Macro Grants

Macro Grants gives small grants to interesting projects, quickly. The name is a joke about microgrants. The checks are still small, usually $1,000 to $25,000, but we move fast and we help beyond the money.

If you have a project that should exist and needs a few thousand dollars to get going, email hello@macrogrants.com. You will hear back within a week, usually sooner. We do not have an application form.

What we fund

Science that a small group could do but no institution is funding: open challenges, prizes, datasets, instruments.
Tools and public goods on the internet that are obviously useful and nobody is building.
Civic and cultural projects, mostly in San Francisco, that make a place better in a concrete way.
Events that get the right people in a room.
Projects whose impact scales with the dollars put in. A lot of the hard work in the world is making a problem solvable with money. Once that is true, the money is easy to find.

We prefer projects that would not happen without us. We prefer first checks that are small, and we add more when something is working. We are fine funding things that are just fun.

What we don't fund

Startups. Venture capital already does this well.
Political campaigns or donations.
Ongoing projects that want a top-up, unless the project is exceptional.

How it works

Email us a few paragraphs: what you want to do, why, what it costs, who you are. Links to past work help more than anything else.
We decide within a week. Most decisions are made on a phone call.
Grants under $10,000 are paid up front. Larger grants are paid in milestones we agree on together.
We ask for a short written update when you finish, and we publish what came of it.
Grantees join a group chat with other grantees and with us. Most of what we can offer is not money: introductions, technical help, logistics, getting attention on your work.

Projects

Planet Nine Challenge open, $20,000 prize
A prize for finding Planet Nine in existing survey data, with a writeup of methods a single person could run in a few weeks. Details.
The Bets in planning
A dinner where everyone gives $10,000 to charity, but only by finding someone in the room to bet against on what AI and the world look like in 2030 and 2035. A second dinner settles the bets. Details.
A real page for every job in progress
What each job in America actually pays, what the day looks like, how people got there, and whether they would do it again. The best existing resource is a Department of Labor site from the 2000s. With Jason Zhao.
SF plaques idea
A thousand more historical plaques around San Francisco. Adolph Sutro planted most of the trees here and owned a tenth of the city, and almost nobody knows.
Open book graph idea
A complete, open copy of the book, author, and review data locked up on Goodreads, and a better interface on top of it.

Bounties

Things we would fund today if someone wanted to do them. Email us if one of these is yours.

An astronomy or astrophysics problem where modern ML can meaningfully contribute and the data is already public.
A psychometrics research effort to build an assessment better than the SAT, which is unidimensional and decades old.
A directory of lost nuclear weapons and what is publicly known about where each one is.
A local version of this bounty list for your own city.

Unemployment Labs

Unemployment Labs is the in-house program of Macro Grants. It is a group of AI researchers and engineers who are between jobs, by choice or otherwise, building the projects on this page that do not have an owner yet. It has a studio in the Bay Area. If you are unemployed, good at building things, and want to spend a few months on something that matters, email us.

Giving

Macro Grants is run by friends who commit a share of their income to it every year. Several of us have done this for years. If you want to give alongside us, you can fund a specific project on this page or give to the general fund.

Email hello@macrogrants.com and we will send you the details.

People

Macro Grants, San Francisco. hello@macrogrants.com