset of your company.
And you should compete a lot to make sure they are compensated well and very happy with the remuneration they’re getting for working with you. That is the thing that I have also pushed for at Manifold. And I think I haven’t heard anyone. I think all of our employees have been pretty happy with their salaries.
They never come back and said “Oh, I would to get paid more”. With a possibly one exception, which is a little bit less central. Our executive assistant, who is not a tech employee, but rather somebody who does a lot more of the back office, paperwork and things that in some instances she has asked for a raise and there’s I got a complicated discussion there.
But the core tech employees have seen the amount that they’ve been getting paid, seen how much their coworkers are getting paid and as far as I can tell have been pretty happy with it. I haven’t actually had too much of an explicit discussion with them, but I always link to the finances as they can see Oh yes, this is how much people are getting.
They also understand that people who joined earlier got in when the valuation of Manifold was a little bit lower and thus got somewhat more generous equity packages. Yeah, but those are all things that we’re happy to explain to our current employees.
Elizabeth: Have there been any downsides of this level of openness so far?
Austin: With regards to salaries specifically Or in general? Yeah I don’t think [00:08:00] so for the salaries. In general
[00:08:02] Open meeting notes
Elizabeth: So one thing, I worry about is even when it was just within a company, once your notes are public, the notes have to have to be under it was a mental load to figure out what is going to happen when other people read this and this was at a fairly small, high trust company, but the minute. You go beyond the really core team. I think it’s natural to worry about that. And that ends up being a big mental load.
Austin: Yeah. I think there’s a couple of responses. One is that in the first place, not that many people care about your company. I think the people working in the company care a lot more than the people outside of it.
So just, there aren’t actually that many people looking at our notes, even though they are public. I think it’s a handful of our most passionate users, maybe five of them might look at our daily stand up notes. And those are also the same users who have the kind of the most context.
The notes are less, a lot less likely to be taken out of context or be repeated, widely on the internet in an adversarial way. I think that part is helpful to keep in mind, even though it is open, we are not broadcasting these notes, we’re just making it available for people to use.
Another thing is that it does happen that you can start small. And I think we, we did this for a while and we just got comfortable with it. It’s your concern or your company’s concern was that other people would be, it would change the way that your company orients to your own meeting notes. Is that right?
Elizabeth: Yeah so I personally would worry that especially if I’m having a conflict with a co worker what gets written up and read by other people who are paying attention because there are co workers feels really high stakes.
And even if there isn’t an open conflict, the minute the system isn’t completely high trust in every circumstance, what you write down feels really important. [00:10:00] And you have to consider how other people are going to read it.
Austin: Yeah. I think
Elizabeth: The bigger the company gets, the more concerned that is.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is reasonable. And for what it’s worth I think our more sensitive discussions still mostly happen. in person or on private one on one docs. So I think it’s very rare that even in the course of a company, a meeting, a daily standup, for example people would have an outright conflict between two people.
There might be a conflict in ideas where some are rationalists enough to try it and have people have strong disagreements, but not disagree against each other. Have the discriminancy be about ideas, not people. Beyond that I think we’re also just relatively agreeable people.
So yeah, and you mentioned the first find, major kind of interpersonal conflicts or disagreements get resolved not in the course of a daily stand up that where the notes are being broadcast or publicly shared.
[00:10:54] History of Manifund
Elizabeth: How many people are you now? Or how many people are, is Manifold and Manifund?
Separately.
Austin: Manifold is about six people, and Manifund is about three people so all of this is in the context of a relatively small team. And I think that’s probably useful context as well. I think this could probably scale up larger, but that’s very unproven.
I don’t have a strong sense. of if this kind of openness works well once you get to 20 or 50 or a million or something that employees.
Elizabeth: Okay. Can you tell me more about Manifund? how did that end up spinning out?
Austin: Yeah
Elizabeth: I would put, start a charity built on my platform is a very interesting thing you’re allowed to do.
So how did you think of that? How did you figure out you were allowed to do it?
Austin: Yeah. The charity started to solve a pretty concrete pain point, which is that we had received a grant from the FTX future fund in about 500, 000 for the purpose of doing prediction markets for charities.
And this was so that people who are betting on Manifold and betting with mana of play [00:12:00] currency could cash out that mana as a donation to the charity of their choice. So just operationally to receive that grant future fund really wanted this grant to be received by a 501c3. And there are basically two ways of doing that.
One is you can go and find another 501c3 to be your, what’s called a fiscal sponsor. Somebody who will handle this money on your behalf, but they have to make sure that your work is properly charitable. And they often take a fee somewhere in between five to 50 percent of the grant in exchange for the service.
So we were okay, that’s one path. It’s usually a little bit faster, but it comes with more oversights. You have to get somebody to agree that your work is good. And even at that time that was very early on in Manifolds life, maybe four to six months around when since when Manifold had been started, I was already thinking about we might want to do crazier things down the line beyond just the prediction markets cash out to charity, which is already a little bit out there.
Nobody’s done this before. We might want to do impact certificates or other kinds of weird charity mechanisms. And I don’t know if I want to be getting permission from an existing charity and have their risk tolerance. So we went with the other path, which in our case was to a file to establish a separate 5 charity.
We called it Manifold for charity because at the time the main purpose of it was just to be running the charity prediction market program. And we got that incorporated relatively quickly. That was the formation of a separate 501c3. And for a while all that the Manifund charity did was process charity payouts.
Then about six months later, Scott Alexander came to us and was Hey I really want to do my next ACX grants round on Impact Certificates. I know you (you being Austin primarily) has had a little bit of excitement for Impact Certificates. Would you to build a platform for us?
And I was sure. That sounds good. This isn’t that core to the prediction market platform, so we can’t really justify paying for it or bringing on additional engineering help from the rest of the Manifold team.
What I can do is: my then girlfriend, now wife, Rachel Weinberg is an up and coming, I think, good software engineer. I can maybe pull her to help me with on this, make sure to employ her under the Manifund, the [00:14:00] 501c3 instead of Manifold. So that was when Manifund started to have independent operations from Manifold markets. And yeah
Elizabeth: I’m tracking causality there. It seems some of it was You were known to have related products and you personally were known as being interested in impact certificates.
And that’s why Scott thought to approach you.
Austin: Yeah. I think Scott was probably impressed with our ability to build Manifold, just getting a successful marketplace website off the ground is actually not a small feat. And I think there were another team of people who were also interested in building this for Scott.
But he chose us in some sense to build this impact market platform. I’m making probably it sounded a little bit more dramatic than it was actually was at the time. But yeah
Elizabeth: I guess what I’m hearing is you were known to be competent and interested in this.
Austin: Yeah, I hesitate to call anybody else less competent.
But
Elizabeth: I’m not saying they weren’t competent. It’s that you were known competent and that’s really valuable.
Austin: I think that was probably true. Yes.
Elizabeth: I think this is a good reason to get a reputation for finishing things is because it builds trust that other people have in you.
Austin: Yeah, I do agree. I think that possibly this is a thing that people in the rationality or EA sphere have a little bit less of the track record of delivering and being able to parley that into larger outcomes.
Elizabeth: Okay. So you get this invitation from Scott to work on this thing. What happens then?
Austin: So then we run the first a test run of an Impact Certs platform. It was a small size of a retroactive grant, about 30, 000, scoped primarily to forecasting. And this was because Scott didn’t want to have a large round.
The first ACX grant round was about 1.5, 1. 8 million. And he didn’t want to do the second one without having tested out the platform a little bit. So we did this on a small round where their retroactive [00:16:00] funder was Scott himself just for area that he was plausibly a world expert in forecasting.
And we went off and did the impact search marketplace. We let people apply for grants on, or projects more or on the amount of fund website. That was set up as impact search. So other investors could come in and buy a fraction of the project, a percent of the equity in the project.
And in about six months time, when Scott decided how much those products were worth in terms of retroactive funding, the investors would get a small cut, the founders would get the rest. That was the rough setup of the ACX forecasting mini grants is what we called it. So we did that in about February of last year, or we started that in about February of last year.
Yeah. And then we realized there’s a while between doing that. And when the results of the retroactive funding come out so we’re okay we have this nice platform. What else can we do with it? And then we were approached by some people who were familiar with the. FTX future fund and really liked the concept of regranting to be Hey, we think the future fund regranting service was really good.
And I was I also agree with this. And then they were would you to run regranting again? We can find somebody who is willing to put up the money for it. If you all are willing to be the charity that. looks over the operations and runs the maintains the website and does all the financial operations for it.
So we thought a bit and we’re okay, that sounds good. Um, there was a donor who I would really love to be able to thank and name, but they have insisted on anonymity. So an anonymous donor who was interested in AI safety, they chose I think five or six experts in AI safety to then go ahead and distribute some funding to about a $300,000 each to list of people who are Leopold Aschenbrenner Evan Hubinger Adam Gleave Tristan Hume I think I’m missing Dan Hendrycks, I think those five.
Yeah. These are all people who are quite well known in [00:18:00] the AI safety field and have had some experience with leadership or grant making. They’re all relatively safe picks. And we were cool, this seems good to us. At the same time we had just received some funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund.
And I was cool beyond the well known AI safety re granters, I want to see what it would be to experiment a bit with giving smaller let’s say 50, 000 re granting budgets. To a bunch of people who I just feel are undervalued in the ecosystem. Maybe they haven’t had a grant making much before.
Maybe they can they might be able to spot uniquely good opportunities. So in addition to the five well known AI Safety re grantors Manifund ourselves, we picked out about eight or so small re granters to give budgets of 50k each and funded that out of the Survival and Flourishing Fund grant.
Those it’s a list of names that was available on our website, but we speculated in some cases. For example, on Qualy the Lightbulb who was, a Twitter personality. That was one case in which the speculation didn’t go over so well. They ended up not being that interested and, I think, bowing out for personal reasons.
Elizabeth: I do think invite Twitter meme accounts with cartoon icons does belong on things you’re allowed to do.
Austin: Yeah. I hesitate to bring that one up as an example because a while it is meme y, it also didn’t particularly pan out. But I think a little bit of risk tolerance is generally good.
We’re big fans of trying things as you may have guessed. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:22] Trying crazy things
Elizabeth: And I, so I feel No startup founder in existence is going to say, I’m against trying things, or I think you should only do things that are sure success. Your companies do seem to just do weirder things than other companies.
Austin: Is that true? Maybe it’s true. I don’t know.
Elizabeth: I, so just defining the reference class is hard. I feel I feel the musical theater thing has got to be objectively weird. I’m just so used to it from you guys at this point that I’m just no, that’s normal. Once you’re running a romance, but launching a romance [00:20:00] betting market on your I don’t know if that was inevitable or completely out of left field.
Austin: Yeah.
Elizabeth: I feel it becomes inevitable once you are open to a certain amount of alien transmissions.
Austin: Fair enough. Fair enough. I do think from the outside, these all are a little bit crazy. I think when we decided to do these things, we were a little bit. Self aware. We knew that these are not the normal thing a startup would do and try to run with it play it for laughs, I think one, one philosophy I really have when it comes to our work on Manifold and Manifund is that you shouldn’t be afraid to have fun. “work” quote unquote, often seems a really serious you have to do all the things correctly and rigorously it’s for real stakes, but I don’t know.
I find out that we get a lot of energy out of indulging in our personal wins almost in things that seem exciting and fun to ourselves. I think one way that one kind of normal way that a lot of other companies do this that this happens is with hackathons.
Where people are just given the task of okay the whole company is going to take the next 12 hours to not really do anything related to your normal day job, but just think of something creative, think of something fun to do.
Another example, that’s also pretty common with tech companies now is April Fool’s. I remember, I think in April Fool’s of Last year, maybe the year before two years ago I did a joke related to land value tax on leaderboards, where basically instead of letting the most accurate traders go on our leaderboards, we just sold off slots on a leaderboards to whoever would want to pay the highest amount of Land value tax.
And this thing
Elizabeth: What a hilarious joke to a very narrow subset of people.
Austin: Yes. That comes up again and again, we tailor our jokes to the 0. 00 1 percent of nerdery in prediction markets. But this actually also had concrete business outcomes in that. I think this is one other reason that Ian, our first employee cited as why they were excited to join Manifold because we did things this.
[00:22:00] So I think that has also Permeated into the culture of Manifold that we are unafraid to do weird random offbeat, ideas. It’s we want to have a lot of fun when we are working on that.
[00:22:14] Funding and tradeoffs
Elizabeth: Yeah, how do you balance that against at some point you need to produce results and there’s only so much money?
Austin: I don’t generally find money to be the bottleneck for what Manifold gets done. It’s something closer to energy, prioritization, ideas, people.
Elizabeth: Yeah, same question, but for staff time or whatever ends up being the limiting resource.
Austin: Yeah it’s actually a, I’m not sure that these things trade off again they might.
But one way in which they might not trade off is that working on projects this provide the energy, the morale boost, the kind of sense of Oh, this is a thing that we are very excited in. That helps also feel some of the more boring bits would say that this is also a place where it helps to have multiple founders with different personalities.
I think I’m probably the one who leans the most into doing relatively offbeat, fun things, creating new things. Whereas, for example, my co founder, Stephen is a lot more focused on cutting down, removing experiments that aren’t working. And you really need both in that company.
You need to have the space to try and experiment and launch new ideas and also the space to cut down your core product into something that is understandable, that is easy to use, that doesn’t have too many bells and whistles that are distracting for a user.
Elizabeth: So the advice I’ve written down in the last couple of minutes are have enough money that it’s never your bottleneck.
And a founding team should be a boring businessman and a manic pixie dream girl.
Austin: That’s I think those are somewhat useful, I guess for the money part. We raised a lot of our funding in an environment where money was less of a bottleneck. But I [00:24:00] still think that money tends to be the bottleneck less than you would expect.
If you have a story, if you have a thing that you are excited about, if you have a little bit of a track record you can go quite a long way with raising funding. This is a thing that YC also tells all of its startups, and I think for a good reason. It’s not the case that you really want to be worrying about fundraising.
You want to worry about making a thing people want. You want to be if you can show that, you are, have built a thing that lots of people are really excited for. And in our case, in the case of Manifold at least, one part of the excitement is the weird, offbeat, fun side things that we do, but also that gets incorporated into our main product.
I think a lot of people were very excited for Manifold because it had a very particularly good, user interface. And that’s something that comes out of Kind of a sense for joy and fun, attention to detail, really wanting these things to be good for our users.
So
Elizabeth: is some of the implicit advice here. Don’t expand the size of your team to match the money in the bank. That if it’s easy to raise funds as but if you technically, if you bloat to use all available funds, you will end up in exactly the same position.
Austin: So that is also common, startup advice.
And I’m of two minds about this. I don’t know that Manifold, for example, did a great job of not hiring a lot of people. And my co founder James would actually, I think, press the opposite point. Sometimes he thinks that we may be hired before we got to product market fit. And that has perhaps led to the effect where Manifold hasn’t continually grown in DAU, but maybe needs a few more product changes before we could get to a continual hockey stick trajectory.
I’m not sure that Manifold is the best example of that. I do think we hire less than for example, nonprofits in the EA space. There’s some structural reasons for that as well where nonprofits raise according to how many people they have on staff, you can really easily justify your budget if you say we have these 10 people, so we net need 10 full t FTEs worth of funding to be able sustain ourselves.
And Manifold has a little bit less of that, but I don’t think we were the most disciplined with regards to not hiring a bunch of people.
Elizabeth: Okay. [00:26:00] Interesting. Man, it’s just, this sounds this has to be some kind of privilege that’s. You’re just getting enough money that it doesn’t matter, and funding is easy enough that it doesn’t matter.
But I can’t actually prove that.
Austin: Yeah there are some things about us having an appealing narrative to both VCs. And EA folks on one hand VCs, because our product is a prediction markets, a market based product. And that has a lot of, a lot more intuitive appeal to people who are investors.
They understand markets. So I think they’re disproportionately Excited about a prediction market product compared to, I don’t know, some B2B software for plumbers or something that. On the other hand yeah, I mentioned, we happened to raise a bunch of funding when future fund was around and they had a money spigot and we were, we caught a small amount of it, I think not as much as many other orgs, but enough so that we were relatively not constrained by our finances for a while.
[00:26:59] Manifest
Elizabeth: Okay. Is there other advice you have or Things you would tell your past self. Did you know you’re allowed to do x?
Austin: Hmm.
The conference I think was actually quite successful. The two conferences that we ran for Manifest now and not a thing that was particularly intuitive.
Elizabeth: Yeah, i’m very curious because that seems the too expensive to do on just a whim but also just weird and wacky just the musical theater You
Austin: Yeah, so the conference first that was approximately a product of me excited for the challenge of it.
And thinking that it would be easier than it was. And I don’t know, a bunch of pieces fall into place. So I had a little bit of experience with what goes on behind the scenes with conferences. I had helped out with the future forum, for example. I’d been to a couple of EAGs and I had on one hand a sense that Oh, these EAGs, they are bringing together a lot of really cool people, but I don’t [00:28:00] think they’re that, well organized or something, or I feel they could stand to be a lot more fun.
And then on the other hand, I was walking through Lighthaven campus for I think an ACX Meetup or something. And then I was just thinking, this place is really great. I feel they’re probably so underutilized, it probably wouldn’t be that hard if we just borrowed it for a weekend and invited a bunch of Manifold users to come and hang out with us.
So that was the start of the Manifest conference. And I think originally we budgeted, Oh, maybe it’ll just cost a couple, 20, 000. We can afford that. And the first time we ran it, we ended up losing a bunch of money. I think we lost on the order of 30 or 40, 000 on the whole thing.
But we could also afford that. I feel I’m going sorry, in a lot of different directions. With the Manifest thing was there a particular point I was trying to address?
Elizabeth: How did what was the process of creating that and deciding it was worth it?
Austin: Yeah, the process of creating it was
Elizabeth: It seems one of the deciding it was worth it was you knew you could take the losses.
Austin: Yeah yeah I still had a rough sense of how much everything would cost and Manifold could absorb it. And I think Manifold’s main problem is that we want to get more users. We want to get more attention in the world. So on that level it justifies us spending our money, our attention on things that are, more crazy stunts.
So I also don’t know if any of the things I’ve been saying actually makes that much sense in other contexts. But for us, it does give us some license to be trying things that are flashy attention grabbing just to raise the salience of prediction markets. The conference, I think, had a little bit of this lean into a little bit of spiciness.
That was part of it. Another part of it was I was describing earlier, just Oh, I think hubris, I think I could do a better job organizing conference than EAG. So I’m going to try and prove it.
Elizabeth: And do you feel that’s paid off?
Austin: Yeah, I definitely think the first Manifest paid off a lot with in terms of direct business rewards to Manifold in the form of a article in the New York Times that was a [00:30:00] sudden and a huge increase in the prestige of Manifold and also just we saw on the DAU charts the day after that article came out, we got the highest number of signups that we’ve ever gotten up until that point.
Elizabeth: So this year’s press hasn’t been that good.
Austin: I think it depends on your perspective. I actually think it is arguably about as good as last year’s. This year’s press for those out of the loop we got a report in The Guardian about a bunch of controversial, shall we say, speakers that we decided to invite.
And while on the face of it, it might look bad press I think it’s actually bad press from a relatively bad publication and it was derided in Twitter and most of the places that I care about. So I’m pretty happy with the outcome of it, I would say. I wrote someplace on the Ye farm that I’m net happy that this article was published.
And some of that is because it just was a weak opponent in some sense. And we were very Strongly defended by our allies, but also other people on the internet.
Elizabeth: Did you end up getting any boost this year from Manifest? in general?
Austin: Hard to say, not one that showed up in our traffic numbers.
Not one from that, guardian article, for example. I think the benefits to Manifold this year for one, we actually turned a profit. the year before we made that we’re still tallying up the final finances, but something 70, 000. In total on running this event. So that’s nice.
The approximately covers the staff salaries for Saul and Rachel. It doesn’t quite cover the cost of opportunity just on the financial level, but we got a lot of additional positive externalities both for ourselves and for all the people who came. So I think I would mark it as a win.
Okay.
Elizabeth: Is there anything you wish you, you knew you could do when you started that you have to get, if you could send a note back in time to yourself,
a things you’re allowed to do when hosting a conference in particular.
Austin: Oh, for a conference in particular, it’s hard to say. I don’t know. I feel both conferences went quite well. above [00:32:00] expectations for myself, above expectations for many of our attendees. So nothing really comes to mind right now. I would have to think on it a lot more.
[00:32:11] What would Austin change?
Elizabeth: I’m interested for the same question in general, of everything you’ve learned.
If you could send a note back to yourself on things you were allowed to do, what would you want to include?
Austin: So the premise of this question makes me try to find something that I could have done for a little while, but just didn’t think to do. And I’m relatively happy with the pace of things I’ve done since I started Manifold. But it might be that I think before I started Manifold, actually there was. a period of time when I was just drifting around, working on relatively small, not very productive side projects with the hopes of turning something into a startup.
It wasn’t really until I found my co founders, James and Stephen, and we started doing this Manifold thing. That I feel my, I don’t know, luck, my momentum in life, just turned sharply upwards. And if I can send a note back to myself, it would be something go find the, a Grugett brothers, James and Steven, and go work on something together sooner.
Rather than I think before that I’ve been very attached to the concept of being a solo developer and especially bootstrapping my business. I cited Patrick McKenzie earlier, I think he’s been a net, huge positive influence in my life, but maybe one way in which things could have gone a little better was out of some of his writings and some other indie hackers literature, I got it into my head that bootstrapping was virtuous and taking venture capital was bad and misaligned and things that.
I feel I have a much more nuanced view on that now, but on net, VC funding EA funding was quite good for me and the things that I wanted to achieve. So that might be the other no, it’s actually quite okay to raise venture funding.
Elizabeth: I feel most people know about that.
Austin: Yeah. So I think that’s a note to me in particular, as opposed to many others. Yeah.
Elizabeth: I just, I I think [00:34:00] it’s interesting that even though that’s such a meme in general, And I think people should bootstrap or bootstrapping should be a more respectable option overall. And you can get individual pockets where people are too biased against venture funding.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of those things that shows that online advice is really hard. And Scott, has this famous post that maybe you should reverse all the advice that you hear. Yeah. And. In my case, it would have been somewhat useful to reverse the advice on bootstrapping specifically and instead look for things that had the potential to grow a lot and work with other people in that endeavor.
Elizabeth: Those were all the questions I have. Is there anything you want to add before we wrap up?
Austin: No. I think that was, many of the things that I’ve done that are a little bit weirder or controversial. Yeah, I think I want to just go back to I really think that your work should be fun that you should orient towards things that give you energy that you should run, not the company that you think needs to be run, but the company that you yourself, really want to run.
Elizabeth: Which I feel is another reverse all advice thing where there’s definitely a lot to recommend that and also there are people who follow They’re entertainment business off a cliff and should have been told to grind more
Austin: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and even for us, I’m not sure that we’re on the right side of it possibly if we had been so more diligent and focused and cut out some of the more extravagant shenanigans.
We might have a better business right now, but that’s okay. I’m pretty happy with the one we have.
Elizabeth: I do feel the thing that energy, it has to be sustainable energy wise. And if it’s not it doesn’t matter how good a financial idea something is.
Okay. So shall we end here?
Austin: Yeah, let’s do that. I will end the recording.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much for talking to me today.
Podcast: Elizabeth & Austin on “What Manifold was allowed to do”
Link post
Elizabeth Van Nostrand and Austin Chen discuss unconventional approaches to running startups, nonprofits, and events. We go over:
How publicly sharing Manifold’s salaries and company information helped with recruitment and user engagement
The origin and evolution of Manifund, an independent charity
Balancing creative, “weird” projects with core business goals
Organizing great conferences as a marketing strategy
Finding the right co-founders and bootstrapping vs VC funding
You can also listen to the episode here: https://share.descript.com/view/2jbEVe05hPt
Links
Milan Cvitkovic on Things you’re allowed to do
Patrick Mackenzie on Salary negotiation
Scott Alexander on Should you reverse any advice you hear?
Manifold—prediction markets
Manifund—grants platform
Manifest—conference
Levels.fyi
ACX Grants
Transcript
Generated via Descript and lightly edited.
Austin: [00:00:00] Cool. I think we’re live.
Elizabeth: Okay, great.
Context. I am compiling a list of things startups are allowed to do. , which is going for the things that are options people don’t know about, basically. And you were one of the first people I asked because you had done a whole bunch of things that Anyone could have done and no one was stopping anyone from doing, but I hadn’t seen other people think about. And previously you gave me a list of these and I had a bunch of followup questions. So we decided to talk in person synchronously.
[00:00:33] Publicly sharing salaries
Elizabeth: Okay. So the first, one of the things you gave me was you publicly share salaries and I’ve worked for a company that internally shared all salaries and all notes, which I thought was mostly useful, but was imposing costs just doing it within the company.
How does that work when it’s completely public?
Austin: Yeah. And I’m curious for background, how big was the company that you were at? Which shared notes sorry, salaries publicly.
Elizabeth: It was under 20 people when I joined and was over 50 when I left.
Austin: I see. Interesting.
Elizabeth: And you would definitely seeing the systems we use change as the company got bigger.
Austin: Yeah, I myself would be quite interested in seeing how well this salary transparency thing scales. So we started it when we were, very small. I think we’ve had it since we were, three or four people at Manifold when just the co founders plus maybe one or two early employees.
And we just have stuck with it. I think that the salary thing is a is a small instance of a broader decision which I think I had—I pushed for very early on with Manifold, which is to make all of our information as public as possible.
It’s not just the salaries and the meeting notes. We also have our source code is open source. Our we have most of our conversations. In public on Manifold or on discord. We still have some privately in our own, private discord [00:02:00] channels or in person in the office. But once upon a time, we had almost all of our, a discussions open on discord.
So the salary thing was in some sense, not trying to shake the boat rock the boat or something that, but rather just the extension of a strong belief that I held, which is that transparency is quite good for our company. And the generator of that was watching other kinds of bootstrap companies, especially do the quote unquote “work in public” approach towards building their startup or building their bootstrap company.
Working public is this mostly online movement where people share their revenue numbers, their work in progress, their products that they’ve been working on in a very transparent, open way. I myself have learned a lot from other such companies. And I also noticed that it made me a lot more positively predisposed to those companies as I watch the internal, the guts of how their company ran.
So then when I was starting on Manifold, I noticed that the more that we talked openly to our own users and to the public about all the small decisions behind how we decided to run Manifold, the more they engage with us. And as a B2C company that is looking for attention and mind share and trying to get people excited about what we’re excited about prediction markets.
I just found it very instrumentally useful for Manifold, the company’s, goals of getting people excited about prediction markets to just talk a lot more just to be sharing everything that we could about how we operated from how we decided on features and our planning process to the finances behind raising funding and the salaries as well.
So, Yeah, I—think that’s go for it.
Elizabeth: This got more users paying attention. I’m guessing it got you more feedback. You’ve also said previously, this ended up being good for recruiting and funding because it was just very easy for people to learn more about you.
Austin: Yes, [00:04:00] I think that was the case.
I think especially our first hire, for example, Ian, showed up on our Discord and spent a bunch of time chatting with us over Discord. And I believe he was impressed with Just the way that we talked about things and just engage with the community. The very tight knit feeling between the core development team at Manifold and its users.
I think you can start off as a Manifold user and then decided to join our team as a result of that. I think that was probably one instance of this kind of being open, being transparent working out really well to go back to the salary bits. I think it’s not just that In general, I think transparency is good.
I think transparency on finances is also very good. Some of this I think comes from me having worked in places tech Google, where there can be actually very large differences in salaries as a result of negotiating ability. Patrick McKenzie has this very A famous very good blog post about how you should negotiate your salary if you’re working in tech because by default, many people don’t, but by default it’s a thing that you should consider very heavily because there is a lot of money on the table available for you.
And I personally benefited a lot from that. I also benefited a lot from sites levels.fyi. Which publish basically tech employees go on levels.fyi and self publish their own salaries based on what company they work for, what level they work at basically how much seniority they have.
It’s a really awesome database, I think that shows off, what is possible in the world. And I think it encourages people to switch companies, join companies that are offering better rates. In a way that maybe without the existence of this kind of transparency but let’s do a less good allocation of people to companies, people by default recruiters have a lot of this kind of insider information about how much different companies are paying, but the general public employees do not.
So I thought the way that levels that I thought I made this even the playing field made this information more available was very noble—a public good. And I guess I wanted to encourage the same kind of things when we were running our own
Elizabeth: So [00:06:00] when I worked at there were two companies that did that sharing internal salaries or at least level information Yeah one of the reasons I really liked it as an employee was I could say Oh, I think I’m between Alice and Bob in usefulness.
I should be between paid between Alice and Bob. Let me talk to my boss about that, which is exactly the thing a lot of companies are afraid of. Has that happened to you guys?
Austin: I don’t think it has. Nobody has gone to us and said this other person is making this much. And as a result, I should be paid this much.
Our compensation philosophy is already that we should try to pay pretty generously both with cash and with equity. And that comes out of more broader philosophy that’s very maybe 2020s tech of just your people are the most important asset of your company.
And you should compete a lot to make sure they are compensated well and very happy with the remuneration they’re getting for working with you. That is the thing that I have also pushed for at Manifold. And I think I haven’t heard anyone. I think all of our employees have been pretty happy with their salaries.
They never come back and said “Oh, I would to get paid more”. With a possibly one exception, which is a little bit less central. Our executive assistant, who is not a tech employee, but rather somebody who does a lot more of the back office, paperwork and things that in some instances she has asked for a raise and there’s I got a complicated discussion there.
But the core tech employees have seen the amount that they’ve been getting paid, seen how much their coworkers are getting paid and as far as I can tell have been pretty happy with it. I haven’t actually had too much of an explicit discussion with them, but I always link to the finances as they can see Oh yes, this is how much people are getting.
They also understand that people who joined earlier got in when the valuation of Manifold was a little bit lower and thus got somewhat more generous equity packages. Yeah, but those are all things that we’re happy to explain to our current employees.
Elizabeth: Have there been any downsides of this level of openness so far?
Austin: With regards to salaries specifically Or in general? Yeah I don’t think [00:08:00] so for the salaries. In general
[00:08:02] Open meeting notes
Elizabeth: So one thing, I worry about is even when it was just within a company, once your notes are public, the notes have to have to be under it was a mental load to figure out what is going to happen when other people read this and this was at a fairly small, high trust company, but the minute. You go beyond the really core team. I think it’s natural to worry about that. And that ends up being a big mental load.
Austin: Yeah. I think there’s a couple of responses. One is that in the first place, not that many people care about your company. I think the people working in the company care a lot more than the people outside of it.
So just, there aren’t actually that many people looking at our notes, even though they are public. I think it’s a handful of our most passionate users, maybe five of them might look at our daily stand up notes. And those are also the same users who have the kind of the most context.
The notes are less, a lot less likely to be taken out of context or be repeated, widely on the internet in an adversarial way. I think that part is helpful to keep in mind, even though it is open, we are not broadcasting these notes, we’re just making it available for people to use.
Another thing is that it does happen that you can start small. And I think we, we did this for a while and we just got comfortable with it. It’s your concern or your company’s concern was that other people would be, it would change the way that your company orients to your own meeting notes. Is that right?
Elizabeth: Yeah so I personally would worry that especially if I’m having a conflict with a co worker what gets written up and read by other people who are paying attention because there are co workers feels really high stakes.
And even if there isn’t an open conflict, the minute the system isn’t completely high trust in every circumstance, what you write down feels really important. [00:10:00] And you have to consider how other people are going to read it.
Austin: Yeah. I think
Elizabeth: The bigger the company gets, the more concerned that is.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is reasonable. And for what it’s worth I think our more sensitive discussions still mostly happen. in person or on private one on one docs. So I think it’s very rare that even in the course of a company, a meeting, a daily standup, for example people would have an outright conflict between two people.
There might be a conflict in ideas where some are rationalists enough to try it and have people have strong disagreements, but not disagree against each other. Have the discriminancy be about ideas, not people. Beyond that I think we’re also just relatively agreeable people.
So yeah, and you mentioned the first find, major kind of interpersonal conflicts or disagreements get resolved not in the course of a daily stand up that where the notes are being broadcast or publicly shared.
[00:10:54] History of Manifund
Elizabeth: How many people are you now? Or how many people are, is Manifold and Manifund?
Separately.
Austin: Manifold is about six people, and Manifund is about three people so all of this is in the context of a relatively small team. And I think that’s probably useful context as well. I think this could probably scale up larger, but that’s very unproven.
I don’t have a strong sense. of if this kind of openness works well once you get to 20 or 50 or a million or something that employees.
Elizabeth: Okay. Can you tell me more about Manifund? how did that end up spinning out?
Austin: Yeah
Elizabeth: I would put, start a charity built on my platform is a very interesting thing you’re allowed to do.
So how did you think of that? How did you figure out you were allowed to do it?
Austin: Yeah. The charity started to solve a pretty concrete pain point, which is that we had received a grant from the FTX future fund in about 500, 000 for the purpose of doing prediction markets for charities.
And this was so that people who are betting on Manifold and betting with mana of play [00:12:00] currency could cash out that mana as a donation to the charity of their choice. So just operationally to receive that grant future fund really wanted this grant to be received by a 501c3. And there are basically two ways of doing that.
One is you can go and find another 501c3 to be your, what’s called a fiscal sponsor. Somebody who will handle this money on your behalf, but they have to make sure that your work is properly charitable. And they often take a fee somewhere in between five to 50 percent of the grant in exchange for the service.
So we were okay, that’s one path. It’s usually a little bit faster, but it comes with more oversights. You have to get somebody to agree that your work is good. And even at that time that was very early on in Manifolds life, maybe four to six months around when since when Manifold had been started, I was already thinking about we might want to do crazier things down the line beyond just the prediction markets cash out to charity, which is already a little bit out there.
Nobody’s done this before. We might want to do impact certificates or other kinds of weird charity mechanisms. And I don’t know if I want to be getting permission from an existing charity and have their risk tolerance. So we went with the other path, which in our case was to a file to establish a separate 5 charity.
We called it Manifold for charity because at the time the main purpose of it was just to be running the charity prediction market program. And we got that incorporated relatively quickly. That was the formation of a separate 501c3. And for a while all that the Manifund charity did was process charity payouts.
Then about six months later, Scott Alexander came to us and was Hey I really want to do my next ACX grants round on Impact Certificates. I know you (you being Austin primarily) has had a little bit of excitement for Impact Certificates. Would you to build a platform for us?
And I was sure. That sounds good. This isn’t that core to the prediction market platform, so we can’t really justify paying for it or bringing on additional engineering help from the rest of the Manifold team.
What I can do is: my then girlfriend, now wife, Rachel Weinberg is an up and coming, I think, good software engineer. I can maybe pull her to help me with on this, make sure to employ her under the Manifund, the [00:14:00] 501c3 instead of Manifold. So that was when Manifund started to have independent operations from Manifold markets. And yeah
Elizabeth: I’m tracking causality there. It seems some of it was You were known to have related products and you personally were known as being interested in impact certificates.
And that’s why Scott thought to approach you.
Austin: Yeah. I think Scott was probably impressed with our ability to build Manifold, just getting a successful marketplace website off the ground is actually not a small feat. And I think there were another team of people who were also interested in building this for Scott.
But he chose us in some sense to build this impact market platform. I’m making probably it sounded a little bit more dramatic than it was actually was at the time. But yeah
Elizabeth: I guess what I’m hearing is you were known to be competent and interested in this.
Austin: Yeah, I hesitate to call anybody else less competent.
But
Elizabeth: I’m not saying they weren’t competent. It’s that you were known competent and that’s really valuable.
Austin: I think that was probably true. Yes.
Elizabeth: I think this is a good reason to get a reputation for finishing things is because it builds trust that other people have in you.
Austin: Yeah, I do agree. I think that possibly this is a thing that people in the rationality or EA sphere have a little bit less of the track record of delivering and being able to parley that into larger outcomes.
Elizabeth: Okay. So you get this invitation from Scott to work on this thing. What happens then?
Austin: So then we run the first a test run of an Impact Certs platform. It was a small size of a retroactive grant, about 30, 000, scoped primarily to forecasting. And this was because Scott didn’t want to have a large round.
The first ACX grant round was about 1.5, 1. 8 million. And he didn’t want to do the second one without having tested out the platform a little bit. So we did this on a small round where their retroactive [00:16:00] funder was Scott himself just for area that he was plausibly a world expert in forecasting.
And we went off and did the impact search marketplace. We let people apply for grants on, or projects more or on the amount of fund website. That was set up as impact search. So other investors could come in and buy a fraction of the project, a percent of the equity in the project.
And in about six months time, when Scott decided how much those products were worth in terms of retroactive funding, the investors would get a small cut, the founders would get the rest. That was the rough setup of the ACX forecasting mini grants is what we called it. So we did that in about February of last year, or we started that in about February of last year.
Yeah. And then we realized there’s a while between doing that. And when the results of the retroactive funding come out so we’re okay we have this nice platform. What else can we do with it? And then we were approached by some people who were familiar with the. FTX future fund and really liked the concept of regranting to be Hey, we think the future fund regranting service was really good.
And I was I also agree with this. And then they were would you to run regranting again? We can find somebody who is willing to put up the money for it. If you all are willing to be the charity that. looks over the operations and runs the maintains the website and does all the financial operations for it.
So we thought a bit and we’re okay, that sounds good. Um, there was a donor who I would really love to be able to thank and name, but they have insisted on anonymity. So an anonymous donor who was interested in AI safety, they chose I think five or six experts in AI safety to then go ahead and distribute some funding to about a $300,000 each to list of people who are Leopold Aschenbrenner Evan Hubinger Adam Gleave Tristan Hume I think I’m missing Dan Hendrycks, I think those five.
Yeah. These are all people who are quite well known in [00:18:00] the AI safety field and have had some experience with leadership or grant making. They’re all relatively safe picks. And we were cool, this seems good to us. At the same time we had just received some funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund.
And I was cool beyond the well known AI safety re granters, I want to see what it would be to experiment a bit with giving smaller let’s say 50, 000 re granting budgets. To a bunch of people who I just feel are undervalued in the ecosystem. Maybe they haven’t had a grant making much before.
Maybe they can they might be able to spot uniquely good opportunities. So in addition to the five well known AI Safety re grantors Manifund ourselves, we picked out about eight or so small re granters to give budgets of 50k each and funded that out of the Survival and Flourishing Fund grant.
Those it’s a list of names that was available on our website, but we speculated in some cases. For example, on Qualy the Lightbulb who was, a Twitter personality. That was one case in which the speculation didn’t go over so well. They ended up not being that interested and, I think, bowing out for personal reasons.
Elizabeth: I do think invite Twitter meme accounts with cartoon icons does belong on things you’re allowed to do.
Austin: Yeah. I hesitate to bring that one up as an example because a while it is meme y, it also didn’t particularly pan out. But I think a little bit of risk tolerance is generally good.
We’re big fans of trying things as you may have guessed. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:22] Trying crazy things
Elizabeth: And I, so I feel No startup founder in existence is going to say, I’m against trying things, or I think you should only do things that are sure success. Your companies do seem to just do weirder things than other companies.
Austin: Is that true? Maybe it’s true. I don’t know.
Elizabeth: I, so just defining the reference class is hard. I feel I feel the musical theater thing has got to be objectively weird. I’m just so used to it from you guys at this point that I’m just no, that’s normal. Once you’re running a romance, but launching a romance [00:20:00] betting market on your I don’t know if that was inevitable or completely out of left field.
Austin: Yeah.
Elizabeth: I feel it becomes inevitable once you are open to a certain amount of alien transmissions.
Austin: Fair enough. Fair enough. I do think from the outside, these all are a little bit crazy. I think when we decided to do these things, we were a little bit. Self aware. We knew that these are not the normal thing a startup would do and try to run with it play it for laughs, I think one, one philosophy I really have when it comes to our work on Manifold and Manifund is that you shouldn’t be afraid to have fun. “work” quote unquote, often seems a really serious you have to do all the things correctly and rigorously it’s for real stakes, but I don’t know.
I find out that we get a lot of energy out of indulging in our personal wins almost in things that seem exciting and fun to ourselves. I think one way that one kind of normal way that a lot of other companies do this that this happens is with hackathons.
Where people are just given the task of okay the whole company is going to take the next 12 hours to not really do anything related to your normal day job, but just think of something creative, think of something fun to do.
Another example, that’s also pretty common with tech companies now is April Fool’s. I remember, I think in April Fool’s of Last year, maybe the year before two years ago I did a joke related to land value tax on leaderboards, where basically instead of letting the most accurate traders go on our leaderboards, we just sold off slots on a leaderboards to whoever would want to pay the highest amount of Land value tax.
And this thing
Elizabeth: What a hilarious joke to a very narrow subset of people.
Austin: Yes. That comes up again and again, we tailor our jokes to the 0. 00 1 percent of nerdery in prediction markets. But this actually also had concrete business outcomes in that. I think this is one other reason that Ian, our first employee cited as why they were excited to join Manifold because we did things this.
[00:22:00] So I think that has also Permeated into the culture of Manifold that we are unafraid to do weird random offbeat, ideas. It’s we want to have a lot of fun when we are working on that.
[00:22:14] Funding and tradeoffs
Elizabeth: Yeah, how do you balance that against at some point you need to produce results and there’s only so much money?
Austin: I don’t generally find money to be the bottleneck for what Manifold gets done. It’s something closer to energy, prioritization, ideas, people.
Elizabeth: Yeah, same question, but for staff time or whatever ends up being the limiting resource.
Austin: Yeah it’s actually a, I’m not sure that these things trade off again they might.
But one way in which they might not trade off is that working on projects this provide the energy, the morale boost, the kind of sense of Oh, this is a thing that we are very excited in. That helps also feel some of the more boring bits would say that this is also a place where it helps to have multiple founders with different personalities.
I think I’m probably the one who leans the most into doing relatively offbeat, fun things, creating new things. Whereas, for example, my co founder, Stephen is a lot more focused on cutting down, removing experiments that aren’t working. And you really need both in that company.
You need to have the space to try and experiment and launch new ideas and also the space to cut down your core product into something that is understandable, that is easy to use, that doesn’t have too many bells and whistles that are distracting for a user.
Elizabeth: So the advice I’ve written down in the last couple of minutes are have enough money that it’s never your bottleneck.
And a founding team should be a boring businessman and a manic pixie dream girl.
Austin: That’s I think those are somewhat useful, I guess for the money part. We raised a lot of our funding in an environment where money was less of a bottleneck. But I [00:24:00] still think that money tends to be the bottleneck less than you would expect.
If you have a story, if you have a thing that you are excited about, if you have a little bit of a track record you can go quite a long way with raising funding. This is a thing that YC also tells all of its startups, and I think for a good reason. It’s not the case that you really want to be worrying about fundraising.
You want to worry about making a thing people want. You want to be if you can show that, you are, have built a thing that lots of people are really excited for. And in our case, in the case of Manifold at least, one part of the excitement is the weird, offbeat, fun side things that we do, but also that gets incorporated into our main product.
I think a lot of people were very excited for Manifold because it had a very particularly good, user interface. And that’s something that comes out of Kind of a sense for joy and fun, attention to detail, really wanting these things to be good for our users.
So
Elizabeth: is some of the implicit advice here. Don’t expand the size of your team to match the money in the bank. That if it’s easy to raise funds as but if you technically, if you bloat to use all available funds, you will end up in exactly the same position.
Austin: So that is also common, startup advice.
And I’m of two minds about this. I don’t know that Manifold, for example, did a great job of not hiring a lot of people. And my co founder James would actually, I think, press the opposite point. Sometimes he thinks that we may be hired before we got to product market fit. And that has perhaps led to the effect where Manifold hasn’t continually grown in DAU, but maybe needs a few more product changes before we could get to a continual hockey stick trajectory.
I’m not sure that Manifold is the best example of that. I do think we hire less than for example, nonprofits in the EA space. There’s some structural reasons for that as well where nonprofits raise according to how many people they have on staff, you can really easily justify your budget if you say we have these 10 people, so we net need 10 full t FTEs worth of funding to be able sustain ourselves.
And Manifold has a little bit less of that, but I don’t think we were the most disciplined with regards to not hiring a bunch of people.
Elizabeth: Okay. [00:26:00] Interesting. Man, it’s just, this sounds this has to be some kind of privilege that’s. You’re just getting enough money that it doesn’t matter, and funding is easy enough that it doesn’t matter.
But I can’t actually prove that.
Austin: Yeah there are some things about us having an appealing narrative to both VCs. And EA folks on one hand VCs, because our product is a prediction markets, a market based product. And that has a lot of, a lot more intuitive appeal to people who are investors.
They understand markets. So I think they’re disproportionately Excited about a prediction market product compared to, I don’t know, some B2B software for plumbers or something that. On the other hand yeah, I mentioned, we happened to raise a bunch of funding when future fund was around and they had a money spigot and we were, we caught a small amount of it, I think not as much as many other orgs, but enough so that we were relatively not constrained by our finances for a while.
[00:26:59] Manifest
Elizabeth: Okay. Is there other advice you have or Things you would tell your past self. Did you know you’re allowed to do x?
Austin: Hmm.
The conference I think was actually quite successful. The two conferences that we ran for Manifest now and not a thing that was particularly intuitive.
Elizabeth: Yeah, i’m very curious because that seems the too expensive to do on just a whim but also just weird and wacky just the musical theater You
Austin: Yeah, so the conference first that was approximately a product of me excited for the challenge of it.
And thinking that it would be easier than it was. And I don’t know, a bunch of pieces fall into place. So I had a little bit of experience with what goes on behind the scenes with conferences. I had helped out with the future forum, for example. I’d been to a couple of EAGs and I had on one hand a sense that Oh, these EAGs, they are bringing together a lot of really cool people, but I don’t [00:28:00] think they’re that, well organized or something, or I feel they could stand to be a lot more fun.
And then on the other hand, I was walking through Lighthaven campus for I think an ACX Meetup or something. And then I was just thinking, this place is really great. I feel they’re probably so underutilized, it probably wouldn’t be that hard if we just borrowed it for a weekend and invited a bunch of Manifold users to come and hang out with us.
So that was the start of the Manifest conference. And I think originally we budgeted, Oh, maybe it’ll just cost a couple, 20, 000. We can afford that. And the first time we ran it, we ended up losing a bunch of money. I think we lost on the order of 30 or 40, 000 on the whole thing.
But we could also afford that. I feel I’m going sorry, in a lot of different directions. With the Manifest thing was there a particular point I was trying to address?
Elizabeth: How did what was the process of creating that and deciding it was worth it?
Austin: Yeah, the process of creating it was
Elizabeth: It seems one of the deciding it was worth it was you knew you could take the losses.
Austin: Yeah yeah I still had a rough sense of how much everything would cost and Manifold could absorb it. And I think Manifold’s main problem is that we want to get more users. We want to get more attention in the world. So on that level it justifies us spending our money, our attention on things that are, more crazy stunts.
So I also don’t know if any of the things I’ve been saying actually makes that much sense in other contexts. But for us, it does give us some license to be trying things that are flashy attention grabbing just to raise the salience of prediction markets. The conference, I think, had a little bit of this lean into a little bit of spiciness.
That was part of it. Another part of it was I was describing earlier, just Oh, I think hubris, I think I could do a better job organizing conference than EAG. So I’m going to try and prove it.
Elizabeth: And do you feel that’s paid off?
Austin: Yeah, I definitely think the first Manifest paid off a lot with in terms of direct business rewards to Manifold in the form of a article in the New York Times that was a [00:30:00] sudden and a huge increase in the prestige of Manifold and also just we saw on the DAU charts the day after that article came out, we got the highest number of signups that we’ve ever gotten up until that point.
Elizabeth: So this year’s press hasn’t been that good.
Austin: I think it depends on your perspective. I actually think it is arguably about as good as last year’s. This year’s press for those out of the loop we got a report in The Guardian about a bunch of controversial, shall we say, speakers that we decided to invite.
And while on the face of it, it might look bad press I think it’s actually bad press from a relatively bad publication and it was derided in Twitter and most of the places that I care about. So I’m pretty happy with the outcome of it, I would say. I wrote someplace on the Ye farm that I’m net happy that this article was published.
And some of that is because it just was a weak opponent in some sense. And we were very Strongly defended by our allies, but also other people on the internet.
Elizabeth: Did you end up getting any boost this year from Manifest? in general?
Austin: Hard to say, not one that showed up in our traffic numbers.
Not one from that, guardian article, for example. I think the benefits to Manifold this year for one, we actually turned a profit. the year before we made that we’re still tallying up the final finances, but something 70, 000. In total on running this event. So that’s nice.
The approximately covers the staff salaries for Saul and Rachel. It doesn’t quite cover the cost of opportunity just on the financial level, but we got a lot of additional positive externalities both for ourselves and for all the people who came. So I think I would mark it as a win.
Okay.
Elizabeth: Is there anything you wish you, you knew you could do when you started that you have to get, if you could send a note back in time to yourself,
a things you’re allowed to do when hosting a conference in particular.
Austin: Oh, for a conference in particular, it’s hard to say. I don’t know. I feel both conferences went quite well. above [00:32:00] expectations for myself, above expectations for many of our attendees. So nothing really comes to mind right now. I would have to think on it a lot more.
[00:32:11] What would Austin change?
Elizabeth: I’m interested for the same question in general, of everything you’ve learned.
If you could send a note back to yourself on things you were allowed to do, what would you want to include?
Austin: So the premise of this question makes me try to find something that I could have done for a little while, but just didn’t think to do. And I’m relatively happy with the pace of things I’ve done since I started Manifold. But it might be that I think before I started Manifold, actually there was. a period of time when I was just drifting around, working on relatively small, not very productive side projects with the hopes of turning something into a startup.
It wasn’t really until I found my co founders, James and Stephen, and we started doing this Manifold thing. That I feel my, I don’t know, luck, my momentum in life, just turned sharply upwards. And if I can send a note back to myself, it would be something go find the, a Grugett brothers, James and Steven, and go work on something together sooner.
Rather than I think before that I’ve been very attached to the concept of being a solo developer and especially bootstrapping my business. I cited Patrick McKenzie earlier, I think he’s been a net, huge positive influence in my life, but maybe one way in which things could have gone a little better was out of some of his writings and some other indie hackers literature, I got it into my head that bootstrapping was virtuous and taking venture capital was bad and misaligned and things that.
I feel I have a much more nuanced view on that now, but on net, VC funding EA funding was quite good for me and the things that I wanted to achieve. So that might be the other no, it’s actually quite okay to raise venture funding.
Elizabeth: I feel most people know about that.
Austin: Yeah. So I think that’s a note to me in particular, as opposed to many others. Yeah.
Elizabeth: I just, I I think [00:34:00] it’s interesting that even though that’s such a meme in general, And I think people should bootstrap or bootstrapping should be a more respectable option overall. And you can get individual pockets where people are too biased against venture funding.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of those things that shows that online advice is really hard. And Scott, has this famous post that maybe you should reverse all the advice that you hear. Yeah. And. In my case, it would have been somewhat useful to reverse the advice on bootstrapping specifically and instead look for things that had the potential to grow a lot and work with other people in that endeavor.
Elizabeth: Those were all the questions I have. Is there anything you want to add before we wrap up?
Austin: No. I think that was, many of the things that I’ve done that are a little bit weirder or controversial. Yeah, I think I want to just go back to I really think that your work should be fun that you should orient towards things that give you energy that you should run, not the company that you think needs to be run, but the company that you yourself, really want to run.
Elizabeth: Which I feel is another reverse all advice thing where there’s definitely a lot to recommend that and also there are people who follow They’re entertainment business off a cliff and should have been told to grind more
Austin: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and even for us, I’m not sure that we’re on the right side of it possibly if we had been so more diligent and focused and cut out some of the more extravagant shenanigans.
We might have a better business right now, but that’s okay. I’m pretty happy with the one we have.
Elizabeth: I do feel the thing that energy, it has to be sustainable energy wise. And if it’s not it doesn’t matter how good a financial idea something is.
Okay. So shall we end here?
Austin: Yeah, let’s do that. I will end the recording.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much for talking to me today.
Austin: Thanks for talking a little bit.