This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations.
Thank you Austin. I would certainly want to read a blog of yours after a month of daily writing :)
Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
I have so far been thinking of this as for 30-50 people. That’s what I’m aiming for.
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
Requiring people to pay for things is minor adverse selection on wealth. It is also has a much more direct feedback loop of the client being the person who uses the service, in contrast with being paid to use the service, and that feels broadly healthy to me.
(If there were a good analogue for equity in the blogging world I would definitely take that option; so far I have been involved in one serious trade for impact equity and I have not felt very keen to try it again.)
I imagine you’ve thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there’s some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 “full rides” at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
Yes, I’d love to explore sponsorships! We have just now added a question to the application for potential residents to let us know if they’re happy for us to share their applications with potential sponsors, and I’d love to share applications with you guys at Manifund as they start to come in (we’ve already got one that I think could be a good fit for your interests). If anyone else reading this is interested in helping cover the costs of a potential next great internet writer like the advisors, please just drop me a line at inkhaven@lightconeinfrastructure.com (or any channel that’s easy for you) and I’ll get back to you about options.
(As to why not: the bottleneck so far has been time. Since I’ve been working on this I’ve prioritized launching so that people can plan for their whole November to be free, which is just 3 months away, and so haven’t yet reached out to potential sponsors, but I’d like to do this after we’ve made sure to get the word out that the event even exists.)
Thank you Austin. I would certainly want to read a blog of yours after a month of daily writing :)
I have so far been thinking of this as for 30-50 people. That’s what I’m aiming for.
Requiring people to pay for things is minor adverse selection on wealth. It is also has a much more direct feedback loop of the client being the person who uses the service, in contrast with being paid to use the service, and that feels broadly healthy to me.
(If there were a good analogue for equity in the blogging world I would definitely take that option; so far I have been involved in one serious trade for impact equity and I have not felt very keen to try it again.)
Yes, I’d love to explore sponsorships! We have just now added a question to the application for potential residents to let us know if they’re happy for us to share their applications with potential sponsors, and I’d love to share applications with you guys at Manifund as they start to come in (we’ve already got one that I think could be a good fit for your interests). If anyone else reading this is interested in helping cover the costs of a potential next great internet writer like the advisors, please just drop me a line at inkhaven@lightconeinfrastructure.com (or any channel that’s easy for you) and I’ll get back to you about options.
(As to why not: the bottleneck so far has been time. Since I’ve been working on this I’ve prioritized launching so that people can plan for their whole November to be free, which is just 3 months away, and so haven’t yet reached out to potential sponsors, but I’d like to do this after we’ve made sure to get the word out that the event even exists.)