Catherine from Community Health here. I was aware of this grant application. After discussion with my colleagues in Community Health who were also aware of the same concerns about Nonlinear mentioned in this post, I decided not to advise EAIF to decline this application. Some of the reasons for that were:
The funding was for a project run by three other people (not Nonlinear staff), and I had no concerns about those people working on this project
The three people were not going to be living with Kat and Emerson, which made risks to them lower
At that stage, I had heard some but not all of the complaints listed in this post, so I didn’t have the same picture as I do now. The complaints were confidential, which constrained the possible moves I could make – I wasn’t able to get more information, and I couldn’t share information with the EAIF team that might lead to someone identifying the complainant or Nonlinear guessing that someone complaining had affected their grant decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
I didn’t request that EAIF send the money directly to the three people involved in the project, rather than Nonlinear, but I was pleased that it happened
Looking back, given the information and constraints I had at the time, I think this was a reasonable decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
Just in case it wasn’t clear from Catherine’s comment, if Catherine hadn’t recommended that we require an incubation contract, it’s very unlikely that we would have asked for one. In light of Ben’s post, setting up this contract seems like a very good decision.
Catherine from Community Health here. I was aware of this grant application. After discussion with my colleagues in Community Health who were also aware of the same concerns about Nonlinear mentioned in this post, I decided not to advise EAIF to decline this application. Some of the reasons for that were:
The funding was for a project run by three other people (not Nonlinear staff), and I had no concerns about those people working on this project
The three people were not going to be living with Kat and Emerson, which made risks to them lower
At that stage, I had heard some but not all of the complaints listed in this post, so I didn’t have the same picture as I do now. The complaints were confidential, which constrained the possible moves I could make – I wasn’t able to get more information, and I couldn’t share information with the EAIF team that might lead to someone identifying the complainant or Nonlinear guessing that someone complaining had affected their grant decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
I didn’t request that EAIF send the money directly to the three people involved in the project, rather than Nonlinear, but I was pleased that it happened
Looking back, given the information and constraints I had at the time, I think this was a reasonable decision.
Just in case it wasn’t clear from Catherine’s comment, if Catherine hadn’t recommended that we require an incubation contract, it’s very unlikely that we would have asked for one. In light of Ben’s post, setting up this contract seems like a very good decision.