The San Francisco Strategy for Animal Welfare

We have nine months

Prerequisite reading: The third wave of American philanthropy - by Nan Ransohoff

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We are entering what could be the Golden Age of Animal Welfare. $50B/year will be coming from the next wave of philanthropists in San Francisco, and the animal welfare movement could be one of their main partners. However, the default path is that a few highly aligned funders will contribute to incredibly substantial but still incremental growth, not a golden age. This feels pretty catastrophic, both for the animals and for the aligned funders who I imagine very much want to catalyze a golden age.

Wherever I go in San Francisco, people are down with the fact that factory farming completely blows and want to end it. The CEOs of both OpenAI and Anthropic are vegetarians. The question is how we convert this latent energy into anything useful, and help the people of this city to end factory farming. We already saw what this could directionally look like with the Save Our Bacon efforts.

In June 2026, the good people of San Francisco backed a $500 million plan to end airborne infections. Is this the most cost-effective plan ever? Probably not (obviously not because it’s not an animal welfare project), but by god are they moving a lot of money and doing something tremendous. We too must be tremendous. The new model we are working with is that there are thousands of people in this city with a limitless appetite to see incredible things done in the world with their new wealth, and the projects that step up to the plate will happen.

So what strategy should the animal movement adopt with regards to San Francisco? I think it is obvious that we should make a huge bet here and become San-Francisco-shaped:

• producing highly ambitious, fast-moving, and scalable projects

• having highly ambitious, fast-moving, and legible leaders and founders attached to these projects

• communicating about them in an effective way

• and turning animal welfare into a high status space that people are rewarded for associated with.

I think we are currently heavily underinvested in doing this.

Timing: If IPOs happen this year, followed by a standard 6 month lockup period where employees cannot sell stock, that implies the philanthropy wave will start in Spring 2027. Call it April/May: 9 months.

Here I’m going to outline what these bets look like. We should do all of them concurrently, and start immediately. Strategies 1 and 4 will need to be led by the fund managers. The other projects I am happy to get started on myself, but they will require budgets to fund and hire people. If we have all of these strategies done by early next year, we will be in a much stronger position.

A note on Status

This is an important concept that appears in Nan’s piece a few times. Animal welfare is incredibly low status. It is not cool. It is soggy and wet. It has an aesthetics problem that will cost trillions of animal lives. If animal welfare were high status, people would be socially rewarded for supporting it. We got closer to this with the Save Our Bacon efforts, but not entirely.

It needs to be the case that people receive clout and praise for doing heroic things to support animal welfare. We’re not close to that, but it’s achievable, and something that will snowball over time. In SF, the highest status thing is a person doing a monumental thing that wins hard and changes the world. Fortunately this is what we are doing; we just need to put more effort into highlighting these individuals. With more people in SF we can start platforming individual people founding or leading individual projects.

Status might be one of the most important ways to solve the talent constraint. Currently it is a sacrifice to work in this movement. I took a pay cut of well over 50% when I moved into it from tech. To bring in the talent we will need to navigate the next years, we must be both financially and socially rewarding.

Strategy 1: Focus on exactly one Megaproject at a time, starting with the Infrastructure Buildout

We need to learn from the reaction to the Save Our Bacon Act, the effort of the pork lobby to remove and prevent almost all animal welfare legislation in the US. It resulted in pieces from Nicholas Kristof and Ezra Klein at the New York Times and a half-hour interview of Lewis Bollard by Tomi Lahren at Fox News. But more importantly, it galvanized attention in San Francisco, receiving support from prominent people including Ajeya Cotra and Dwarkesh Patel who, among other things, wrote a Twitter post that got 500k views. These people are all heroes for showing up when it mattered, with no reward, and the machine god will spare them when it comes.

Why did this work? Partially it was the inherent urgency of the situation, but hugely it was because of how well we responded. We presented a clearly defined rallying cause:

• a clear problem,

• a clear solution,

• a clear person leading it,

• the backing of everyone to show that it was legitimate and the main thing to focus on.

This is the way! It is really hard for people to reason about unstructured problems, especially when they’re not spending all their time thinking about them. We should be taking the Save Our Bacon approach rather than just displaying an array of funds, which will not galvanize people. There are many urgent projects. The strategy here is to push megaprojects sequentially, one by one, with snowballing wins and momentum.

I think there is an obvious first choice to lead with next.

The Infrastructure Buildout

It is critically urgent that we increase the absorption capacity of the movement to at least $1B by mid-2027. In many ways this is already happening, but this is about packaging it, branding it, and communicating that it is our focus and the main thing to support.

We choose someone to be the Buildout Tsar, who will explicitly be the face of the effort. It will be their responsibility to work with people behind the scenes and ensure we are scaling capacity. We start the Buildout Fund, which is housed somewhere. This is the person and the fund that we coordinate around, and direct everyone to. Everyone in the movement should unanimously point at this person and this fund as the main thing, with the same effort we brought to Save Our Bacon.

Strategy 2: Start the SF Global Center for Animal Welfare

We need to do what people have been doing since time immemorial when they want to scale and make themselves known: work together in a building. I am incredibly jealous that the AI safety people get to work together at Constellation. There isn’t a hub exclusively for animal work anywhere in the world, so we should make it, and it should obviously be in San Francisco.

1. We need to greatly increase the communication bandwidth of our movement. Things are going to ramp up and get crazy, and we need the best possible coordination and speed.

2. A physical building increases our legibility and will make more people aware of our existence.

3. We need to spend more time together. David Coman-Hidy in What Did the Pro-Life Movement Get Right? calls community “the central unsolved problem of the animal movement”. Also read Jesse Marks’s Is coordination our comparative advantage? where his first recommendation is “spend time together, in person”.

4. It becomes an easy way for people to find us to work with us, removing a huge cognitive barrier. Speaking from experience, it is incredibly hard to get into the animal welfare movement from the outside.

5. If done well, we will project competency and power, improving the status of the movement.

6. Having a permanent space will reduce friction for bringing together people from SF.

There is a ton of office space in this city. It should be professional, exclusive, and invite-only to work or be there. And somewhere that will double as an incredible event space. We should find somewhere really, really nice. Outside people should want to be there.

Not in the East Bay

This should be in SF. Putting it in Berkeley would be an enormous tactical error. There is a reason the vast majority of startups and action are in SF: it is where the talent, attention, and capital is, and serendipity is invaluable. We can’t have people cloistered away, and apart from the action. The SF center should be near a BART station to make it easily accessible to people from other areas of the Bay.

Strategy 3: Put successful tech founders in charge of our organizations

This will also apply to the key projects in Strategy 1. This should be our first stop for recruitment.

Traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it. These problems demand tech-caliber talent and execution. Importantly, this new wave of funders grew up in tech and will likely care a lot about the quality of the talent working on these problems. I suspect many of them will have an affinity for philanthropic founders who come from tech with excellent track records and will by default be wary of folks who come from traditional philanthropy. They’ll also likely expect the organizations they fund to exhibit other startup qualities (execution speed, creativity, efficiency, etc.).

New orgs should be run by people of this profile, and advised and staffed by existing people in animal welfare, or new people we bring in.

The pitch will need to look something like this: “We have funding secured for this project. It is clearly defined and has buy-in from everyone, here’s the expected impact, here’s the (high) salary. It’s the most important thing we need to work on. The only missing piece is a solid operator to lead it.”

Create high-status on-ramps for founders. Great founders will start great organizations, which in turn will create natural on-ramps for other great people who want to work at them.

A great model for this is Astera. They pay founders $250K and give them up to $1.5M in project funding, and platform them. We should copy this, and explore other ways to make sure they are highly remunerated.

Strategy 4: Pour gasoline on our philanthropic capital allocators

These are the ‘philanthropic VCs.’ As with premier VCs like Sequoia, these allocators grant money but also bestow credibility and prestige.

The VC-like approaches will be able to move quickly, and distribute funding through different worldviews and approaches. We will likely need many attempts to find projects that can really scale well. I am very excited by the things with this shape that are emerging, such as the ones being run by Yaqi Grover, Aaron Boddy, and Liz Specht. We should throw a lot of weight into supporting them, and provide them with the space, employees, and resources they need to maximize whatever their plans are. These VCs are trying to create ambitious projects, but we should be encouraging them to be the most ambitious versions of themselves.

On top of this we should explore partnering with other groups thinking about philanthropic VCs, and work with actual VCs who might find this work interesting.

Strategy 5: Create pipelines for non-founder employees of tech companies to exit into animal welfare

There are employees of AI labs who are reaching the end of their vesting, or are otherwise post-economic, and looking to work on new projects. I think it is important that we don’t poach people doing important work, but at the same time there’s going to be a lot of people of this profile. We should make it easy and attractive for them to join our efforts, and show them how they could have an enormous impact.

Strategy 6: Focus on communications that resonate in SF

SF obsesses over the way founders communicate and capture attention, especially on Twitter. We should play this game. We can learn how to do this, and we probably know a lot of people who are very good at it and would help us. An OKR we should have is that we should have 10 well known animal welfare personalities by the end of the year. Lewis Bollard is our only celebrity. We need more!

We need to be known, and for people to see the amazing things we’re doing. Our PR will matter a lot, especially highlighting founders and projects. We should have a GM for SF comms, starting immediately.

For a taste of how this works, I recommend reading a16z’s New Media, One Year In, and Lulu Cheng Meservey’s Go Direct.

Strategy 7: Build the scene

We should be throwing great parties, and often. We should be known for our parties. Our people are awesome. This needs a budget and a person to focus on it. We should be renting cool venues and collaborating with people in different SF scenes.