The Civitech Incubator recruits top talent to launch, test, and scale new civic engagement projects. We offer competitive salaries, training, mentorship, and a network focused on excellence. Our goal is to fund 15-40 founders, operators, and researchers over the coming year to tackle challenges facing US democratic institutions and improve civic participation.
American civic and democratic institutions face a significant talent gap. Decision-makers often lack analytical and operational skills. Median salaries in this sector are just $40,000/year. This lack of talent leads to predictably bad outcomes: poorly directed efforts, information failures, and misaligned incentives.
Our goals:
Identify the most promising nonpartisan interventions in democracy and rule of law
Recruit and fund talented people to execute those interventions
Provide advising and support as teams grow
Track and measure outcomes to create feedback loops within the ecosystem
How Civitech Incubator works:
We're adapting the Y Combinator and Charity Entrepreneurship models to civic engagement. Primarily we'll recruit "batches" of people (mostly without much pro-democracy or civic experience) to start new initiatives, and connect them with experienced operators for advising, as well as potential funders.
We aim to connect talent with research, advising and funding. We'll have a research team who helps prioritize top pro-democracy project ideas, and then recruit great people—dynamic, entrepreneurial people with tech or otherwise fast-scaling leadership experience who want to try focusing on politics and democracy—to spend a few months focusing on starting something new and potentially very impactful. We'll give them 6 months of funding and, with research, advice and connections, they'll hopefully be able to make meaningful progress and raise on their own to continue after the initial 6 months.
Most funds raised (90%+) will go to more and better incubation. We have already raised the money for our team's operational overhead for 2026. We intend to run a batch that starts in mid February, and the size and quality of the batch will depend heavily on how much we can raise for the project. Marginal funding will go towards:
Finding, funding and training more incubees (currently $50k per person)
Raising salaries for incubees to make the incubation offer more competitive
More and better advising, training and other programming for incubees
Giving larger initial grants to incubee projects we think can be really impactful
More and better in-house and commissioned research on the most impactful civic interventions on American democracy
Note: We're planning to use Manifund funds exclusively for research and non-partisan advocacy (501c3-compatible), including salaries, operational costs, and non-partisan projects. There's a lot that can be done with c3 funding. If you prefer to give c4 funding, please reach out to Lincoln separately.
Jeremy Smith (Team Lead): CEO of Civitech, which third-party evaluator Focus 4 Democracy found to be the most cost-effective organization in its category during the 2024 election cycle. West Point graduate and Marshall Scholar. Previously founded Register2Vote, which helped identify and turn out 400,000+ new voters from 2018-2020. Extensive experience managing large-scale operations, including a $20M communications operation with 900+ staff running dozens of RCTs.
Lincoln Quirk (Incubator Director): Co-founded fintech companies Sendwave (acquired for $500M) and Wave ($2B valuation). Y Combinator alum (2012). Serves on the board of Effective Ventures and advises Charity Entrepreneurship, which has launched dozens of highly effective nonprofits.
Most likely causes of failure:
Talent recruitment: We may struggle to attract sufficient high-caliber founders willing to work in pro-dem/civics, either because the salaries we offer are still too low, or the space just seems too fraught to attract talent.
Founder mismatch: Incubated projects may not align well with founders' skills, or founders may clash with each other, leading to poor execution despite good ideas.
Measurement: Civic outcomes are notoriously hard to measure, making it difficult to identify what's working and iterate effectively.
Political coordination failures: The broader pro-democracy ecosystem may not collaborate effectively with our incubees or startups.
What happens if we fail:
By default, most incubated projects succeed while others don't, resulting in moderate impact and useful learnings about what works in civic incubation. Hopefully this is still a success case. Of course, maybe the money is wasted: we spend a bunch of money without producing sustainable organizations or measurable improvements.
Blowback risk: There is always some risk that an incubated project will make mistakes that can lead to the incubator being implicated, reputationally/financially/legally. We intend to mitigate this through oversight of incubees and mentorship from experienced advisors and staff, but it remains a risk.
The Civitech Incubator is fiscally sponsored by Civitech.