as a person working on meta-projects I would be interested if there are any plans to broaden the amount of projects that you are considering for funding?
Your grants demonstrate that you seem to only fund very much established players and focus on āvery safeā bets ā probably due to time limitations. Have you considered pitching opportunities for project proposals, putting out requests for proposals regarding specific challenges, or topping up EA Grants so that more proposal have the chance of being considered and funded?
My concerns is that right now it is still pretty difficult to get funding if you are not an established player and I donāt really see any path for new players to emerge other than by personal connections which is strongly dependent on serendipity or physical location. Something like EA Grants is by far not a perfect solution (e.g., itās too open which leads to unclear criteria and there is no feedback at all which disallows iterative improvements and learning) but at least more projects are even considered for funding.
We are interested in funding new projects (see also Alex Fosterās response above).
I am also concerned about the difficulty of promising new projects to be discovered. Personally, I am happy to invest some time into evaluating new projects. This is why we have a grant consideration form you can fill out to be considered for receiving a grant. That said, we are time capacity constrained and would not be able to handle 100 applications per month in our current setup.
I have personally considered putting out proposals like you are suggesting, but am concerned about the time investment. First I would like to see how much interest we can gather in different ways.
The challenges of funding small early stage orgs deserves a whole piece to itself but I can say that this topic has come up internally quite a few times and we will continue to try to address it.
We did make a few small grants to smaller orgs this time around as we wanted to signal that we supported those projects.
One potential future is that we decide to give a much larger proportion of the grant allocation to smaller orgs. That would require either for the larger orgs to more easily fill their room for funding (one clear signal of this would be those orgs no longer needing capital from flexible donors that might have funded smaller projects in the alternative) or for some strong arguments for increasing our prioritisation of smaller orgs. Right now the benefit of experimenting by funding small orgs is traded-off against the increased uncertainty.
Some of the larger orgs are also only large because they are performing incredibly well. Itās worth pointing out that they were previously smaller orgs themselves and that the benefit of experimenting with earlier stage orgs isnāt realised unless they can be scaled up once theyāve proven their approach.
This is also how I currently feel about EA grants. Iād love to see them work out how to scale up their operation. Itās a project that is more bottlenecked on talent than funding and early stage re-granting is really hard. An obvious retort would be for them to lower their standards and give out more grants with less analysis (in venture capital this technique is distastefully referred to āspray and prayā). This isnāt particularly feasible at present I donāt think. Any re-granting program has its own donors and there arenāt any major donors that I have heard of that are willing to have their funds distributed in this manner. Itās also not clear that this would be a good thing given the risk of bad orgs with seed funding doing significant damage through PR risks, dilution effects or similar. Maybe the benefits outweigh the risks but either way, this is another effect that puts off donors from giving to a re-granting program that uses this approach.
My best guess, is that EA Grantsā (or similar groupās) best approach is to take their time to work out how to deploy early stage capital in a systematic and professional manner that can attract funding from larger foundations like Open Phil that usually donāt have capacity to handle much early stage funding.
For now, and I donāt speak for the whole team here, my best estimates are that very early-stage funding in most cases is lower impact than filing the funding gaps of growing orgs and for an impact-maximising fund such as ourselves we should only be putting smaller checks into particularly promising early stage orgs that we want to signal confidence in.
Iām very open to having my mind changed on this and have enjoyed taking the time to put thought to paper in this AMA today (as is hopefully apparent from the volume of text for any of those still reading).
Also to clarify: while I donāt currently think itās highest impact for this fund to be making lots of early stage grants due to the points raised above and others, I do think that a systematic team of full-time staff putting all necessary processes in place, attracting the right talent would be able to raise and deploy lots of early stage funding in a way that is highly valuable. Iām very much hoping that this what EA Grants manage to achieve.
This is also not a closed topic for us and itās not that unlikely that, come next granting round and having discussed this further, the EA Meta Fund team decide to devote more of our allocation to earlier stage groups.
Hey,
as a person working on meta-projects I would be interested if there are any plans to broaden the amount of projects that you are considering for funding?
Your grants demonstrate that you seem to only fund very much established players and focus on āvery safeā bets ā probably due to time limitations. Have you considered pitching opportunities for project proposals, putting out requests for proposals regarding specific challenges, or topping up EA Grants so that more proposal have the chance of being considered and funded?
My concerns is that right now it is still pretty difficult to get funding if you are not an established player and I donāt really see any path for new players to emerge other than by personal connections which is strongly dependent on serendipity or physical location. Something like EA Grants is by far not a perfect solution (e.g., itās too open which leads to unclear criteria and there is no feedback at all which disallows iterative improvements and learning) but at least more projects are even considered for funding.
Hello Alex,
We are interested in funding new projects (see also Alex Fosterās response above).
I am also concerned about the difficulty of promising new projects to be discovered. Personally, I am happy to invest some time into evaluating new projects. This is why we have a grant consideration form you can fill out to be considered for receiving a grant. That said, we are time capacity constrained and would not be able to handle 100 applications per month in our current setup.
I have personally considered putting out proposals like you are suggesting, but am concerned about the time investment. First I would like to see how much interest we can gather in different ways.
The challenges of funding small early stage orgs deserves a whole piece to itself but I can say that this topic has come up internally quite a few times and we will continue to try to address it.
We did make a few small grants to smaller orgs this time around as we wanted to signal that we supported those projects.
One potential future is that we decide to give a much larger proportion of the grant allocation to smaller orgs. That would require either for the larger orgs to more easily fill their room for funding (one clear signal of this would be those orgs no longer needing capital from flexible donors that might have funded smaller projects in the alternative) or for some strong arguments for increasing our prioritisation of smaller orgs. Right now the benefit of experimenting by funding small orgs is traded-off against the increased uncertainty.
Some of the larger orgs are also only large because they are performing incredibly well. Itās worth pointing out that they were previously smaller orgs themselves and that the benefit of experimenting with earlier stage orgs isnāt realised unless they can be scaled up once theyāve proven their approach.
This is also how I currently feel about EA grants. Iād love to see them work out how to scale up their operation. Itās a project that is more bottlenecked on talent than funding and early stage re-granting is really hard. An obvious retort would be for them to lower their standards and give out more grants with less analysis (in venture capital this technique is distastefully referred to āspray and prayā). This isnāt particularly feasible at present I donāt think. Any re-granting program has its own donors and there arenāt any major donors that I have heard of that are willing to have their funds distributed in this manner. Itās also not clear that this would be a good thing given the risk of bad orgs with seed funding doing significant damage through PR risks, dilution effects or similar. Maybe the benefits outweigh the risks but either way, this is another effect that puts off donors from giving to a re-granting program that uses this approach.
My best guess, is that EA Grantsā (or similar groupās) best approach is to take their time to work out how to deploy early stage capital in a systematic and professional manner that can attract funding from larger foundations like Open Phil that usually donāt have capacity to handle much early stage funding.
For now, and I donāt speak for the whole team here, my best estimates are that very early-stage funding in most cases is lower impact than filing the funding gaps of growing orgs and for an impact-maximising fund such as ourselves we should only be putting smaller checks into particularly promising early stage orgs that we want to signal confidence in.
Iām very open to having my mind changed on this and have enjoyed taking the time to put thought to paper in this AMA today (as is hopefully apparent from the volume of text for any of those still reading).
Also to clarify: while I donāt currently think itās highest impact for this fund to be making lots of early stage grants due to the points raised above and others, I do think that a systematic team of full-time staff putting all necessary processes in place, attracting the right talent would be able to raise and deploy lots of early stage funding in a way that is highly valuable. Iām very much hoping that this what EA Grants manage to achieve.
This is also not a closed topic for us and itās not that unlikely that, come next granting round and having discussed this further, the EA Meta Fund team decide to devote more of our allocation to earlier stage groups.