Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck

What It Covers

Mike McCormick, founder of Halcyon — a hybrid nonprofit grantmaker and venture fund — explains how his organization has helped launch 30 AI safety, cybersecurity, and biosecurity organizations in three years, collectively raising $500 million. The conversation covers founder selection criteria, verification technology gaps, governance structures, and why talented professionals from non-technical backgrounds should consider pivoting into AI safety now.

Key Questions Answered

• •Founder Bottleneck Over Funding Gap: The primary constraint in AI safety is not money but experienced founders and operators. Halcyon's core thesis holds that as frontier labs approach IPO, billions in capital will flow into the space with insufficient high-quality organizations to absorb it. Professionals who build those organizations now effectively "write the menu" for future philanthropists. The talent shortage is so acute that even a 100x increase in serious organizations across interpretability, oversight, and verification would still fall short of what the problem requires.
• •Career Transition Grants as Catalysts: Halcyon's most effective tool is the career transition grant — typically $50,000 to $200,000 — paid to accomplished professionals while they determine what to build, not after. Goodfire's founders Eric Ho and Dan Balsam received Halcyon's first-ever grants while still running their previous company. That financial runway, combined with network access at a Northern California retreat, enabled them to identify interpretability as their focus and eventually reach unicorn status with a Series B above $1 billion.
• •Zero-to-One Window as Strategic Focus: Halcyon concentrates resources on the twelve months surrounding an organization's founding — six months before and six months after launch. This period covers co-founder recruitment, organizational structure decisions (nonprofit vs. for-profit, board composition), first hires, and initial product development. Most funders engage after proof of concept; Halcyon's differentiation is operating upstream of that moment, when foundational decisions that determine long-term mission alignment are still being made.
• •Four Investment Criteria for Mission-Aligned Bets: Halcyon evaluates every investment against four criteria: the core product must directly address an AI safety problem (not as a side benefit); the organization must have viable business prospects; founders must demonstrate missionary motivation rather than financial opportunism; and founders must show the operational capability to succeed independent of mission. Criterion three — founder motivation — carries the most weight. McCormick explicitly deprioritizes founders whose primary driver is financial return, even when other criteria are met.
• •Verification as the Linchpin of Any Pacing Agreement: Any meaningful slowdown or international coordination agreement between labs or governments requires technical verification infrastructure that does not yet exist at scale. Specific needs include zero-knowledge proof systems for inference verification, fully verifiable cloud infrastructure, hardware-level attestation, and cryptographic confirmation that a deployed model matches its claimed specification. Halcyon has invested in early companies in this space and is hosting a 25-founder retreat specifically focused on cryptographic, software, hardware, and governance components of the verification stack.
• •Biosecurity Has Legible, Fundable Solutions Now: Unlike alignment, biosecurity contains tractable near-term problems with defined price tags. Hadrian, a Halcyon-backed organization, calculated that stockpiling sufficient PPE to keep every American essential worker operational during a severe pandemic costs on the order of a few hundred million dollars. Indoor air quality hardening — combining HEPA filtration, far-UVC, and glycol vapor technologies — represents another concrete intervention with immediate non-pandemic ROI through reduced sick days, making adoption viable without requiring a crisis as a forcing function.
• •Governance Structures Reduce But Cannot Eliminate Mission Drift: Public benefit corporation status, mission-protective board structures, and safety-aligned investor bases all nudge organizations toward long-term mission fidelity but none functions as a reliable safeguard alone. McCormick points to visible drift at frontier labs as evidence that even sophisticated governance frameworks erode under financial pressure and organizational scale. His practical response is to spend extended time with founders before committing — observing behavior under operational stress, not just evaluating pitch decks — and to prioritize demonstrated hands-on execution over strategic articulation.