Incubator Week

Test-drive founding for a week. Bring a friend. Find out if you'd make good co-founders. 5 days in SF, all expenses paid, up to $200k in funding.

Next round

To be announced

Funding

Up to $200k in grants

Covered

All expenses paid

Express interest

About Incubator Week

AI safety needs more founders. An organization can have orders of magnitude more impact than any one person doing direct work. But starting one is a big commitment.

We want to make it as easy as possible to find out if you want to. Bring a friend, colleague, or early co-founder, work on a real problem together for 5 days, and find out whether you want to go for it.

Inviting someone to try Incubator Week is a much smaller ask than inviting them to co-found with you right away.

Track record

Past cohorts: 50 participants, $10M+ in external funding raised.

Alumni are building organizations focused on:

  • Evaluating power-seeking and shutdown resistance in frontier AI
  • Scalable oversight of advanced AI systems
  • Detecting safety failures when AI agents interact
  • Defending advanced AI systems against training-data poisoning
  • Tracking undeclared AI compute to support treaty verification

And more.

Plus career transition grants and placements at AI safety organizations.

The week

The best way to figure out if you work together is to work together. Over 5 days, you and your co-founder work on a real problem in AI safety.

  • Founding 101

    What does founding an AI safety organization really entail? Get a clear picture of what starting an impactful organization involves.

  • Threat models

    Think critically about what the world needs. Develop threat models and identify the top experts who can help solve the problem.

  • Build interventions

    Build and test interventions together, arrange calls with experts, and pressure-test your assumptions with the cohort.

  • Pitch for funding

    If it turns out you're a match, pitch us. If we back your pitch, we can give you up to $200k in grant funding within two weeks if you get us excited. Learn more about our Seed Grants.

About you

  • Working in or adjacent to AI safety, biosecurity, cyber, or other catastrophic-risk fields
  • You have a friend, colleague, or existing co-founder to try it with
  • If the week goes well, you're ready to leave whatever you're doing now to build
  • You don't need a polished idea, we will help you find one

Know someone who should join? Refer them, and we'll send you $2,000 for each person accepted after your referral.

Questions

When does it make sense to leave my existing organization?
When founding would do more good than what you're doing now. For some people that's easy to answer. If you work in a role with little positive impact, or someone else could easily take over your work, you give up relatively little by leaving.

It's harder if your work is already important. Founding might still be the better path, especially if you've identified an important problem that your current organization isn't addressing or structurally can't address (similar to a spin-out).

The harder part is figuring out whether you're the right person to solve it, whether your intervention will work, and whether you've found the right co-founder. That's what Incubator Week is for. Spend five days working on a real problem together, without quitting your job. Ideally, you keep your employer in the loop and only consider leaving once you have good reason to believe founding would be more impactful.
Can I apply solo?
Incubator Week is designed for potential co-founder pairs. We occasionally make exceptions for outstanding solo applicants. In those cases, we focus purely on threat modeling, intervention exploration and pitching.
I don't have a co-founder. How do I find one?
Finding a co-founder takes time. From our experience, chances are high that you've already crossed paths with them. Take some time to think back on past collaborators, colleagues, and friends who are passionate about the same things you are. Someone you could imagine working with for the next couple of years. Consider sending them a link to this program. You can also check out our co-founder matching database.
Do I need to have an idea?
No, you don't need an idea. Finding the right intervention is hard, and we will help you find one. We do want you to bring AI safety context and background knowledge in a relevant domain, so you can iterate quickly inside a problem space and land on the right intervention.
Is this for nonprofits or for-profits?
Our program is agnostic to entity form. We support whichever form best supports building the intervention. In many cases, a nonprofit is the best fit for AI safety work. In rare cases, the incentives for being impactful line up well with the incentives to scale a business, and we are very open to for-profits in those cases.

About BlueDot

BlueDot Impact is a philanthropic startup building the workforce and organizations needed to safely navigate AGI. We've raised $71M and trained over 10,000 people since 2022.

For questions, reach out to team@bluedot.org.

Incubator Week

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