5050 is a flagship program of Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based venture firm and company builder founded in 2016 by Seth Bannon and Ela Madej. The program is entirely free with no equity taken, running 12-14 week cohorts in San Francisco, Boston, and London. Participants receive weekly workshops, one-on-one mentorship from Fifty Years partners, startup visits, and a multi-day off-site cohort camp. A dedicated AI safety track recruits scientists and engineers to build startups in areas such as safety evaluation, mechanistic interpretability, agent oversight infrastructure, and AI governance. The UK cohorts run in partnership with ARIA (the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency).
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Theory of Change
5050 operates on the premise that the AI safety field is underinvesting in the founder pathway: researchers with the technical depth to solve alignment problems often lack entrepreneurial training, and the field therefore misses a high-leverage intervention. By running free, equity-free cohorts that give researchers the skills, mentorship, and networks to start companies, 5050 aims to increase the number and quality of AI safety startups. These companies can build commercial infrastructure and tools — such as interpretability platforms, evaluation frameworks, and agent oversight systems — that the largest AI labs and the broader industry will adopt. The program's bet is that specialized startups combining safety research with commercial viability can accelerate deployment of safety-critical infrastructure in ways that purely academic or nonprofit approaches cannot.
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC