Fundraising for Mox: coworking & events in SF

By Austin @ 2025-03-31T18:25 (+37)

This is a linkpost to https://manifund.org/projects/mox-a-coworking--events-space-in-sf

Hey! Austin here. At Manifund, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to help AI go well. One question that bothered me: so much of the important work on AI is done in SF, so why are all the AI safety hubs in Berkeley? (I’d often consider this specifically while stuck in traffic over the Bay Bridge.)

I spoke with leaders at Constellation, Lighthaven, FAR Labs, OpenPhil; nobody had a good answer. Everyone said “yeah, an SF hub makes sense, I really hope somebody else does it”. Eventually, I decided to be that somebody else.

Now we’re raising money for our new coworking & events space: Mox. We launched our beta in Feb, onboarding 40+ members, and are excited to grow from here. If Mox excites you too, we’d love your support; donate at https://manifund.org/projects/mox-a-coworking--events-space-in-sf

Project summary

Mox is a 2-floor, 20k sq ft venue, established to bring together EA & AI safety folks with the SF tech scene and labs. Since launching 6 weeks ago, we’ve onboarded 40+ coworking members and hosted 20 events: hackathons and bootcamps, dinners and retreats.

We’re now raising funding to expand Mox into a premier hub. We’re inspired by what Constellation, Lighthaven, and FAR Labs have achieved in Berkeley, and intend to build upon their example, in San Francisco: the city that is ground zero for transformative work.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The main elements of Mox:

• Coworking & offices: We host daytime members, who use Mox as their primary workplace. Currently our members are small teams and individuals, with a mix of EA orgs, AI safety researchers, and startup founders. We’re also speaking with “anchor” orgs like Epoch AI to situate their offices here.
• Community space: We’re positioned as a “weekend office”, for folks at eg Anthropic, OpenAI, and METR to work and mingle. We encourage member-run gatherings like blog club, paper reading groups, lightning talks and yoga.
• Public events: As a large, central venue with easy access to both SF and East Bay, Mox is ideal for hackathons, speaker talks, happy hours, unconferences and the occasional party. We organize our own events, and also rent our space to aligned organizers.
• Project incubation: as a medium-term goal, we’d like to host external fellowships or incubators (eg for MATS, FLF, or Apart), or run our own in-house accelerator.

Our north star is approximately: “bring together people who are insanely great.” In pursuit of this, we’ll move fast, stay flexible, try out many approaches, and double down on whatever shows promise.

Mox isn’t a WeWork; an explicit non-goal is to profit by selling coworking space. While we do charge for memberships and events, we do so at subsidized rates, to ground the value we provide. If Mox itself ends up becoming fiscally profitable, that will likely be through other models, eg equity from incubating amazing projects, YCombinator-style.

How will this funding be used?

All figures are very rough. We’d guess that philanthropic funding & investment will cover between 20% to 50% of Mox expenses, and to make up the rest via memberships, events, and other program revenue.

• Minimal budget (for 3rd & 4th floors): $1.6m/year
  • $200k in setup costs (furnishing & labor)
    • We inherited ~$100-200k worth of furnishing and labor from Solaris, the previous tenants; helping us to hit the ground running
  • $120k/mo * 12 mo of ongoing costs
    • ~$40k in fulltime benefits for team of 3
    • ~$80k in rent, utilities, services, materials, snacks^[1]
  • Aim to support ~150 members
  • Organize ~1 tentpole event a month
• Ambitious budget (for all 4 floors): $3.6m/year
  • $800k in setup costs
    • +$600k to build out the 2nd floor to support housing for ~100
  • $240k/mo * 12 mo ongoing — doubling the ongoing values above
  • Support ~350 members, with a fulltime team of 6
  • Organize 3-4 tentpole events a month

Who is on your team?

Our current core team is:

• Austin Chen: CEO of Manifund
• Rachel Shu: Space Manager for Mox
• Mattie Reyes: Operations for Mox
• Ara Hao: Interior Designer for Mox

Manifund also employs ~3 other FTE for other projects, including Manifest.

What's your track record on similar projects?

Since launching 6 weeks ago, Mox has:

• Onboarded ~40 members, contributing $8k per month. Our members include folks from Anthropic, METR, FLF, and numerous startup founders and AI safety researchers.
• Hosted ~3 events a week, with ~$10k in revenue to date. Notable visitors include Aviv Ovadya (AIDF), Ben Goldhaber (FLF), David Rein (METR), Deger Turan (Metaculus), Dylan Patel (Semianalysis), Gideon Lichfield (Wired), Jan Leike (Anthropic), Joel Becker (METR), Jonas Vollmer (Macroscopic), Josh Morrison (1DaySooner), Jueyan Zhang (AISTOF), Leo Gao (OpenAI), Marci Harris (PopVox), Oliver Habryka (Lightcone), Owain Evans (Truthful AI), Paul Christiano (AISI), Tamay Besiroglu (Epoch), Tao Lin (METR), William Saunders (ex-OpenAI) ^[2].
• Organized the AI for Epistemics hackathon, along with Elicit. Andreas Stuhlmüller (CEO of Elicit) remarks:

Mox was an amazing space for the AI for Epistemics hackathon. I loved the thoughtful layout with central communal gathering areas and quiet work areas around the edges, easily enough space for the 40+ participants. Austin was extremely helpful as well - the event was super smooth. I didn't have to think about anything, couldn't be happier. I'd definitely co-host again and am excited to do other projects together

Outside of Mox, Manifund has:

• moved >$5m to projects in AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, and other EA and charitable causes
• run AI safety regranting in 2023 & 2024, with regrantors like Neel Nanda, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Dan Hendrycks, Adam Gleave, Ryan Kidd, and Evan Hubinger; and have raised funding for a larger 2025 version
• partnered with Scott Alexander on ACX Grants in 2024, distributing $1.5m to early science & developmental projects
• organized 3 premier conferences of 200-500 people: Manifest 2023 & 2024, on prediction markets & forecasting; The Curve 2024, on bridging the AI safety and SF tech scenes

Previously, Austin started Manifold, a prediction market platform which raised >$4m in EA & venture funding; hosts ~160k markets and ~7m bets; attracts 5000 MAU; and engaged the NYT, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and countless blogs.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

While thinking about whether to do Mox, I made this prediction market, including reasons it might be a bad idea. Some that are still top of mind:

1. Coworking spaces are bad businesses, as far as I can tell
   • Nowhere near the margins of software
   • The upsides mostly flow to the tenants I think?
     • Maybe the answer is "charge more" but I'm somewhat allergic to that
2. Many other event/coworking spaces have failed or are failing
   • E.g. Lightcone Offices, Atlantis, Solaris AI, Wytham Abbey if you squint
   • It's not obvious to me that SF Commons or Constellation are currently doing well (at least well enough to make me go "yeah there's no point in me starting my own")
3. "Coworking" might be actively harmful (bad for focus, lead to groupthink).
   • Famously, Paul Graham refused to offer coworking to YC startups
   • I do think the Constellation setup of "provide lots of private offices" might be good
4. Physical spaces mostly serve human users; maybe there's more upside in serving AI users
   • Though, as a human, I like humans, and probably will for a long time
5. Maybe most interesting work in SF happens inside of labs, so there's less need for this kind of space

Though: in just 6 weeks, Mox has already proven its value in counterfactual events hosted, connections made, and projects incubated. “Failure” now would be a matter of degree, aka ending up less than maximally amazing as a space and community.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

Mox has not received any external funding at this time. Manifund started Mox with $300k for the initial deposit, rent, and operational costs; we have approximately 2 months of runway without further funding. We’ve applied to, and are still waiting to hear back from EA Infrastructure Fund (app), and OpenPhil (app).

Even without funding, we are committed to operating Mox for remaining duration of the lease (~12 months), at the least. We’ll be more interested in finding clients that can pay well for coworking or events, rather than clients aligned with our mission. We’ll also need to focus more on the fundraising side of Manifund, to generate operational revenue. In the worst case, Austin may make substantial personal donations towards Manifund & Mox.

Impact certificates in Mox

It would be wise to view any donation to Mox in the spirit of an investment; specifically, as a purchase of an impact certificate for Mox, at a premoney valuation of $8m. Your donations now entitle you to a share of the credit for whatever Mox accomplishes. And, extremely speculatively, you may be able to sell these impact certs for more donation ability in the future.

There isn’t much precedent for impact certs of this size, but here are some comparisons to ground this $8m valuation:

• Constellation received $20m in funding from OpenPhil in 2024. In a typical investment round, investors might buy 10-20% of the total company; this heuristic would value Constellation at $100m-$200m.
• Lighthaven made $1.8m in revenue in 2024; Claude and ChatGPT ballpark Lighthaven’s for-profit valuation at $4-8m based on revenue multiples; this metric excludes Lighthaven’s significant impact, which I would put a further 3-4x multiple on for $20-$30m.
• A typical YC-backed startup might raise a $2m seed at a $15m-$25m valuation after demo day, 3 months after starting.
• Manifold raised at a $15m postmoney valuation in our seed round in Mar 2022, 3 months after launching our website.

To be clear, impact certificates are a very new concept, without any of the ecosystem surrounding for-profit startups. It’s very possible that your donation to Mox simply ends up as a one-time donation.

But we’re hoping that through our efforts and with your support, Mox will grow to be much more valuable than it is today. And if Manifund can establish a robust ecosystem of impact certificate purchases, buybacks, and retroactive funding (big if!), then donors today may be rewarded with a large return in charitable credit, to donate towards future projects that matter to you.

Donate to Mox

PS: apply for Mox!

Want to join Mox? We're located at 1680 Mission St; our website is here. Fill out https://moxsf.com/apply if:

• you’re looking for a space to work from. We support memberships for hot desks, fixed desks, private offices and occasional visitors.
• you’d like to run an event. We’ve hosted hackathons, parties, dinners, reading clubs and weird events of all kinds.
• you’re interested in working for Mox or Manifund! We’re looking for great people for a variety of roles, from events coordinator to back office & finances to “Director of Mox”

(or if you know someone who’d be a good fit, send them the link!)

1. ^{^}

   Our landlord has asked us not to broadcast the rent we pay, hence this aggregation. If a more precise breakdown is important, reach out to austin@manifund.org

2. ^{^}

   This should not necessarily be read as a strong endorsement of Mox from these individuals; the amount of participation ranges from “brought their team in to cowork” to “participated in an all-day hackathon” to “played in a Magic: the Gathering event”.