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$250k for your AI-first product startup

aigrant.org

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Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#31

Post by yieldcrv »

azhenley wrote: post #10

I’ve always wanted to setup a nonprofit to give motivated people a grant (not investment!) that enables them to build an app/product. Like maybe someone who didn’t go to college but wants an opportunity to build a product. How hard is it to set this up? The process to start a nonprofit doesn’t seem inviting.

it depends on how big you expect the endowment to be - aka how much capital is your nonprofit going to be working with

are you going to be the sole donor and board member, or are you going to be actually raising donations because thats a full time job

giving grants for coding is hard, it has to match your mission statement that got you the non-profit status to begin with, and the IRS is not enlightened on the concept of coding as a charitable class, but you can have other things like educational purposes, or "sustainability" and give grants to organizations that are ultimately doing coding.

grants and scholarships to individuals are much more complicated, but they can incorporate and nobody cares that the new company is just wrapped around an individual

also, all of this can be circumvented due to the fact that non-profits can invest. growing the endowment is simply asset management and there is no difference in investing in shares on the stock market and investing in shares of a private C-corp that was just formed that just your non-profit filled the seed and series a round for. non-profits can make wild profits, no different than Harvard's endowment growing indefinitely. there are also some cases where investments can count as the grant requirement (if your type of non-profit is one that has an annual grant requirement, via regulation)

yeah the regulations actually make the individual charity part of non-profits really hard and you can do lots of profit making activities! but you can try your goal

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#32

Post by kmlx »

seibelj wrote: post #25

Is anyone actually using co-pilot? They claim “millions of users” but I seriously doubt millions of programmers opted into paying $10 per month for it. A lot of these stats seem highly suspect.

i used it for react js, golang and java. it was very much hit and miss.

i was not expecting github to start charging for such a mediocre product. obviously i decided we don’t need it.

but i expect we’ll get something open source and better relatively soon considering the pace of innovation in this field.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#34

Post by flaque »

Hey folks, this is Evan from AI Grant! We're excited to support founders building new AI products.

AI Grant is investing $250k on an uncapped, no-discount, MFN SAFE, as well as providing more than $300k in cloud credits.

AI Grant used to do small grants in lots of AI research projects. Now, we think there's plenty of research, and what's needed is products: so we're doing bigger investments in founders building products. Name's the same, but now we can deploy larger checks, and focus on what we think will help the most in 2022. Frankly we used the name "AI Grant" because we already had it!

If you're working on something cool, please apply! And if you have a special situation, or need help, reach out to support@aigrant.org

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#35

Post by srelbo »

minimaxir wrote: post #20
rexreed wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HackerNews community is not reflective of the general tech, consumer, or business environment. First-hand experience in delivering and selling AI solutions to enterprises and governments plus activity at conferences, venture capital investment, and other measures are showing that interest in AI is generally cooling off, even if there are interesting things happening with generative transformer models, which is wh…

DALL-E mini/Craiyon, Midjourney, and Wombo all blew up because of the easy/free accessibility of AI generation tools, to the point of John Oliver doing a sketch about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YNku5FKWjw The consumer applications will incidentially provide more of an incentive into investing into AI research since there's a good chance of ROI, which will trickle down into better open source AI like Stable…

oh and shameless plug (I know I will get downvoted) art.elbo.ai, but see our public gallery of images people create with free tools.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#36

Post by ks2048 »

realbarack wrote: post #29
ks2048 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s in exchange for equity in the company? They don’t say how much?

It's on an uncapped mfn safe, so the amount of equity will be determined by your other investors.

Okay thanks. Just wondering how it compares to YC. I know YC says mfn safe too but they say 7% (and it’s 500k and obvious differences in experience, mentoring, process etc)

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#37

Post by jonas21 »

goethes_kind wrote: post #17

So like 1 experienced researcher or 2 college grads for 1 year's worth of salary. Putting it through that perspective, it does not seem like much. Wondering now how much hours of compute this would buy.

> So like 1 experienced researcher or 2 college grads for 1 year's worth of salary. Putting it through that perspective, it does not seem like much.

Well, I think the point is that you would be the one doing the work at first and you wouldn't have to pay yourself market rates because you also get to own the vast majority of the company.

> Wondering now how much hours of compute this would buy.

It also comes with $250k in Azure compute credits, which would buy ~70,000 hours on a machine with an A100 GPU, for instance.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#38

Post by wrs »

kmlx wrote: post #33

something is not mentioned or i missed it: $250k for how much equity?

MFN SAFE means it converts to equity in the next funding round, at the price set by the lead investors in that round. E.g., if the next round had a $2.5M post valuation, this would become 10%.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#39

Post by hellohowareu »

alecfreudenberg wrote: post #22

Fuck yes. This is the type of program that can actually hear a proper pitch. I teared up reading it. As someone who has a lot of tinkering and research underway on a big idea, this motivates me to scrap and scrounge to get the demo party together. Spending 8k-ish to build a product demo for my friends rich uncle is too uphill for me to risk. But for this, I mean fuck yeah.

"8k-ish" I read this as k8s-ish... which makes me thing maybe 8k-ish could be your product name, as a play on k8s-ish. That said... ive been learning kubernetes lately and it doesn't necessarily relate to AI.
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