Consider transitioning into AI safety grantmaking, even if you're early in your career

Senior transitions

If you have good judgment about AI risk, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to evaluate organizations and people, you can shape the trajectory of millions of dollars.

Julian continues that senior grantmakers do more than evaluate a stack of inbound proposals: they have to proactively generate new grants—for example by headhunting founders or designing new funding programs—provide strategic advice to grantees, write memos that shape funding strategy, and generally serve as connective tissue in the ecosystem.

This work depends on a better model of failure than most people have early in their careers. The value of time spent in research, policy, operations, or organization-building is learning how projects are created, failures are avoided, and budgets are scoped. You learn what ideas will survive and which types of people push through. That experience accumulates into a sense of how value is generated—and, with time, into judgment.

That judgment matters more if new AI safety capital enters the field quickly. A large influx of money will increase the value of people who can turn partial strategic views into real, fundable opportunities.

Founder talent

There is also a strong role for people who are earlier to grantmaking but already strong at execution. The best candidates here are often founder-shaped or operator-shaped. They may be former founders, early employees, chiefs of staff, research managers, or policy researchers. They do not lack capability; instead they may only lack field-specific taste.

If you are this archetype, you have the superpower of speaking with the relevant people, working out the nature of the project, estimating a first-year budget or defining its first milestones. You surface the first bottlenecks and provide the data to pressure-test the theory of change.

This also improves founder selection; a strong operator is usually better than a pure analyst at spotting false positives. They can tell when there is not clear ownership of projects, when a timeline is unrealistic, or when having more hands on deck is the bottleneck.

For some people, this is also a path into founding. Working closely with a strong allocator exposes them to many unsolved problems and many failed or partial attempts to solve them. Over time that is one way to build the taste required to start something strong yourself.

Junior training

It's easy to read all of this and come away thinking: yes, this matters, but it's obviously a job for someone with more experience and better strategic instincts than I have right now.

A junior person doesn't need to set the priorities themselves; what they can do is enable a small number of high-judgment people to search a wider space, test more ideas, and move faster. This is a very different bar, and a much more reachable one.

In some cases, they can also become the early operators or founders who execute on those opportunities. This experience compounds toward growing their taste—toward complementing the senior talent's taste instead of substituting it.