SURPLUS

First, there are many standard reasons to use a for-profit corporation when trying to do good. For-profits operate with tight feedback loops. They can be more certain that they produce value (see: gains from trade, Paul Graham on wealth, “surplus”). They can tap into a much larger pool of available financing. They compensate founders and employees with high upside upon a successful exit, and thereby draw in better talent.

For-profit models are surprisingly flexible: Elicit, Apollo, Goodfire, Wave, Dwarkesh, Lighthaven and Manifest all demonstrate different approaches to making money while also serving the public interest.

Now is an excellent time to start a for-profit, given vast torrents of funding available from Anthropic employees and OpenAI Foundation. These funds are distributed out of 501c3 entities — but 501c3s can pay for for-profit services, and invest in for-profit corps. There’s a $100B market waiting to be constructed; shovels waiting to be sold.

And ideologically, we think that equity is a beautiful mechanism for value alignment and credit allocation. Manifund has previously experimented with impact certificates to bring this concept to the charity world; now, we think that plain ol’ corporate equity will work fine, maybe with a light sprinkling of retroactive funding or prize rounds or advance market commitments to finance public goods.

It is absolutely the case that Anthropic or METR are great places to work. But maybe:

— You’re well suited towards starting projects: you enjoy independence, ship fast, update quickly and are willing to fail.

— You think that establishing new orgs is good for accountability and avoiding groupthink, as a counterweight to frontier labs accumulating talent and money.

— You have an idea that you can’t stop thinking about, something you think will be great for the world, something that nobody else is doing (or worse: somebody is doing, but badly).

Building great software takes more than coding. Product taste, visual design, distribution, sales and marketingare all things that 2026 LLMs still fail at. We’ve developed these supplementary skills needed to ship successful products, and would love to foster them in a new generation of founders.

Beyond advice & mentorship, Surplus also provides a cohort of folks working on similar problems, some of whom may be great cofounders. And finally, an incubator is a container for focus, a commitment device, a way to hold yourself accountable and get your idea out into the world.