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

Halcyon's McCormick says AI safety is bottlenecked by a shortage of experienced founders, not funding, with verification tech critically underbuilt.

• 30 orgs, $500M raised: Halcyon, a three-year-old hybrid nonprofit/venture fund, has helped launch ~30 AI safety, biosecurity, and cybersecurity organizations that collectively raised roughly $500M, including Goodfire (interpretability, >$1B valuation), AIUC (agent standards/insurance), Fathom, Asymmetric Security, Transluce, and Hadrian (PPE stockpiling).
• Talent, not capital, is the constraint: McCormick argues the binding bottleneck across AI safety, biosecurity, and cybersecurity is a shortage of experienced founders and leaders, not funding — and expects a coming 'mountain' of philanthropic liquidity from lab IPOs/employee wealth with too few strong organizations to absorb it.

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