Founder in Residence

• Location: Remote, with plans for local hubs in SF, DC, London, and Tel Aviv
• Ask us about relocation support if you're intersted in moving to a hub.

Travel: likely 5-20% travel, largely consisting of team offsites meeting in the hubs and conferences

Advancements in AI bring both opportunities and serious risks. Atlas Ignota takes on society-scale AI risks that no existing institution is built to address — we design the intervention, validate it with domain experts and funders, then recruit and empower the career professional who will own it.

You can think of us as:

A tiger team that identifies, scopes, and launches interventions that aren't a good fit for existing organizations

A design studio developing and staffing product requirements docs for coordination and market failures

A think tank combined with whatever their analog of "tech transfer" would be.

Atlas is looking to incubate a cohort of Founders to each scope a different potential intervention and exit Atlas (with support) to lead it.

That’s why Atlas is launching a selective incubator for career professionals who have spent the last decade or more executing on relevant security topics, and now want to direct their skills to the most important risks facing society from growing AI capabilities. Our job is to lower the barriers to entry — both the cost of leaving your current career path and the risk that a good idea never gets off the ground — and to meaningfully raise the odds that the effort you launch succeeds. As an Incubated Founder, we’ll work with you to take one risk from a rough problem statement to a fundable plan: sharpening a concrete intervention, pressure-testing it against the field, and building the relationships and founding team to execute on it.

Founders will have between six months and two years to research a problem and develop a pitch, but we hold that timeline loosely — a founder is done when their effort is ready to stand on its own, not when a calendar says so. The goal is for founders to develop an ambitious plan as quickly as possible (early graduations welcome), complete with conditionally committed users/stakeholders, an excellent founding team, expert advisors, and organizational plans like milestones — completion consists of pitching funders like Coefficient Giving on an ambitious grant, having assembled an excellent founding team, and launching with a clear path to scaling up your project substantially, such as $10 million or more.