How To Get $1,000 For Your Project, No Strings Attached | Solo Grants

0:00We have this big announcement to make. If you are watching this, it is happening in real time. What's the announcement, Ari? Well, the announcement is that we are officially launching Solo Grants. The world is a collection of passion projects.

0:24I mean, look around you. Almost everything you see was created by someone who cared about something. almost more than anyone else. We think that a world where more passion projects are being pursued is a better one, and because of that, we're launching Solo Grants, an initiative to fund more passion projects by people who want to see something new in the world. Oftentimes, things require teams, but it only takes one person to get started. To date, we funded over 50 people working on projects ranging from discovering and naming three new viruses to deploying wildfire prediction systems in California and Texas, even raising$10 million to bring ML to chip design.

1:02All of them got started with$1 ,000 or less. So if you're building something you're excited about and need some support to get things going, apply now at sologrants.com.

1:15And Solo Grants is kind of the reincarnation, the continuation, the evolution of this program that we've been running for the past year and a half, two years where we have been giving grants to just really like exceptional young talent across the world excited about building really technically compelling projects. It's really exciting. We'll get into the backstory of Merge and sort of how we came to even be working together on this. But before we do, what distinguishes someone who gets a solo grant from somebody who maybe is starting a startup typically? Yeah. I mean, I think that there is like substantial distinction in some ways.

1:58I think that for us specifically, when it comes to solo grants, it is in no way required that you're building this to reach some sort of like venture scale outcome. It does not even necessarily have to be a business. In fact, most of the time it isn't a business. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's important. Like I think that's really important, especially for the age range that a lot of the people who receive these grants are in. I think that venture is like obviously a great model. Like it's incredible for people who are wanting explicitly to pursue venture scale businesses. But when you're young and you're getting started, I think that there's something really magical about the sort of frame of mind where this is an exploration.

2:41This is like, this is something that is a technical sort of like venture. and it can be something that is genuinely novel and really innovation-driven. It could be something that's like a remixing of a bunch of different technologies to bring something to the world that hasn't been seen yet before. And I mean, a lot of these things do become businesses eventually, but I think it's important that they're not going into it with the idea that, okay, every decision I make has to go through the filter of how does this become profitable, how does this become a business? and I think we've spoken a lot about quaint ideas, how some of the most exceptional businesses start as very quaint ideas that seem completely, almost laughable when you see them years later, raising venture and IPOing and doing whatever.

3:31So I would say that's the main distinction. I think the other thing that's worth noting here, just for sake of completeness, is that this is not explicitly for young people. is for anyone who wants to pursue a technically ambitious idea and is doing so not necessarily as a startup, but as a personal interest. The reason that it typically tends to go towards younger people getting the grants is because it's a small amount of money for somebody who's maybe been working for a long time. So typically the grants are anywhere from hundreds to$1 ,000 that we give. And I think there's also something really interesting, of course, which is that not only are we giving grants, but we're also a mechanism for people to discover sort of what I would like to describe as the wide world of grants.

4:22there's so many amazing grant programs out there and ultimately we like to not just support people with grants themselves but also to forward people who have promising projects or ideas to the people who are actually best suited to help them go that you know go the distance with their project so maybe you can speak a little bit about sort of what merge started as which is you know just for people who are listening or watching merge was sort of our initial idea that we started maybe a year and a half ago um and and sort of talk about how we started with merge and then we can talk about how we sort of made the evolution from saying hey merge is actually solo grants and we just never gave it that name until now yeah yeah um it's an interesting space like the the sort of grant micro grant non-dilutive capital space is an interesting one um i think it's it's pretty quiet, especially when you look at the kind of like outcomes and interesting things people are working on.

5:25And I think that right now it's a little bit different, but you know, it's still the case, especially when we got started. All of these different programs were very sort of separated and siloed off in their own kind of areas. And there was a lot of overlap up an interest in projects. Like you would even see, you know, two people working on a very similar project. They'd received grants from two separate programs within a month of each other. They had no idea that each other existed. Oftentimes in the same country or the same state. And that seemed kind of crazy to us, I think. And so Merge initially was really the idea that there are all of these incredibly talented people that are receiving non-dilutive capital to build out these projects, it's crazy that they're not all in the same place, able to sort of cross-pollinate ideas and relationships and build together.

6:18And I think that was the first idea. That's really cool. So the idea of Merge was not just give our own grants, but actually bring people together who've received these grants from various places like Emergent Ventures or 1517, and bring them all together so they could know each other. And then also for people who are looking for grants, be that routing layer for micro grants. Micro grants specifically because grants could go up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars depending on what kind of grants we're talking here. We're specifically talking about micro grants. So before we sort of talk about that transition from merge to solo grants and kind of the insight there, talk to me a little bit about what micro grants actually are.

7:03Yeah. So this changes a ton program to program. Like you mentioned, Emergent Ventures 1517. I think a micro grant can start in hundreds of dollars. It can be extremely small. And I think that a lot of people, when they hear that, they probably write it off to a certain extent. And I think they write it off unless they are actually in the position where a micro grant is, you know, maybe not, it could be life changing. In a lot of cases it actually is, but it may not seem it. But it certainly is trajectory changing with the project itself and oftentimes sort of the lifetime of that project and what they go on to do afterward.

7:40And it can scale up from small hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of millions. 1517 for example is a venture fund but they set aside a sort of a small portion of that fund every year to give out in these$1 ,000 checks these are non-dilutive these are completely non-dilutive there's no right to invest or anything like that it's just and and again they're not giving people money explicitly for businesses yes they're giving people money for interesting wacky ideas exploration yeah yeah completely i think that's i mean that's that's like the real just like it is 100 no strings attached that's what a grant really means um and then you know we see programs like immersion ventures that are doing 5 000 to 50 000 o'shaughnessy ventures has a grant program where and o'shaughnessy especially goes into other sort of like creative areas in addition to technology projects it's like a hundred thousand dollars ten thousand dollars and so and we also see models like the Teal Fellowship.

8:38I mean, really, the Teal Fellowship is kind of a grant program with a support layer wrapped around it. So it's like a broad space. But the core mechanism there is safe consistent across the board. And the Teal Fellowship was actually started by Danielle and Michael, who are at 1517 now, and of course, Peter Teal. And the original premise of the Teal Fellowship has kind of changed a little bit over time to what it is today. The original premise was drop out of school. You have no money probably because you haven't started a company yet. So we're going to give you money to actually work on some idea that in theory could be much more valuable than what you do in school.

9:25And there were a lot of great things that came out of that. I think that the most notable one that most people are aware of is Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin was a Teal Fellow. But there were so many. Thigma? Yeah, so that's the other thing. There were all these great companies that came out of it as well. Ethereum is sort of more of a project. I mean, there's the Ethereum Foundation, and lots of businesses have been built on top of it. But the whole premise was something that was explored in a way that I think that would have been done differently had he had to go out and raise venture capital, for instance.

10:00So I think that there's something really interesting about that. And of course, Teal Fellows have gone on to create all these wonderful companies. And now when you look at the Teal Fellowship, a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them are actually getting the Teal Fellowship after they've already dropped out of school and after they've already raised money. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that. These are great founders. Augustus from Rainmaker, as an example, he got into the Teal Fellowship after he left school and was working on Rainmaker full-time. He's a fantastic solo founder.

10:31We'll be having him on the show at some point in the near future. We've been talking about doing an El Segundo trip. But, yeah, I think there's something really wonderful about sort of the origins of the Teal Fellowship and then how it led to 1517 where they're continuing to do this grant giving. Maybe you could share a little bit about the realization that what we were doing at Merge was actually solo grants by another name and us deciding that, wow, we have to really need to relaunch this and announce it with the framing of, this is primarily for solo builders. Yeah, I think we're starting to see, I think in Merge, what we start to see was the very real-time disintegration of the idea that you needed to get started with a co-founder.

11:18I think that was really interesting because a lot of the people who were building in Merge, whether we had given them a grant ourselves or they had joined the community and received funding from other programs, a lot of them were building projects for the first time. And it did not even occur to them that they should necessarily go out and find a co-founder. It was not something that we were selecting for. It was really something that we saw kind of looking back. And I think that's really kind of incredible when we see now what we're doing with solo founders. The thing, I forget who said this, but this idea that the world is a series of passion projects, right?

11:53Passion projects are very often done from one person's passion, right? It is sometimes, it's amazing when there are people who come together and co-create ideas, and some of the great things that have been made have multiple creators, of course. But there's something to be said about when people are looking at working on a passion project, they don't think, oh, I need to have a passion project co-founder, right? So the co-founder idea is really something associated with businesses, with startups. And when they're in the passion project frame, it never even occurs to someone to have that, right?

12:33Now, maybe they happen to know someone or they want to work with someone and that happens. But if you look at most grants and most grantees and most of the projects that they're working on, they don't have collaborators or they get the grant and then they find collaborators. So it really is sort of, as you were saying, this model of building solo that doesn't have that sort of baggage or bias that is created by the existing sort of maybe lore around startups. The startup lore is you get a co-founder, you go and raise some money, maybe you talk to customers afterwards. I'm just kidding. But you eventually build this great company and you have your co-founder.

13:17With passion projects, it's almost always about somebody sitting alone at their typewriter or at their easel or in their garage. You know, it's about the tinkerers and the explorers. And oftentimes, because the ideas that they're working on are pure interest plays, they're not businesses, you know, it's really just about appealing to yourself and not appealing to other people. Yeah. And I think that there are a lot of things that we can sort of like extrapolate from that. One of which that comes to mind is like this idea that if you build for yourself, you're in a way building for many. I think a few episodes back, maybe this was Eugenia.

13:58She had a similar kind of, she spoke about a similar thing. And I think like that applies here too. And also a lot of, I think it's important that people do take the time to explore these passion projects and go on these explorations. and in the event that they do become excellent businesses. I think a lot of times it can be traced back to the fact that not a lot of people are necessarily getting started on business ideas truly as just an exploration and as a passion project. Like they were probably on relatively uncharted territory thinking about the things they were thinking about before they realized it could be applied in that more business way.

14:35I also think there's something really valuable about not optimizing immediately to figure out is this a business when you can discover more interesting businesses that way, right? You can find a great business idea specifically by just exploring things that are of interest and discovering something along the way. If the only way to discover the business idea is through this sort of free-range exploration of something that doesn't actually seem like a business, it actually means that you're probably going to be one of the few people who ever discovers it So therefore it is a business that is unique versus something where, you know, you know, you're going to have like five YC companies cloning you the next day.

15:22Right. There is just there is just so much to be said about coming to interesting ideas through something other than how do I find a startup idea? Right. How to find a startup idea is generally a bad thing to do if you're optimizing for that. And I think that the best advice around it is look to your own personal experiences. Well, if you don't have many personal experiences yet, especially if you're younger, how do you actually create personal experiences? Well, you work on passion projects. And that's specifically what solo grants and the wider world of grants exists to do. So now I think that there's something that's really worth talking about specifically around solo grants, which is this idea that there should be more people working on passion projects.

16:10Right. And I think that there are there are probably two reasons that I can think of primarily why people aren't doing that. I'd love to hear what other ones you have. The first two that come to mind for me are one, oftentimes the gap between working on a passion project. and not is some very small, relatively speaking, amount of money for a large portion of the population. So you were just saying, well, hundreds of dollars, you know, for somebody who's maybe worked in tech for a number of years, hundreds of dollars, you can't even imagine. Maybe if you're sort of removed from sort of the average person, like you can't even imagine that that's a lot of money or that that's a gap that needs to be filled.

16:54But the reality is there's so many people where if you give them a couple hundred bucks, it's the gap between them pursuing that passion project and not. And I think if you actually want to help more people pursue passion projects, it's about closing the gap. And then the other piece is role models, right? If you show people that there is a way to go out there in the world and work on projects, they don't need to be instantly monetizable. You don't need to try and figure out some app that you can pump UGC content to drive traffic to and then have a paywall and then get consumers to pay for it.

17:29Like, that's fine. I'm not trying to knock people who do that sort of thing. But there's so much more in the world than that. And if you can ultimately help people, you know, go out there and make the things that are representative of their interests versus just sort of some kind of cookie cutter, you know, follow what everybody else has done approach. Well, that allows people to see, wow, I can do that. And not only can I do that, but there's actually a support system for that. And there's infrastructure for that. And that's pretty cool as well. But I think the high level here is if we actually help more people work on their passion projects in the world that are real interests and especially technical interests, we're going to see such an incredible return on that.

18:09Not as investors or anything like that, though certainly if people were to invest in people who are working on some of these things and converting them to business, 1517 is a great example of doing that and it working well. but I think it's more from the the actual side of you know what actually benefits the world right we will benefit the world so much uh when we have what the world will benefit so much I should say when we have more people working on passion projects in fact my hope with you know things like AGI and all of this is that it will free up people's time to work on like truly novel passion projects and AI of course will be a lever to help them make more progress on that yeah I'm curious if there are other thoughts that you have you know based off of off of those premises if there's anything else that you think that kind of like solo grants uh unlocks for people well i mean to the the thing that that uh what you said about how like a few hundred dollars it can oftentimes be the the thing that unblocks a person reminded me of is uh is arian uh he was one of our first grantees to this date one of the the only times we looked at the application um and we looked at the amount of money that he was requesting.

19:22And then when we got on the call, he asked for, I think it was like$100 less. And I think the reason for that maybe had been a few days in between the application and the interview, and he had found a way to get even scrappier and build out the idea. But the reality with RN's project was that he was building the world's largest database of phage viruses, which is an insane, it's an insane thing to decide to build, especially, I think he was 19, when we gave the grant, and we covered his Airtable costs. That's all it took. That's what he was using to host all of these images and the information on each of these phages.

20:04And from that point, he then continued doing phage virus research. He discovered and named three new viruses. I mean, he's doing incredibly well. And it started with like, you know, $100? $150? Crazy. So yes, I think that was the main thing that that reminded me of. But I think it's also like a lot of these explorations don't necessarily fit into specific, you know, like a single interest group. That certainly probably isn't popular with their existing friends or their community or the family. Sometimes it isn't, that's great, but it's not frequently the case. and I think that having a single person or a couple of people get on a call and not only express interest but also give them this small amount of money to go and pursue this interest is very validating and I think that creates a snowball effect where it's not just them working on this it's like, okay, these two people or this one person on the call they think this is a great idea too so so not only um you know do i think it's it's worth doing but but there are other people that agree with me and i think like when you're just getting started that that's like a really outsized impact so something that was really uh that was really interesting and sort of full circle about us working on this is you know ultimately you know we got working together a year and a half two years ago or at least we first met because of all the stuff you were doing online and because you had actually received a micro grant yourself.

21:40So maybe we can talk about sort of the early days of what was going on in your life, like how you actually came to discover micro grants, what micro grants have done for you. And then we can talk about kind of the history of how we ended up working on this. Cool. Yeah, I, well, I was in high school, I was interested in so many different things, all of which, you know, for the most part, at a certain point required, you know, some money to get started. It was never a lot, but it was more than I had access to at least. And I think the first encounter I had with the concept of a grant was when I was building a Discord server called Builder Group, and we were wanting to host our first hackathons.

22:25I remember that we were trying to figure out ways to accept money, you know, we couldn't incorporate because we were minors and there was all of this stuff that we were having to figure out. And the first grant that we got actually was not even from a fund. It was from a guy who was a founder. He had just like sold his startup to Dropbox. And I think he gave us like$500. And it was, you know, very casual. We just sort of bumped into him. We shared what we were working on. He really dug it. And he was like, okay, you know, like what's blocking you right now? And that came up and he was happy to do it.

22:57Um, and then we got a grant from 1517, uh, coincidentally to, to sort of support the same project. Um, but closer to you and I working together, um, I was working on a biotech project and like hardware was, was really the main thing that we needed. We needed transducers and we needed rice because it was a food tech project and, um, we needed all sorts of chemicals and, and, um, proteins. And, um, again, we needed some, some money. And I think at that stage, I wasn't really sure what this project was. I, you know, I knew that it was for the greater good. I knew that regardless of whether we were successful with this project or not, the research that we were doing would become useful and we, you know, we should document it regardless.

23:38Um, and I, I wasn't, you know, certain enough in, in the idea necessarily to go out and turn this into a business yet. Like that's for sure. Um, and so I looked at, at other options and ended up submitting an application to Emergent Ventures. And that was a really eye-opening process as well because they were actively supportive of the idea even more than I was in terms of the cash that I was asking for. I got on the call and I explained the sort of ambition of the project and they started pulling threads a little bit and saying, well, why aren't you maybe getting some flights out to India? Why aren't you, you know, going sort of the extra mile?

24:21Like, why don't you really give this the attention and the money that it deserves? And so they ended up giving a little more than I had even asked for. And I think that goes back to, like, the belief thing. The cash was incredible as an unblocker. But the belief in and of itself was equally, you know, substantial. It's interesting, too, because I think in a lot of ways people might say, oh, how do you actually spend less money, right? but in the case of emerging vendors this was Tyler this was Shruti she runs the program so she said she said hey instead of cutting your budget back what would happen if you actually were more ambitious so I think that there's something to be said about how could we actually raise people's ambitions and you know if somebody's saying well I can do this if I had zero dollars or I could do this if I had you know this amount of money we want to say we'll do both like do the thing, start out, get started, don't wait around for money if you can actually make some progress, but do not put a cap on your ambitions, especially if it's just a relatively small amount of money that these microgrant programs exist for.

25:28And Solo, we have an entire, Solo Grants, we have an entire directory for you to browse and look at all of the microgrants. You can read about people who've had experiences getting the different microgrants. We, of course, give out our own micro grants, but there's just so much out there to support people who are building their passion projects solo or otherwise. Like the, the cool thing about our micro grant guide is it shows you which ones will actually give grants to people, even if you have people that you're working with, because we're not trying to say, Hey, you can't, you can't get funding to work at your project.

26:03We just want to route you to the right people to help with that. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe you could tell a quick story about sort of how you ended up building the largest photography Discord, which I think is pretty cool. And then also, how do we meet? Like, what's the backstory there? Because I think that it's an interesting illustration of what happens when you put things out into the world. And also when you're primarily on places like X, where you can meet people and have sort of serendipity take place. Yeah. I mean, the backstory here, it ties into a lot of what we've already spoken about in a way.

26:42I started this Discord server when I was 15. It was the middle of the pandemic. And I was living abroad with family. And so I was extremely isolated. And one of the things that I was most interested in at the time was photography. And I basically just wanted to meet more photographers. And I was on Discord a lot. I was thinking, why aren't there communities for photographers on Discord? I know it's a gaming platform primarily, but I just thought I'd give it a shot. And I think that what ended up happening there was a big mix of really good timing, serendipity, and kind of accidentally just falling into something that resonated with what people wanted.

27:30And it did not start out going sort of to the moon. It was not some sort of crazy high growth situation from day one. But it kind of felt like the doors were opening as I made progress on that a little easier than past things I had done. And so I knew that I wanted to continue doing it in addition to my just wanting to make new friends. And so I would just promote it in different places on the internet, create different channels, think about what people wanted on Discord to sort of not only meet other photographers, but maybe showcase their photography. And it actually turned six years old on July 4th.

28:12So with America's birthday, it was also Photography Lounge's birthday. And, I mean, it's at 40 ,000 members, and those 40 ,000 members send over 10 ,000 messages a day. And it's just like sort of bloomed into this thing that I have no control over anymore. and is mostly managed by this incredible team that has built out completely volunteer-based over the past few years. So that was my introduction to community building online, seeing things kind of work in a very organic way, and later technology. And so a couple years after I had started that, I was building more communities online specifically for technology and young people getting started.

29:00coding and designing and starting companies. And I think we released a resource hub called BuilderBook, which is really just like a one-stop shop where we had articles that we had written. We had guest authors writing articles, everything from immigration to filing your 83 Bs after incorporating your company to design. And I put that up on Twitter. We spent a ton of time on the launch video. This was before the sort of really fancy launch videos. We spent a lot of time on the website designing it and it resonated with people. And I think that it was a good sort of evergreen resource. I think that's how you came across the work that we were doing initially.