Thank you for sharing these reflections, Asya! And for your service as the LTFF chair!
I feel confused about the difficulty of fund manager hiring. One source of confusion comes from the importance of expertise (/doing-good-direct-work), as you touch on in the post:
Historically, we’ve had trouble hiring fund managers, especially in technical AI alignment, largely for the reasons mentioned above (people generally want to focus on their work). I think there’s an extent to which I’ve contributed to our difficulty in hiring, in that I’m not sold that people doing good direct work should be taking on additional responsibilities as fund managers (so haven’t been great at convincing people to join)
In addition to the high opportunity cost of time for expert fund managers, I would have guessed that small differences between the EV of marginal grants pushes in the direction of expertise being less important. But then I don’t understand why hiring fund managers would be unusually challenging. Wouldn’t deemphasizing expertise increase the pool of eligible fund managers, thereby making hiring easier?
(Perhaps I‘m confusing relative and absolute difficulty — expertise being less important would make hiring relatively easier, but it’s still absolutely tough?)
The second source of confusion comes reconciling the difficulty of finding fund managers with the fact that FTXFF and Manifund seemed to find part-time grantmakers quite easily. I don’t know how many regrantors and grant-recommenders FTXFF ended up with, but the last rumour I heard was between 100 and 200. Manifund are currently on 16 and seem keen to expand. I would’ve thought that there is some intersection between regrantors with the top, say, 30% of grantmaking records by your light, those satisfying other hiring criteria you might have, and those currently willing to work with LTFF.
Is the difference in the scale of grants LTFF fund managers make vs regrantors? Or expectations around regularity of response (regrantors are more flexible)? Or you’re not excited about the records of regrantors in general? Or something else?
I feel kind of confused about this—I agree in theory re: EV of marginal grants, but my own experience interacting with grant evaluations from people who I’ve felt were weaker has been that sometimes they’re in favor of rejecting a grant that I think would be really good, or missing a consideration that I think would make a grant pretty bad, and furthermore it’s often hard to quickly tell if this is the case, e.g. they’ll give a stylized summary of what’s going on with the applicant, but I won’t know how much to trust that summary, so feel compelled to read the full grant application (which is bad, because I already bottleneck the process so much).
I basically feel pretty confident that lowering the bar for fund managers would lead to worse grants by my lights, but I don’t think I have a great grasp on the full space of trade-offs (i.e. how much worse, exactly? is the decrease in quality worth it to be able to get through more grants in a timely way?); it’s totally plausible to me there would be some set-up that would overall be better than the current one.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
I think the pitch for being a regrantor for the FTXFF or Manifund is pretty different than the one for the LTFF, both in terms of structure and raw number of hours.
As a regrantor, you get to opt-in to making the grants you’re most excited about on your own time, whereas on the LTFF, you’re responsible for spending a certain number of hours per week (historically, we’ve asked for a minimum of 5, though in practice people work less than that) evaluating incoming grant applications. (As a concrete instance of this, Adam Gleave is currently a regrantor at Manifund but left the LTFF a while ago—this isn’t to cast aspersions on Adam; just to illustrate that people have differing preferences between the two.)
I do think a possible restructure for the LTFF would be to switch to an opt-in regranting set-up, but that would be a pretty different way of operating. (I’d guess a bunch of good grants coming in through our application form would be missed by default, but it could still be overall preferable from the perspective of being more sustainable for fund managers.)
I would imagine that some of the time saved in hiring expert grantmakers could be spent training junior grantmakers. (In my somewhat analogous experience running selection for a highly competitive program, I certainly notice that some considerations that I now think are very important were entirely missing from my early decision-making!) Should I think about your comment as coming from a hypothetical that is net or gross of that time investment?
As for improved set-ups, how about something like:
Junior grantmaker receives disproportionate training on downside considerations.
Junior grantmaker evaluates grants and rates downside risk.
Above some downside risk cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the senior grantmaker checks in.
Below the cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the funding is improved without further checks.
(If you think missing great grants is a bigger deal than accepting bad ones, analogously change the above.)
Intuitively, I would guess that this set-up could improve quite a bit on the waste-of-your-time and speed problems, without giving up too much on better-grants-by-your-lights. But I’m sure I’m missing helpful context.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
Definitely makes sense that the pitches are different. I guess I would have thought of this as part of “other hiring criteria you might have”—considerations that make it more challenging to select from the pool of people with some grantmaking experience, but for which some people tick the box.
In addition to the high opportunity cost of time for expert fund managers, I would have guessed that small differences between the EV of marginal grants pushes in the direction of expertise being less important. But then I don’t understand why hiring fund managers would be unusually challenging. Wouldn’t deemphasizing expertise increase the pool of eligible fund managers, thereby making hiring easier?
I think a decent number of grants are pretty high variance and quite a few grants that seem marginal to some seem pretty negative to others (particularly more experienced fund managers).
I would’ve thought there is some intersection between regrantors with the top, say, 30% of grantmaking records by your light, those satisfying other hiring criteria you might have, and those currently willing to work with LTFF.
I didn’t quite parse this, but my impression is that we either weren’t able to attract excellent fund managers, or we were looking for different things to FTXFF and Manifund such that our bar ended up looking higher. I do think that our experiments with hiring people that we are less excited about have made me less keen to hire more people close to the bar but more keen to create junior positions and increase management capacity.
I talked to someone from Manifund who said that it was easy to find people to put up their hand to be grantmakers, but harder to get them to actually give out grants.
Random idea that just came to me – require regranters to put down a “deposit” (say, $2,000 if their budget is $100,000), which they only get back once they’ve donated at least 50% of their budget. Not only would this create an incentive for them to actually regrant, but it would also make them think a bit harder before accepting to be a regranter about whether they were actually committed. (OTOH, I can also think of negative aspects of this setup.)
Speed due to indecision is a very solveable problem (e.g. tie funding that a given regrantor can give out to shorter window, or have shared pot that other regrantors could use on their preferred projects first).
The indecision is due to the ~need to actively seek out grants, which wouldn’t be a problem for LTFF.
(In case relevant: I am a Manifund regrantor who just got back from holiday and plans to start working on it today! Thank you for the gentle push! :P)
Thank you for sharing these reflections, Asya! And for your service as the LTFF chair!
I feel confused about the difficulty of fund manager hiring. One source of confusion comes from the importance of expertise (/doing-good-direct-work), as you touch on in the post:
In addition to the high opportunity cost of time for expert fund managers, I would have guessed that small differences between the EV of marginal grants pushes in the direction of expertise being less important. But then I don’t understand why hiring fund managers would be unusually challenging. Wouldn’t deemphasizing expertise increase the pool of eligible fund managers, thereby making hiring easier?
(Perhaps I‘m confusing relative and absolute difficulty — expertise being less important would make hiring relatively easier, but it’s still absolutely tough?)
The second source of confusion comes reconciling the difficulty of finding fund managers with the fact that FTXFF and Manifund seemed to find part-time grantmakers quite easily. I don’t know how many regrantors and grant-recommenders FTXFF ended up with, but the last rumour I heard was between 100 and 200. Manifund are currently on 16 and seem keen to expand. I would’ve thought that there is some intersection between regrantors with the top, say, 30% of grantmaking records by your light, those satisfying other hiring criteria you might have, and those currently willing to work with LTFF.
Is the difference in the scale of grants LTFF fund managers make vs regrantors? Or expectations around regularity of response (regrantors are more flexible)? Or you’re not excited about the records of regrantors in general? Or something else?
Re: deemphasizing expertise:
I feel kind of confused about this—I agree in theory re: EV of marginal grants, but my own experience interacting with grant evaluations from people who I’ve felt were weaker has been that sometimes they’re in favor of rejecting a grant that I think would be really good, or missing a consideration that I think would make a grant pretty bad, and furthermore it’s often hard to quickly tell if this is the case, e.g. they’ll give a stylized summary of what’s going on with the applicant, but I won’t know how much to trust that summary, so feel compelled to read the full grant application (which is bad, because I already bottleneck the process so much).
I basically feel pretty confident that lowering the bar for fund managers would lead to worse grants by my lights, but I don’t think I have a great grasp on the full space of trade-offs (i.e. how much worse, exactly? is the decrease in quality worth it to be able to get through more grants in a timely way?); it’s totally plausible to me there would be some set-up that would overall be better than the current one.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
I think the pitch for being a regrantor for the FTXFF or Manifund is pretty different than the one for the LTFF, both in terms of structure and raw number of hours.
As a regrantor, you get to opt-in to making the grants you’re most excited about on your own time, whereas on the LTFF, you’re responsible for spending a certain number of hours per week (historically, we’ve asked for a minimum of 5, though in practice people work less than that) evaluating incoming grant applications. (As a concrete instance of this, Adam Gleave is currently a regrantor at Manifund but left the LTFF a while ago—this isn’t to cast aspersions on Adam; just to illustrate that people have differing preferences between the two.)
I do think a possible restructure for the LTFF would be to switch to an opt-in regranting set-up, but that would be a pretty different way of operating. (I’d guess a bunch of good grants coming in through our application form would be missed by default, but it could still be overall preferable from the perspective of being more sustainable for fund managers.)
Thank you for the helpful replies Asya.
Re: deemphasizing expertise:
I would imagine that some of the time saved in hiring expert grantmakers could be spent training junior grantmakers. (In my somewhat analogous experience running selection for a highly competitive program, I certainly notice that some considerations that I now think are very important were entirely missing from my early decision-making!) Should I think about your comment as coming from a hypothetical that is net or gross of that time investment?
As for improved set-ups, how about something like:
Junior grantmaker receives disproportionate training on downside considerations.
Junior grantmaker evaluates grants and rates downside risk.
Above some downside risk cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the senior grantmaker checks in.
Below the cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the funding is improved without further checks.
(If you think missing great grants is a bigger deal than accepting bad ones, analogously change the above.)
Intuitively, I would guess that this set-up could improve quite a bit on the waste-of-your-time and speed problems, without giving up too much on better-grants-by-your-lights. But I’m sure I’m missing helpful context.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
Definitely makes sense that the pitches are different. I guess I would have thought of this as part of “other hiring criteria you might have”—considerations that make it more challenging to select from the pool of people with some grantmaking experience, but for which some people tick the box.
I think a decent number of grants are pretty high variance and quite a few grants that seem marginal to some seem pretty negative to others (particularly more experienced fund managers).
I didn’t quite parse this, but my impression is that we either weren’t able to attract excellent fund managers, or we were looking for different things to FTXFF and Manifund such that our bar ended up looking higher. I do think that our experiments with hiring people that we are less excited about have made me less keen to hire more people close to the bar but more keen to create junior positions and increase management capacity.
Thanks Caleb! Noting that my reply to Asya is relevant here too.
I talked to someone from Manifund who said that it was easy to find people to put up their hand to be grantmakers, but harder to get them to actually give out grants.
Random idea that just came to me – require regranters to put down a “deposit” (say, $2,000 if their budget is $100,000), which they only get back once they’ve donated at least 50% of their budget. Not only would this create an incentive for them to actually regrant, but it would also make them think a bit harder before accepting to be a regranter about whether they were actually committed. (OTOH, I can also think of negative aspects of this setup.)
Seems like:
FTXFF did move a lot of money, alas.
Speed due to indecision is a very solveable problem (e.g. tie funding that a given regrantor can give out to shorter window, or have shared pot that other regrantors could use on their preferred projects first).
The indecision is due to the ~need to actively seek out grants, which wouldn’t be a problem for LTFF.
(In case relevant: I am a Manifund regrantor who just got back from holiday and plans to start working on it today! Thank you for the gentle push! :P)