resolves YES if there's an event with all of the following properties:
more than 50 attendees
organized by staff at manifold or manifund or similarly adjacent folks (e.g. me if i don't work there would count)
has the name "manifest" or some portmanteau in the name (e.g. "manivibefest" or "lessfest" would count)
is at least nominally for prediction markets, forecasting, and other related topics (betting, mechanism design, impact markets, etc)
i've seen a few markets about whether there will be a "manifest 2025," but it seems quite plausible that the next manifest will be run before 2025 โ in the fall or early winter of 2024.
Considerations for:
Manifest 2024 was a bunch of fun, people really enjoyed it, made new friends/connections, and are asking us to do another. Many positive externalities for our attendees
Also positive externalities for Manifold & Manifest: our own relationships with the people and companies who came. And we enjoyed it too!
Manifold & Manifest actually made a profit of something like ~$70k overall, before accounting for Rachel/Saul/my salaries & opportunity cost
We've developed some infrastructure/know-how so that running it again might take eg 30% less staff time
Running it again, we might be able to scale it up with regards to total attendees & prestige
Considerations against:
Opportunity cost. Organizing Manifest 2024 cost something like 3 months of Rachel/Saul's time and 1.5 months of mine. If it were a purely mercenary transaction I would value that time at more like $300k
Very unfortunate that event organizing doesn't have the scaling properties of eg software; each time there are relatively high one-time costs to make it happen
Diminishing marginal returns on the positive externalities to ourselves?
Some feeling of being aversive to sequels and wanting to try new things
Lighthaven is approximately capped at ~550 people, and switching venues would be some combination of requiring more organizer time, more costly, and less good attendee experience
haha yeah most likely -- though the relevant comparison is $300k in profit. Manifest 2024 took in something like 320k in revenue against 250k of costs (very rough, might be +/- $30k), so to purely offset our opportunity cost against the same expenses, our mysterious benefactor would have to pay something like $550k.
This market is overpriced given the survival rate of a general population of startups - you'd have to argue that Manifold is an extremely successful start-up (relative to general population) that will not run out of funding in two years.