It looks like Manifest turned an overall profit of ~$80-85k. FWIW, the profits will be split 50% Manifold, 20% Saul and Rachel, 10% Manifund. Here's an approximate breakdown of costs and revenue:

(Kudos to @saulmunn for doing the accounting, and @rachel for helping with ticket breakdowns)

congrats!

Amazing! Holding my fingers for Manifest 2025!

Why is security at $0? There were professional guards, I doubt they worked for free.

presumably lighthaven paid for it

included in the venue rental I'm sure.

yup included in venue rental. (for context, this is not usually included in venue rental, this was an nonstandard deal in a ton of weird ways, one of which led to 'lighthaven pays for security guards.')

/strutheo/will-the-next-manifest-or-manifest

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

If someone paid the team $300k to host Manifest again this year, would you?

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.

I would like to propose that if the other Manifest is held somewhere geographically distinct (eg, Boston, NYC, London, Berlin), we now refer to Manifest Berkeley informally as “Mana-west” when attempting to distinguish between the two

Especially good because it will kick off a fierce competition to be known as Mana-Best

Oh man! Summer camp missed the opportunity to be called "Mana-Rest"

down to host an amateur comedy night or pun battle - call it Mana-Jest

Manifest NYC would be amazing.

You mean Mana-hatten

Twice a year feels to often to me, especially if they are similar in scope. Which one should a non-US resident prioritize?

Non-US resident here. Absolutely agree

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.

there can be a community run event

65%: If Manifold survives 2026, there will be manifest: 80%

35%: If manifold does not survive 2026, community will arrange manifest: 30%

Overall prob: 62.5%

The question is not "Will Manifold hold Manifest in/after 2026". In fact, Saul is talking about holding another manifest this year!

Oh thanks for correction. I completely misunderstood this market.

it seems quite plausible that the next manifest will be run before 2025 — in the fall or early winter of 2024.

🙌

😃