I’d be interested to read some thorough thinking on how to trade-off between funding early orgs and later orgs. I’d have a bunch of considerations I would want to make sure made it in there but I don’t currently have any piece of work where I’ve tried to do a general collection of these considerations and weight them. I generally feel like I make better decisions when I can apply my intuitions to a series of smaller decisions that come together in some way.
A question I have that I would like to learn more about at some point (I currently assume it’s not very relevant for some time to come) is how to think about competitive dynamics in small donor funded markets. In large profit-driven markets it seems well accepted by economists that more competition is generally a good thing for the consumer. In smaller donor-driven markets it seems like a less closed case. If choosing between funding an established player or another org doing the same thing, how should we think about that? Presumably at some point the cost of duplicated effort, talent and capital requirements are overridden by the benefits of competition. My current working assumption is that that point is quite far along, especially given second mover advantage. If this is incorrect then perhaps we should be funding more early stage clones of existing orgs.
Better frameworks for thinking about fungibility. See my points from above reply to Tee. The reasoning used for these currently is pretty ad-hoc and potentially it’s better that way, but it does seem like it could be important enough to warrant further research. I think I saw a while back that it was on GPI’s research agenda.
Better frameworks for evaluating community building or spreading important ideas. It’s really hard and involves a number of highly sensitive input assumptions. Whilst this is of course very relevant for CEA-type groups and prioritisation research groups, it’s also relevant for groups like Founders Pledge. In poverty charity evaluation one question has been whether long-term flow through effects actually dominate the equation. Similarly, it might be the case that for money moving groups that the community building or important-idea-spreading functions might dominate the equation. This would be an important realisation for funders but potentially more so for those orgs themselves. A big issue is that it might be too case dependent to generalise. I don’t think a model would be very helpful, but a well thought through list of considerations to evaluate with some estimates on how much to weight each one could potentially be very useful.
What new research would be helpful to finding and/or evaluating opportunities?
I’d be interested to read some thorough thinking on how to trade-off between funding early orgs and later orgs. I’d have a bunch of considerations I would want to make sure made it in there but I don’t currently have any piece of work where I’ve tried to do a general collection of these considerations and weight them. I generally feel like I make better decisions when I can apply my intuitions to a series of smaller decisions that come together in some way.
A question I have that I would like to learn more about at some point (I currently assume it’s not very relevant for some time to come) is how to think about competitive dynamics in small donor funded markets. In large profit-driven markets it seems well accepted by economists that more competition is generally a good thing for the consumer. In smaller donor-driven markets it seems like a less closed case. If choosing between funding an established player or another org doing the same thing, how should we think about that? Presumably at some point the cost of duplicated effort, talent and capital requirements are overridden by the benefits of competition. My current working assumption is that that point is quite far along, especially given second mover advantage. If this is incorrect then perhaps we should be funding more early stage clones of existing orgs.
Better frameworks for thinking about fungibility. See my points from above reply to Tee. The reasoning used for these currently is pretty ad-hoc and potentially it’s better that way, but it does seem like it could be important enough to warrant further research. I think I saw a while back that it was on GPI’s research agenda.
Better frameworks for evaluating community building or spreading important ideas. It’s really hard and involves a number of highly sensitive input assumptions. Whilst this is of course very relevant for CEA-type groups and prioritisation research groups, it’s also relevant for groups like Founders Pledge. In poverty charity evaluation one question has been whether long-term flow through effects actually dominate the equation. Similarly, it might be the case that for money moving groups that the community building or important-idea-spreading functions might dominate the equation. This would be an important realisation for funders but potentially more so for those orgs themselves. A big issue is that it might be too case dependent to generalise. I don’t think a model would be very helpful, but a well thought through list of considerations to evaluate with some estimates on how much to weight each one could potentially be very useful.