[status: incomplete, but technically published for a blog-a-thon]
My first interaction with the FTX Future Fund was in the March of 2022. Linchuan Zhang, who’d reviewed Manifold’s previous application to the (unrelated) Long-Term Future Fund, revealed that he was an Future Fund regrantor, and offered to lead our seed round: investing $250k at 10M valuation cap, and a further $750k, contingent on us raising the same amount externally. (At the time, I didn’t appreciate the wisdom in this, but this structure challenged us to build up the muscle of being able to pitch angels and VCs.) At the time, it was the coolest thing in the world to have gotten an email from the legendary SBF himself — one single word, “done!” upon signing our SAFE.
My next interaction with the Future Fund was also in March, when we applied for funding to start up Manifold’s prediction markets for charity. We’d gotten users excited to trade in mana, our play currency, but we wanted something real-er to back it up. Real money or crypto seemed like a huge legal hassle — and inspired by a blog post about using charity dollars to settle bets instead, I decided we should give this a try, and applied for a grant. (Fun fact: posting this grant application led Ian Phillips, Manifold’s founding engineer and now 4th cofounder, to reach out. It pays to post in public!) The Future Fund seemed embarrassed by the extra time they requested to evaluate our application; 8 weeks instead of the usual 2. Now, after having been on both sides of various grant processes, that seems like an entirely reasonable timeline. This $500k grant also led us to spin up a 501c3 offshoot to receive the funds, which eventually became Manifund.
[TODO: meeting the FF team and helping set up their airtable]
[TODO: FTX fallout]
In short: they moved fast, they worked in public, and they build a small team of insanely great folks.
[TODO]
None of them work on funding or grantmaking.