The funding process works on two simple principles:

1. You fund what you value the most

2. When several people want to fund the same thing, they split its cost in proportion to how much money they are giving away

There are two main classes of participants in the Lightcone Commons: funders and evaluators.

All funders and evaluators enter a funding order, i.e. the ideal order in which they would distribute money in the round. For instance:

“Project Alpha is most effective, so I want to fund that until marginal money given to it is as good as funding project Beta, at which point I want to fund them both until they are as good as project Gamma, etc. until eventually I run out of money”

Evaluators do so for projects, and funders have the extra option of doing the same for evaluators. For instance:

“Alice seems to have the best judgment, so I want to fund her until her recommendations are only as good as evaluator Bob’s recommendations, at which point I want to fund them both until their recommendations are only as good as Carol’s, etc.”

When two funders want to fund the same evaluator, they split the bill in proportion to their total budgets. When two funders want to fund the same organization, they too split the bill in proportion to their total budgets. If one funder wants to fund a project for up to $100k, and the other one wants to fund it for up to $150k, then they split the bill on the first $100k, and the second funder, who is more excited about the project and wants to fund it more, covers the remaining $50k.

A virtue of this system is that it tells us immediately how to reallocate funds if anyone’s funding order changes, or a funder’s total budget changes, while following a simple rule for ensuring that costs get split fairly between participating funders.

If you want to build a more intuitive understanding, you can play around with the widget at the top of this page.

Evaluators receive 2% of any funding directed through them, and we additionally charge a 3% platform fee (for a total of 5% on top of the grant amounts). We sometimes lower platform and evaluator fees for funders who distribute large amounts of money through the platform.

You decide how much time and effort you put in; you’re not committing to any time investment by signing up as a funder.

If you bring your own evaluator to a grant round, or already know what you want to fund, then you could complete the process in as little as 2-3 hours, including getting yourself familiarized with the process and the UI, plus your onboarding call.

No. We do not require applicants to have 501(c)(3) status, and coordinate grants and investments to for-profits, individuals, educational institutions, 501(c)(4) organizations, and non-US organizations and individuals. Funders can specify arbitrary restrictions on what kind of organizations or individuals they want to fund, depending on what makes sense from their ethical, legal, or tax perspective.

No. Any evaluator can recommend grants to any organization (or private individual) that they think is a good funding target. We only ask the evaluator to fill out basic information about the organization, such as what kind of legal entity they are, and to perform some basic due diligence to avoid fraud.

Yes! Many of the funders participating in our first round (such as the Long-Term Future Fund and the ARM Fund) are funds or foundations, not just individuals.

You can have your staff join as evaluators, and use your existing decision-making processes to decide your preferred funding order. You can import any existing grant proposals you are evaluating into the round, which means you get to potentially split the bill with other funders on those grants. You also get access to other institutions’ funding applications, increasing your pool of potential funding targets, and get to read and learn from the grant evaluation practices of other evaluators and institutions.

When a grant round gets finalized, every funder is asked to lock in their final amount of funding and allocation order. At that point each funder can see what their final grant recommendations will be. When they are locked in, the funder commits to us and the other participating funders and evaluators that they will send out the funds for these grants in the next 2 months. If they fail to do so, we bar them from ever participating in any Lightcone Commons round again (and will try our best to find replacement funders for the affected organizations).

When any funder makes a change to their final budgets and allocations, all other funders get a chance to do the same in response. Only if everyone explicitly approves their final grant allocation do we move forward with the end of the round. If this somehow ends up going in cycles, I will coordinate some kind of compromise, or make an executive decision to remove a funder from the round (though this seems to me very unlikely to occur).

No! You can choose to make the grants yourself, or have Lightcone make them on your behalf, or do a mix of both.

If Lightcone makes the grants, you send the money to one of our sister organizations, which sends the money onwards. We perform due diligence and route charitable grants so they are tax-deductible. The costs for these services are covered by the 3% platform fee on all recommendations (which, to be clear, is charged regardless of whether you make use of these services).

We place no restrictions on organizations that evaluators want to recommend grants to, and provide no mechanism for evaluators or funders to block grants by other funders. I aim for Lightcone Commons to be a platform that facilitates coordination between funders, evaluators, and organizations with a wide variety of worldviews, many of which will strongly disagree with each other. I think the world will be a lot better if we can nevertheless successfully coordinate, critique each other’s plans, and split the bill whenever many people want to see the same thing funded, even if they diverge strongly on other issues.

(If you wish to use the nonprofit and LLC grantmaking services, I will do my best to make whatever grants you want to make, but do maintain the option to refuse to make any specific grants, and will occasionally face legal restrictions on the grants we can make.)

In addition to facilitating funding rounds every month, we also make it easy for funders to run a “direct grantor program” where invited grantors get a special budget that allows them to make grants immediately and unilaterally. This enables more active grantmaking (where the grantors are able to take the time to talk with and get to know a grantee), and allows grantors to use this unilateral grant budget to insure projects against the risk of not getting funding in the next grant round (which enables more risk-taking).

When a grantor funds a project like this, let’s say for $10,000, then in the next grant round the first $10,000 allocated to that project will, instead of going to the grantee, be used to reimburse the grant budget of the grantor.

Funders can specify what level of review they want such unilateral grants to undergo before they go out. If they use our nonprofit and LLC grantmaking services, we can accommodate any of a manual review by the funder, a simple checklist process run by our staff, or a full unilateral system where grants go out as soon as possible.

It is up to the evaluators to decide who to share their evaluations with. The platform encourages evaluators to make their evaluations visible and transparent to all participating funders and other evaluators, which makes it more likely that funders will decide to defer to their grantmaking portfolio, and more likely that other evaluators will engage critically with their evaluations. But we provide tools to make evaluations only visible to subsets of funders and other evaluators, and if some evaluations involve sensitive information, or we grow to have a large enough number of participating funders such that expectations of privacy become an issue, I expect more evaluators to limit their evaluations to a narrower audience.

No! We can make grants to 501(c)(3)s, individuals, and for-profit organizations. For individuals, we will determine whether your work qualifies as charitable, and provide you with fiscal sponsorship if so. Some of our funders can only make charitable grants (but others aren’t limited to charitable grants, so you will be considered in either case).

No! We accept applications from anyone internationally. However, there are some countries to which it is, in my experience, approximately impossible to send money (in particular Russia and India), so it’s pretty likely we can’t make a grant to you if you are located in one of those places.

We try hard to make the application process quick and straightforward. The application has only four required sections:

1. What are you working on?

2. What would you do with funding?

3. Who is involved?

4. Logistical details about your project

You can structure your answers to the first three questions however you want, and the application interface is a live-editable collaborative document.

You can update and edit your application any time after you submit it, so don’t worry about getting it all perfect immediately. If your plans have changed, we encourage you to revise your proposal accordingly.

Once the round begins, evaluators and funders using the platform will consider your proposal and make recommendations for how much funding they think it should receive. You can read more about our evaluators and how recommendations work in the Funder FAQ.

You can submit multiple applications for your organization, but please try to avoid them being mutually exclusive or overlapping too much. We might consolidate applications ourselves on the backend if you submit multiple, and leave it up to you how to allocate funding between your projects if you do get funding.

By default your application will be visible to funders, evaluators, and direct grantors on the platform. Anyone with those roles might also choose to share your application with external references or third parties to get their input, including publicly sharing the fact that you applied.

If you have highly sensitive information that is relevant to your application, please indicate on your application that evaluators should reach out to you directly to get access to it (and what confidentiality they would take on when they do so).

Yes, evaluators are paid 2% of any funding directed through them.

In short: read applications, and rank them in a priority order for funding.

You’ll produce three kinds of outputs:

1. Your funding order (most important)

Your funding order is an ordered list of things you would fund, and should be the answer to “in what priority order would I recommend distributing funding if I were the only funder in this round”.

2. Explanation of your funding priorities

You are strongly encouraged, but not required, to explain your funding order. Explanations will frequently consist of writeups about specific organizations for other funders and evaluators to read, based on each organization’s application. But high-level, general material is also useful — your views on cause prioritization, what you look for as signs of strong teams or projects, and your predictions about the future will all help funders understand the thinking behind your recommendations, and feel more confident in deferring to you.

3. Engagement with other evaluators

You are strongly encouraged to engage with other evaluators — reading and commenting on their explanations, answering questions on your own, and debating points of disagreement. Applications and evaluations live in documents that support top-level and inline comments, with configurable visibility, and the platform includes features for notifications and direct messages to help evaluators manage many parallel threads. We also encourage recording and posting synchronous debates that other funders and evaluators can watch.

Technically, yes. You can sign up with either your real name or a pseudonym, which others on the platform will use to track your priorities and commentary across applications and rounds.

We expect pseudonymity to be most useful when specific funders bring in evaluators who wish to remain anonymous. Currently, the only other way to become an evaluator is for me (Oliver Habryka) to personally select you to participate, which is less likely for evaluators who don’t want their identity revealed. Pseudonymous evaluators are also less likely to be given additional funding to allocate by new funders, since it makes it difficult to find other information about them outside the platform.

By default, your identity on the platform will be visible to all other evaluators and funders — and we aren’t asking anyone to commit to secrecy about which evaluators are part of the program.

Your funding priorities, explanations, and discussions have a few different options for visibility. By default, your funding order will be visible to all funders and evaluators on the platform. Other documents you write — including explanations of your reasoning, and evaluations of specific organizations/applications — can have more granular visibility settings. Options for those documents are:

• Private, visible only to you

• Visible only to a specific set of people you’ve shared it with

• Visible to all funders and evaluators, but not to direct grantors

• Visible to everyone on the platform besides applicants: funders, evaluators, and grantors

Your comments on other evaluators’ work will be visible to everyone who can see the document you commented on — usually everyone on the platform, but sometimes only the specific set of people they’ve shared it with.

All applications are read by a screening team as soon as they come in, so by the time you read an application, it will be tagged with:

• Multiple initial 1–5 star ratings from the Lightcone Commons staff

• A Pangram score

• Tags related to cause area and problem domain

In future rounds you’ll also be able to see past comments about organizations that have applied, from evaluators who made their comments broadly visible.

We give all evaluators a generous LLM token budget and a set of AI tools we’ve developed to help evaluate applicants. We don’t require you to use a specific rubric for evaluation, so you can build whatever workflow works for you.

You also don’t need to read every application. Your funding priorities will be more useful to funders in proportion to how many applications they cover, but you’re free to stick to your areas of expertise and ignore applications outside of them.

Yes! A fund, foundation, or research group can participate as an evaluator, and receive the 2% evaluator compensation as an organization. You’ll need one point of contact to sign up as an evaluator on the platform to submit the group’s recommendations.

The basic process is the same: evaluators submit funding priorities and comment on other evaluators’ priorities, and projects are funded in proportion to recommended budgets.

The biggest change is ongoing engagement: participation in Lightcone Commons is intended as an ongoing engagement, as opposed to the round-based engagement in SFF rounds. Evaluators are welcome to only participate for a single round and then become inactive, but they are also welcome to keep submitting evaluations as an ongoing long-term activity.

The other differences are:

• No required meetings. You can technically participate without ever talking to another evaluator. But discussion with other evaluators helps funders calibrate on how closely your priorities match theirs, so evaluators who don’t engage in discussion will likely see less money routed through them.

• No requirement to review all applications. You can make recommendations that only cover the applications you feel confident in evaluating, though your funding priorities will be more useful to funders if they include more applications.

• No speculation-grant filter. Grants no longer need to have received a speculation grant to be considered in a round.

• Matching pledges get no special treatment. Applicants can mention them; you should treat them as ordinary evidence about cost-effectiveness.

• No special tracks or sub-area rounds.

• No required rubric for evaluating applications.