# Emergent Ventures **Draft profile.** Low-overhead fellowship-and-grant program launched in **2018** by **[[Tyler Cowen]]** at the **[[Mercatus Center]]** at George Mason University. Funds **entrepreneurs and "brilliant minds"** working on highly-scalable, "zero-to-one" ideas to improve society. **Median grant: $10K–$25K**, but with a distinctive philosophy: grants range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, with **applicants as young as 13** eligible. The program is one of the **earliest and longest-running institutional expressions of [[Progress Studies]]**, predating the 2019 *Atlantic* essay that formally launched the movement. ## Operating Philosophy Cowen's stated philosophy for Emergent Ventures, repeatedly outlined on Marginal Revolution: - **Credentials don't matter.** No degree, no formal business plan, no track record required. - **Speed matters.** Decisions are made fast (often days, not months). - **Small grants can have outsized impact.** A $10K grant to a teenager at the right moment can change a career. - **Talent identification is the bottleneck.** Most resources are wasted on the application process; EV minimizes it. - **Iterate publicly.** Cowen publishes the lists of recipients with project descriptions. The program is **deliberately structured as a counter-model** to traditional grantmaking — small, fast, ideosyncratic, founder-philosophy-driven (Cowen makes most decisions personally). ## Recipients EV recipients have ranged across: - **STEM prodigies** — 13–18-year-old programmers, mathematicians, biologists. - **Independent researchers and writers** — bloggers, podcasters, Substack writers working on neglected topics. - **Early-stage entrepreneurs** — pre-revenue founders working on tractable problems. - **Mid-career academics with unconventional projects** — work that wouldn't fit a normal NSF/NIH application. - **Talent-identification meta-projects** — grants to fund *other* talent-identification programs. - **Specific Progress Studies–adjacent writers** — many [[Roots of Progress]] alumni have been EV recipients. The recipient list is **publicly maintained** at New Science's tracker and on Marginal Revolution. Notable patterns: - Heavy international representation (India, Africa, post-Soviet states). - Frequent grants to people who later go on to found organizations. - The recipient pool functions as a **leading indicator** for who's next in the Progress Studies talent pipeline. ## Verticals Over time, Emergent Ventures has spawned several specialized verticals: - **Emergent Ventures India** (2020) — separate India-focused track. - **Emergent Ventures Africa** — Africa-focused track. - **Emergent Ventures Ukraine** — launched after the 2022 invasion. - **Underrepresented STEM talent identification** vertical — announced as a new line of giving. - **Climate** vertical — for energy and climate-focused projects. ## Why It Matters in This KB ### 1. It is the earliest [[Progress Studies]] institutional vehicle Launched **2018** — a year *before* the *Atlantic* "We Need a New Science of Progress" essay. Emergent Ventures is functionally **the prototype that proved Progress Studies could operate as a real institutional project** before it had a name. ### 2. It is the talent feeder for the rest of the [[Progress Studies]] stack EV recipients reliably populate [[Roots of Progress]] fellowships, [[Institute for Progress]] policy roles, [[Stripe Press]] author lists, and adjacent academic-and-Substack positions. The recipient → downstream-institution pipeline is **the actual talent pipeline of the movement**. ### 3. It is Tyler Cowen's personal-judgment instrument at scale Most grantmaking is committee-based and consensus-driven. Emergent Ventures is **a single person (Cowen) making most decisions** with a small budget and rapid turnaround. The closest comparable operation is [[Peter Thiel]]'s Thiel Fellowship — but EV is broader, smaller-grant-sized, and more academically-oriented. **Tracking EV recipients is tracking Cowen's intuition about who matters next.** ### 4. It is the [[Mercatus Center]] philanthropy bridge EV is housed at Mercatus, the GMU-affiliated free-market think tank funded by [[Koch Network]] and [[Bradley Foundation]]. That places EV at a structural intersection: **conservative philanthropic capital underwriting a program whose recipients populate Progress Studies institutions that take [[Open Philanthropy]] money**. The dollars travel from the Koch network through Mercatus through Emergent Ventures through grant recipients into [[Institute for Progress]] / [[Roots of Progress]] / [[Arc Institute]] orbits. ## Critiques - **Single-decisionmaker risk** — Cowen's personal idiosyncrasies become institutional patterns. - **In-group selection effects** — recipients disproportionately come from the rationalist, EA, Progress Studies, or Marginal Revolution reader communities. - **Mercatus parent organization** — recipients are accepting grants from a Koch-funded operation, which some critics treat as a conservative-coding flag (even though most recipients show no political signature). - **Hard to evaluate at scale** — the program's "small bets on talent" thesis is plausible but resists rigorous outcome measurement. ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Add full recipient list with KB-relevant individuals flagged - Document specific EV recipient → institution-founder pipelines (multiple examples: [[Roots of Progress]] alumni, IFP staff, Arc Institute personnel) - Detail [[Tyler Cowen]] (no page yet) personal-judgment philosophy - Map the EV → [[Mercatus Center]] → [[Koch Network]] funding lineage - Investigate whether EV recipients receive follow-on funding from [[Open Philanthropy]] or [[Schmidt Futures]] - Compare with [[Thiel Fellowship]] as the closest comparable talent-identification operation ## See Also - [[Tyler Cowen]] — Founder and primary decision-maker - [[Mercatus Center]] — Parent institution - [[Progress Studies]] — Adjacent movement - [[Roots of Progress]] — Sister institution / recipient pipeline endpoint - [[Institute for Progress]] — Sister institution / recipient pipeline endpoint - [[Fast Grants]] — Sister Cowen-Collison grantmaking program - [[Thiel Fellowship]] — Comparable talent-identification operation - [[Philanthropy Ecosystem]] — Money-flow MOC