MAGNIFICENT GRANTS

$100.000 fellowships to outliers taking down the walls of universities, credentialism, and elitist hierarchies to have impact on the world.

WHAT

Every year, 10 exceptional talented pioneers, younger than 25yrs old, will receive a $100.000 grant to bypass what slows them down and to fight the status quo.

MENTORSHIP

The Magnificent Grants team will be on standby to actively support the fellows in a 2 year program. Free from substantive interference or agendas of investors or academia. The fellows will all meet once a year and will see each other on a regular basis to help each other out to widen, deepen and launch ambitious ideas.

WHO

We seek candidates who apply unreasonable sense of urgency to extraordinary intellectual zoom range and fluidity, tackling audacious problems impacting the world.

HOW

We will analyze written applications leading to interviews in person. The questions aim for a maximum of 2000 words (4 pages).

WHY

(1) The time to escape from systemic norm captivity is now.

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(2) We go where effective altruism stops.

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(3) Edge in spotting extreme talent: our team built a track record as one of the world’s best misfit seed investors. We don’t fit in linear journeys ourselves.

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TRUSTEES

Barend Van den Brande

Barend founded Magnificent Grants in 2023.

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As a founder of Hummingbird Ventures, an early stage global VC fund backing outlier entrepreneurs overlooked by brandname investors, Barend brought a very different playbook to VC, already returning 3 Hummingbird funds >10x.

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Identifying talent in fundamentally different ways than other investors, Barend subsequently launched Nomads, one of the leading fund-of-funds investing $300m in below- the-radar funds outperforming well-known larger players.

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Barend passionately practices architecture since he was in college, without any formal training, designing and building a growing portfolio of spaces from scratch, working around tectonic friction, spatial stutter and poetic flow.

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Sidar Sahin

Founder & CEO of Peak Games, sold for $1.8B to Zynga in 2020. Before, Sidar was a co-founder of Trendyol, majority-owned by Alibaba. Sidar dropped out of college when he was 20 to launch his first startup.

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Salar al Khafaji

Founder & CEO of Terraform, automating on-site construction with robotics. Previously founded Silk, sold to Palantir in 2016, led commercial R&D projects at Palantir, mostly in the data science/ML space and with industrial clients. Dropped out of M.Sc. Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam.

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Firat Ileri

Firat is the General Partner at Hummingbird Ventures. He is involved with BillionToOne, Kernal Biologics, Layer and Aspire ao. He previously worked with Frontier Car Group, Gram Games, Peak Games and Merlin prior to their acquisition. He fast-tracked through his student years, entering MIT at age 16, receiving a Master of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

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FAQ
How does the Grant work?

A Magnificent Grant is a two-year $100.000 grant to jumpstart the journey of a new generation of innovators and builders . We do not claim titles in any projects nor take equity in your company.

Do I need to drop out?

Yes, we need you to drop out of your current college, school, job.

What is the age limit to apply?

Anyone aged 25 years or younger.

Do I need to be on the verge of launching a product or incorporated a company already?

No, but your chances of being selected go up when you show demonstrable progress toward realizing your vision.

Is there an application deadline?

Yes, October 31, 2023.

How many Grantees do you select?

Anywhere from 5 to 15 per batch.

Application Form

Next : 2  effective altruism
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PREV : 1  individual escape
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Next : 3 extreme talent
PREV : 2 effective altruism
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(1) The time to escape from systemic norm captivity is now.

Fig. 1 – Escaping systemic norms
¶Gradually, systems grow norms, rules and hierarchies to a point they may corrupt independent thinking, courage and action bias. Individual contributions, against the consensus of the ruling elite, fuel breakthroughs to a greater degree than what Western society feels comfortable admitting. It’s not individuals pitted against collective dynamics. But, certainly in matters of groundbreaking innovation, the two collide. Universities impose linear paroting and credentialism, smothering the best student’s sense of urgency and potential discontinuous impact on the world. Free market dynamics only do so much to picking and supporting truly special talent in the earliest and hardest part of the journey.

¶ Universities fuel group think. Exceptions to the rule are celebrated if they survived against the odds. Their journey prior to breakthrough is often sabotaged as institutions and government promote a collectivized view on progress. And progress itself is increasingly under pressure. Loud or with subtle undertone: Stopping progress to see our climate change worries go away. Fighting social injustice by putting a leash on progress. Progress is suspect with both older and younger generations as media lends a voice to the preachers of de-growth , invisibly amplified by egalitarism, systemic self protection, sycophancy, ecoreligion, or moral sophistry.

¶ If you sleep with the dog you get its fleas, and individuals bombarded with norms get normalized. Universities suffer from increasingly poorer and outdated education, creating an elite of clerks maintaining the status quo, increasingly unfit to address larger problems and faster change. More money, subsidies and donations to existing power structures triggered an explosion of well-documented kafkaian waste and misdirection of resources. And relying on 2nd hand knowledge stops people from practicing courage and first principle action.

¶ Legendary innovators and entrepreneurs realize in less than a decade what organizations would not accomplish in generations. Going with assumptions and existing rule sets: the quiet and alluring Sophistic morale of what seems the plausible way to succeed in innovation is what is stopping the best from looking harder. Today’s smartest young people don’t dare to dream big enough nor act on it with great impact.

¶ Magnificent Grants exists to have fellows gain at least a decade in bringing progress to the world.

⑵ We go where effective altruism stops.

Fig. 2 – Effective altruism trap
¶ Effective altruism is great to help one think about impact and beyond just feeling good as a contributor. Designed to help you think through where an extra dollar can do relatively most good, it’s also best to see it as a practice tool: once you covered three quarters of the way to full utilitarianism, you should venture out to where you have edge.

¶ Intrinsically, effective altruism is good to keep NGOs moral higher thrones in check and focused on the power of scarcity. It comes with 2 downsides: some goals like social justice, undercover research journalism, feminist empowerment have harder to calculate and longer term flywheel effects that risk getting snowed under. And it doesn’t promote the most daring edge cases: by moving resources to more proven solutions with lower marginal benefit, effective altruism is the enemy of edge case innovation.

¶ If I want to spend my dollar grant best now according to Effective Altruism logic, I piggy-back proven solutions and organizations: by waiting for more proof, my personal opportunity cost is lower than it is by betting on unproven new talent. Rapid social consensus formed by great EA institutions will attract increasingly money from contributors who have no edge in seeing future talent.

⑶ Edge in spotting extreme talent: our team built a track record as one  of the world’s best misfit seed investors. We don’t fit in linear journeys ourselves.

Fig. 3 – Finding misfit seed investors
¶ Our team obsessed for 20 years over long feedback loops to see the link between a certain type of innovator in their early twenties and impact on 100M people later in their journey. We didn’t just study such journeys, out of 100.000+ people scanned, we put our money on less than 50 who moved on to build 1B+ in ebitda collectively ever since. Not just in SF but globally. Our pattern recognition is unparralled: these entrepreneurs were amongst the most non-linear Xmen in an already colourful world of nerdy entrepreneurs. They faced more adversity early in life than others, and remarkably often propelled, not slowed, by neurodivergent spectrum thinking, they excelled.

¶ If we don’t go out looking with a special focus on some of the hardest to read talent, then who would? Being the first to back people who stand up against status quo and widely accepted hierarchies is what energizes us.

Application Form

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