title: Co-Found Lens Academy With Me. (We have early users and funding)
author: Luc Brinkman
contenttype: lesswrongpost
publication: LessWrong
published: 2026-03-31T14:05:15.435000+00:00
source_url: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LDbGob3XJ3LDBFmAe/co-found-lens-academy-with-me-we-have-early-users-and
word_count: 2513
tl;dr. Lens Academy is creating scalable superingelligence x-risk education with several USPs. Current team: Luc (full time founder, technical generalist) and several part time contributors. We have users and funding. Looking for a cofounder who's either a nontechnical generalist or a technical generalist.
(Drafted by human; edited by AI, re-edited by human.)
Misaligned superintelligence might end humanity. The number of people who understand this deeply enough to act on it is far too small.
Lens Academy exists to change that. We're building scalable AI Safety education focused on what we think matters most: the case for existential risk from superintelligence, why alignment is hard, and how to think strategically about what to work on. Not a survey of all possible AI risks, but the part that's most likely to cause human extinction, taught in a way that hopefully actually sticks.
We do this through 1-on-1 AI tutoring, active learning, and measured outcomes. The whole platform is designed to scale: under $10 per student, volunteer facilitators, automated operations.
We're looking for a co-founder.
You can be a technical generalist or a nontechnical generalist.
What you'll do at Lens Academy
Being a co-founder means choosing from a buffet of work. Here's what needs doing at Lens:
(You're not expected to do or be great at all of these!)
Strategy & Product thinking. Deciding what to build and what to ignore. Understanding what students and navigators (our group facilitators) need. Product, especially nonprofit product, is pretty neglected in AI Safety (in my eyes), so there are loads of impactful things waiting to be built beyond our core education platform.
Software Development, full stack. You don't need to be a senior developer already. I care more that you use AI tools well (e.g. try to juggle several Claude Code instances and sometimes max out your Claude Max subscription -- in which case we'll get you a second one) and that you can learn quickly from the senior developers who advise us. Stack: Python backend, React (TypeScript) frontend, Supabase (PostgreSQL). A lot of what we do is custom-built.
Design. UX/UI. Mostly design taste; we don't have a ton of time to run a lot of user interviews and experiments, though some of those too.
Marketing and growth. Positioning, messaging, figuring out how to get Lens in front of the right people. Figuring out how to get viral growth with a short time constant (e.g. get people to recommend the course to others after 1 week instead of 5).
Community and volunteer management. Both through personal meetings and scalable systems: recruit, onboard, and keep volunteer navigators (group facilitators). Keeping them happy and effective. Setting up a "volunteer ladder": steps people can take to start small and then increasingly contribute more to the Lens Academy ecosystem, if they want to.
Course and content development. Writing and structuring course material, working with contributors, designing the learning experience.
Fundraising and networking. Writing grant applications, talking to donors, etc.
What we're looking for
There isn't one profile that fits. We could use a technical generalist, a non-technical generalist, or potentially both. As co-founders, we'd divide the work based on our strengths and interests. We can also contract out specific things we still need outside of the cofounders.
Cofounder matching is notoriously difficult. It's not really a role you can hire for. Unlike for employees, for cofounders, vibes are as important as skills. And this is a matter of personal preference and just happening to be a match. It's our job together (you and I) to figure out if we are a match or not.
That said, the bar for a cofounder is high. I'm looking for someone who is intelligent and agentic (or, in YC's terms: smart and effective) — someone who figures things out, moves fast, and doesn't need to be told what to do next. If you've previously been deeply motivated by a project and put in serious effort, that's a good sign. If you work well remotely (not everyone does — this is largely a personality thing), that's important too. Luc is based in Zurich (Central European Time), so having a decent time overlap with that helps.
Existential risk from misaligned superintelligence
You should find the case for existential risk from misaligned superintelligence compelling – or at least be seriously open to it. Lens Academy's main focus is on this specific problem. If you already know you'd rather work on AI biosecurity, power concentration, or gradual disempowerment, this probably isn't the right fit for you. If you're unsure which part of AI Safety matters most, that's fine – we can talk through the arguments together (or rather, you can talk through the arguments together with the AI Safety experts in and around our team. Because I myself am no such expert.)
This work can be emotionally challenging. The world is in serious trouble, and Lens Academy aims at what might be the scariest part of the problem. On a day-to-day basis, the atmosphere here is optimistic and builder-oriented, but it's a type of optimism that doesn't require pretending the situation is less messed up than it is.
Compensation
We have early funding. Compensation is aiming to be competitive with other AI Safety nonprofits — better than what you'd earn at a typical nonprofit, but below what similar roles would pay at a for-profit company. But for now our funding allows for only a pretty basic salary.
Since Lens Academy is a nonprofit, there's no equity, no shares, no exit. We think good salaries matter precisely because of this — you'll be putting in startup-level hours without startup-level financial upside. As a cofounder, you'll be part of fundraising, so we'll work together to get you a good salary.
Hours are long but extremely flexible, and health — cognitive, mental, emotional, physical — comes first. You still need a life besides co-founding. Also, no one will count your hours. Either you will gradually find out that you find working on Lens Academy incredibly exciting (though that excitement takes time to grow; please don't fake it to me or yourself at day 1), and then the hours will come naturally, or you don't, and then this isn't the right project for you to cofound.
Who you'd work with
Luc (full time founder) and several great part-time contributors. A message from Luc (who also wrote the rest of this post):
Hi, I'm Luc, the founder of Lens Academy.
This is me:
I started Lens because it seemed like the most impactful thing I could do for AI Safety. I'm relatively new to the field (since summer 2025), so for long-term strategy I work with several people who've spent 5+ years in the AI Safety community. They saw that something like Lens was needed; I agreed with their reasoning and got going.
Some background: interdisciplinary engineer, Master's from ETH Zürich (top ~10 university worldwide, finished 2nd of my class), published papers including one cited 50+ times. I previously co-founded and led SOLID, a student organisation developing iron-based energy storage — still running after 9 years with a commercial spinoff that raised over 100M euros.
I don't have a formal software engineering background. Most of my week is in Claude Code, and I learn fast with access to senior developer mentors.
On a personal level: I'm energetic, honest, and pretty direct. Outside of Lens, I go to improv comedy class weekly (though I might soon switch to some dancing class), I like hiking and skiing, playing board games with friends, and tinkering with DIY engineering projects. I've had less time for all of those since starting Lens, which is a tradeoff that I think is worth making. Working on Lens Academy is genuinely the most fun and exciting thing I can imagine doing. The topic is heavy (potential human extinction is not exactly fun), but I find trying to be part of the solution incredibly fulfilling.
Oh and I figured probably a short video helps you figure out whether you might enjoy working together, so here's a quick video. (It's unscripted and I was recently ill, so forgive the red eyes and occasional topic jumps.)
https://youtube.com/shorts/qHK7zbNvoF0
Just like your CV can't really tell me who you are, this section can't really tell you who I am. As we work together, we'll figure out if we're a good fit. (If you want more of a sense of how I think, see my posts on AI Safety entrepreneurship or get a sense of some of my projects on https://www.lucbrinkman.org/. Or see my CV/resume from some months back.)
By the way, as a nonprofit, we'll probably stay quite small. Chances are we'll be with
How to reach out and what happens next
Co-founder matching is more like dating than hiring. Either we're a good fit or we're not, and the easiest way to find out seems to be to talk. (see e.g. the YC Guide to Co-founder matching, which I can share privately in DM)
After you reach out, we'll book a short get-to-know call. After one or two calls, you can do some actual work for Lens Academy, as a work trial. Next, it would probably make sense for us to meet in person. We have some funding available for trains/flights if needed.
If you think there's a reasonable chance this could work – say, more than 5-10% – just join our Discord servers and then send a message in the cofounder interestee thread. Maybe also go by the opinion of people who know you well. And if you know you're likely to downplay your capabilities to yourself and others, err on the side of reaching out. I'll DM you a link for booking a meeting. For now: no CV required, no cover letter, no coding test. We'll take it from there. If there's a lot of response, we might add a short application process.
Oh, and send this post to anyone you think might be interested. We'll take our time for cofounder matching so this will likely stay relevant for several months.
Let's try to make a dent in this incredibly hard problem and help humanity continue for a long, happy time.
Tags: AI Alignment Fieldbuilding, AI
Karma: 35 | Comments: 0 | Author: Luc Brinkman
Top Comments
yams (6 karma):
New reacts available only to paid users of LessWrong Premium (not you freeloaders) facilitate frictionless, borderline-telepathic communication.
‘I will NEVER change my mind’: Use this react to assert that you’re content with exactly how wrong you are (which is not at all), and that the case is permanently closed on this matter, so far as you’re concerned.1
‘EY Stamp of Approval’: Use this react to assert that, on your personal authority, Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the contents of the comment, rendering it beyond reproach.
‘NOT EY Approved’: Use this react to assert that, on your personal authority, Eliezer Yudkowsky disagrees with the contents of the comment, rendering it immensely reproachful. Users who accrue too many ‘NOT EY Approved’ reacts will have their accounts suspended (although actual thresholds here have yet to be set).2
‘May as well be AI’: Use this react when you’re indifferent to whether or not a statement was generated by AI because shit, it may as well be. You’re ignoring it either way.
‘Have you even read plane crash?’: Use this react when your interlocutor’s unfamiliarity with prior literature is clearly on display.
‘China Hawk’: Use this react to assert American supremacy and insist that its recipient is derelict in their duty to ensure the supremacy of the greatest country in the history of conscious life from here to the other side of the singularity.
‘Toilet’3
‘Sure, buddy’: We all know that the optimal amount of mental masturbation is non-zero. But some reach far beyond the zone of optimality and into the depths of their pants to produce truly monstrous works of self-gratification. Previously, one was compelled to express such an opinion obliquely on LessWrong, or else shatter the decorum of the space and open oneself up to similar critiques. In Beta, we now have the power to quietly acknowledge the reality of the situation, without derailing the gratification itself.
———————————————————————————————
1This has replaced the ‘I beseech thee’ emoji, which never worked anyway.
2 Note that both EY-invoking reacts are invisible to anyone logged into the @-EliezerYudkowsky LessWrong account, or from any IP address that has ever been logged into that account. No point in having the man himself weigh in when so many LessWrong users are so well practiced at speaking on his behalf!
3Beta users haven’t settled on how this react ought to be deployed. I’ve seen utilizations ranging from ‘This post belongs in the toilet’ to ‘I enjoyed reading this on the toilet.’
Boaz Barak (5 karma):
I think this is a decent way to describe it. When models are just “misaligned,“ we can potentially increase reliability via having one model monitor or check the work of the other, since what the model does has some relation the the prompt it is given. When a model is adversarially misaligned then the monitor could completely ignore its prompt and collude with the model it’s supposed to be monitoring.
gwern (5 karma):
This has been discussed a lot in the past, often under the term 'mode collapse' and RLHF and flattened logits etc. Hollis Robbins has some good posts the past 2 years on her Substack on the bad writing of chatbot LLMs. It's hard to say what is 'the' problem, since there seem to be multiple overlapping phenomenon.
WilliamKiely (9 karma):
New book out today: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence
This article (archived paywall bypass) by the author includes some quotes:
Hassabis acknowledges the setbacks, and yet he keeps racing forward. His faith in governance mechanisms now shattered, he has come to see salvation, paradoxically, in his own career advancement. He knows that his personal goal is to shape AI for the good of humanity. His new safety agenda therefore involves securing personal influence.
“Safety isn’t about governance structures,” Hassabis now says. “I mean, even if you have a governance board, it probably wouldn’t do the right thing when it came to the crunch.” Rather, his goal is to earn “a seat at the table, so when a safety issue comes up,” he can help decide the solutions.
“Things aren’t black and white, especially when you are dealing with a technology with unknown consequences,” he told me. “So you have to be adaptable. You have to move from idealist to realist, but hopefully still with your values.”
Vlad Sitalo (6 karma):
I keep thinking about having a server where I'd run ai coding agents.
Why: always on for recurring tasks (that would use my discount tokens 🙃) + I can send messages to them from my phone + better isolation vs running things directly on my laptop (but still some scoped access)
Do people do this/what's your setup?
(I'm vaguely aware of the Mac mini OpenClaw meme, but I'm not particularly interested in running local models, so doesn't seem like the best fit?)