(on phone againâI really need to change this wakeup routine đ!)
This was helpful. Alongside further consideration of risks, it has made me update to thinking about an intermediate approach. Will be interested to hear what people think!
This approach could be a platform like Kickstarter that is managed and moderated by EA funders. It is an optimal home for projects that are in the gap between good enough to fund centrally by EA orgs and judged best never to fund.
For instabce, if you submit to FTX for and they think that you had a good idea but werenât quite sure enough that you could pull it off, or that it wasnât high value relative to competitors, then you get the opportunity to rework the application into funding request for this platform.
It then lives there so that others can see it and support it if they want. Maybe your local community members know you better or there is a single large donor who is more sympathetic to your theory of change and together these are sufficient to give you some initial funding to test the idea.
Having such platform therefore helps aggregate interesting projects and helps individuals and organisations to find and support them. It also reduces the effort involved in seeking funding by reducing it to being closer to submitting a single application.
It addresses several of the issues raised in the post and elsewhere without much additional risk and also provides a better way to do innovation competitions and store and leverage the ideas.
(Iâm just writing fan fiction here, I donât know much about your project, this is like âdiscount hacker newsâ level advice. )
This seems great and could work!
I guess an obvious issue is âadverse selectionâ. Youâre getting proposals that couldnât make the cut, so I would be concerned about the quality of the pool of proposals.
At some point, average quality might be too low for viability, so the fund canât sustain itself or justify resources. Related considerations:
Adverse selection probably gets worse the more generous FTX or other funders gets
Related to the above, I guess itâs relatively common to be generous to give smaller starter grants, so the niche is might be particularly crowded.
Note that many grant makers ask for revise and resubmits, itâs relationship focused, not grant focused.
Note that adverse selection often happens on complex, hard to see characteristics. E.g. people are hucksters asking money for a business, the cause area is implausible and this is camouflaged, or the founding team is bad or misguided and this isnât observable from their resume.
Adverse selection can get to the point it might be a stigma, e.g. good projects donât even want to be part of this fund.
This might be perfectly viable and Iâm wrong. Another suggestion that would help is to have a different angle or source of projects besides those ânot quite over the lineâ at FTX/âOpen Phil.
(on phone againâI really need to change this wakeup routine đ!)
This was helpful. Alongside further consideration of risks, it has made me update to thinking about an intermediate approach. Will be interested to hear what people think!
This approach could be a platform like Kickstarter that is managed and moderated by EA funders. It is an optimal home for projects that are in the gap between good enough to fund centrally by EA orgs and judged best never to fund.
For instabce, if you submit to FTX for and they think that you had a good idea but werenât quite sure enough that you could pull it off, or that it wasnât high value relative to competitors, then you get the opportunity to rework the application into funding request for this platform.
It then lives there so that others can see it and support it if they want. Maybe your local community members know you better or there is a single large donor who is more sympathetic to your theory of change and together these are sufficient to give you some initial funding to test the idea.
Having such platform therefore helps aggregate interesting projects and helps individuals and organisations to find and support them. It also reduces the effort involved in seeking funding by reducing it to being closer to submitting a single application.
It addresses several of the issues raised in the post and elsewhere without much additional risk and also provides a better way to do innovation competitions and store and leverage the ideas.
(Iâm just writing fan fiction here, I donât know much about your project, this is like âdiscount hacker newsâ level advice. )
This seems great and could work!
I guess an obvious issue is âadverse selectionâ. Youâre getting proposals that couldnât make the cut, so I would be concerned about the quality of the pool of proposals.
At some point, average quality might be too low for viability, so the fund canât sustain itself or justify resources. Related considerations:
Adverse selection probably gets worse the more generous FTX or other funders gets
Related to the above, I guess itâs relatively common to be generous to give smaller starter grants, so the niche is might be particularly crowded.
Note that many grant makers ask for revise and resubmits, itâs relationship focused, not grant focused.
Note that adverse selection often happens on complex, hard to see characteristics. E.g. people are hucksters asking money for a business, the cause area is implausible and this is camouflaged, or the founding team is bad or misguided and this isnât observable from their resume.
Adverse selection can get to the point it might be a stigma, e.g. good projects donât even want to be part of this fund.
This might be perfectly viable and Iâm wrong. Another suggestion that would help is to have a different angle or source of projects besides those ânot quite over the lineâ at FTX/âOpen Phil.