Summary
BlueDot is recruiting founders to solve critical problems threatening civilization.
Our approach: deep problem scoping, targeted recruitment, and capital coordination.
First focus: pandemic PPE stockpiles.
Context
BlueDot is a non-profit building the workforce that protects humanity.
We’re a 5-person team. We train 1,000s of people each year in AI safety and biosecurity, and we place the highest-potential people into impactful jobs at AI companies, governments and non-profits.
Since 2022, we’ve raised $34M.
Today, ~2,000 people work full-time on AI safety. We believe this needs to increase to 100,000 by 2030 to prevent worst-case scenarios.
To help scale the workforce, we’re testing a “startup studio” model alongside our courses. We’re attracting leaders, builders and entrepreneurs, and helping them start and scale the most important projects that protect humanity.
We’re building this in collaboration with Jonah Weinbaum and Hugo Walrand.
Initial approach: AGI Strategy course
Two months ago, we launched our AGI Strategy course alongside a $1M fund.
We’ve attracted 15 founders to the course who’ve raised $1M+ each, and ~$50M in total.
We’ve invited a handful of them to join our in-person “incubator weeks”, where we’ve helped them improve their ideas and launch new AI safety companies.
We’ve deployed $130k in grants so far to 1) build a risk engine for AI insurance and 2) improve the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure.
This approach works well for founders who already have a particular area of expertise, project ideas that leverage that expertise, and are motivated to work on AI safety.
To test what it takes to drive founder-energy towards a shortlist of high-priority ideas, we’re running a second experiment in parallel.
Second experiment: Problem scoping and serial entrepreneurs
Compared to other AI safety incubators, we’re taking a different approach:
Doing deep in-house problem scoping before recruiting anyone, and
Targeting serial entrepreneurs rather than junior talent.
We’ve spent the past 3 weeks going deep on pandemic PPE stockpiles.
We’ve done 50+ expert interviews, asked for intros from everyone, read many papers and blog posts, and shared a commentable doc with everything we’ve learnt and our understanding of the situation with those experts.
We’re writing a “landscape analysis” to understand the current situation, and help us develop a strategy for how this problem will get solved.
We’re headhunting serial entrepreneurs with relevant experience in the problem area we’re focused on, and making the most compelling pitch that we can for why they should work on solving this problem.
Founding and scaling a successful company is exceptionally hard, and the best predictor of future success is past success.
We make the pitch personal and concrete:
“Here’s the threat and its scale. Your expertise in X is exactly what’s needed to make Y happen. This is why we believe it’s solvable. Here’s the funding situation (validated business model or $100M+ in philanthropy). Here are the experts we can introduce you to. Your work could save millions of lives.”
Why we’re exploring pandemic PPE stockpiles first
We wanted to start with a high-priority, tractable problem that is well-scoped but is still nowhere near to being solved.
We believe bioweapons are one of the most tangible and early ways a global catastrophe could occur due to AI - see this blog post.
In the event of a catastrophic pandemic, PPE stockpiles are essential for protecting critical workers and keeping civilization functioning.
Let’s imagine a bad actor releases 10 pandemic-potential pathogens into the population, each with a similar R0 to COVID-19, and a 20% infection fatality rate.
Once this is detected, governments lockdown their populations akin to March 2020.
The lockdown only holds if people continue to have food, water and energy delivered to their homes.
If people are cold, thirsty and hungry, they will leave their homes and get infected en-masse.
To maintain the lockdown, workers in the food production, distribution, water and energy sectors need to continue working.
If they believe they’ll get infected if they go to work, and that they could then infect and kill their families, they won’t go to work!
Critical workers need high-quality respirators that protect them from infection.
Existing PPE stockpiles are woefully inadequate.
In the US, there’s enough N95 masks to protect healthcare workers for 10-20 days.
N95 masks do reduce transmission, but they don’t provide adequate protection to prevent infection in this scenario.
There are no stockpiles for critical workers in other industries.
If the above scenario happened today, critical industries would collapse, the lockdown would fail, and a significant fraction (30%+?) of the population would die.
We need a large stockpile of reusable respirators (e.g. elastomeric half-mask respirators, EHMRs).
They’re much better at reducing transmission AND they cost less than N95s when accounting for multiple months of usage.
The filter in an EHMR only needs to be replaced every 6-12 months.
Who’s working on it
The field is extremely small — we know of <10 people working on it full-time:
Protective Equipment (1-2 FTE) - designing and manufacturing better EHMRs
Blueprint Biosecurity (2 FTE on PPE) - researching the best PPE to stockpile and advocating government for it
Amodo Design (2-3 FTE on PPE) - engineers testing PPE
Centre for Health Security - reusable respirator research and advocacy
Compare this to the scale of the problem: for North America, it could cost $1-20B to build the pandemic PPE stockpiles.
We believe this money could come from some combination of:
Government procurement via the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS),
Investors investing into a PPE stockpile company offering pandemic insurance for critical industries, and/or
Philanthropic grants
Recent momentum includes a podcast discussion with Andrew Snyder-Beattie from Open Philanthropy, and the OpenAI Foundation’s $25B commitment to societal resilience.
By default, we still believe very little money will be spent in the US on effective pandemic PPE stockpiles.
To change this, we’ll need serial entrepreneurs attacking this problem (perhaps using market mechanisms), effective government advocacy campaigns, and sustained outreach to foundations and high net worth individuals.
Meta learnings
We aim to build a repeatable playbook for building scalable companies that address the greatest civilisational challenges.
We’ve landed on three questions that are critical to answer for this type of project:
1) What needs to be done? What does success look like? What are the critical challenges and hurdles?
PPE: design masks fitting diverse populations, scale manufacturing and reduce unit costs, establish rapid distribution systems for pandemic-time.
2) Who will pay for it? Are there feasible business cases? What would it take to get government funding? Could philanthropists cover it?
PPE: Most likely philanthropic grants (e.g. early employees at AI companies, OpenAI Foundation, Open Philanthropy), but pandemic insurance business models might be possible. We’re still testing this.
3) Who will make it happen? Who are the serial entrepreneurs, leaders, motivated generalists and experts who will take responsibility to drive this work?
PPE: Serial entrepreneurs with design, engineering and manufacturing experience.
Our next blog post will share our preliminary landscape analysis, detailing what work is needed, where the gaps are, and how it might get funded.
We’ve also narrowed our target audience to three main personas:
1) Serial entrepreneurs who build and scale new companies.
2) Smart, motivated generalists who do research, run experiments, co-found and join as early employees.
3) Domain experts who provide guidance to the entrepreneurs and generalists, help to validate what’s possible, and join as employees/executives.
What we’re doing now
Completing our landscape analysis.
Trying to recruit serial entrepreneurs to work on biodefense, to test if this target profile is viable.
Evaluating funding options by doing customer interviews with philanthropists, investors and government lobbying groups.
Building an expert network throughout the PPE space.
How to get in touch
We’re looking for:
Serial entrepreneurs interested in biodefense
Domain experts who are excited to advise us on how to make this happen
Philanthropists interested in supporting this work ($1-10B needed!)
Smart generalists who want to jump into the deep end
If you want to contribute, get in touch via email - we’re excited to hear from you!