(I’m just writing fan fiction here, I don’t know much about your project, this is like “discount hacker news” level advice. )
This seems great and could work!
I guess an obvious issue is “adverse selection”. You’re getting proposals that couldn’t 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 can’t 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 it’s 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, it’s 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 isn’t observable from their resume.
Adverse selection can get to the point it might be a stigma, e.g. good projects don’t even want to be part of this fund.
This might be perfectly viable and I’m wrong. Another suggestion that would help is to have a different angle or source of projects besides those “not quite over the line” at FTX/Open Phil.
(I’m just writing fan fiction here, I don’t know much about your project, this is like “discount hacker news” level advice. )
This seems great and could work!
I guess an obvious issue is “adverse selection”. You’re getting proposals that couldn’t 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 can’t 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 it’s 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, it’s 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 isn’t observable from their resume.
Adverse selection can get to the point it might be a stigma, e.g. good projects don’t even want to be part of this fund.
This might be perfectly viable and I’m wrong. Another suggestion that would help is to have a different angle or source of projects besides those “not quite over the line” at FTX/Open Phil.