I hadn’t seen Julian’s comment and I don’t fully agree with it.
Our needs vary over time and between roles. Some roles ~require several years of prior work experience (the more senior roles, specialist roles like infosec expert or China expert), but generalist grantmaker roles are often suitable for people straight out of undergrad or during/after grad school — e.g. on my team, that describes Trevor, Julian, Nick, and Catherine when we hired them, and they all moved tons of money, contributed to team-level strategy, etc. in their first 18mo. That said, there are only so many early-career folks we can hire before we need additional more-experienced management capacity to take them on.
Re: grantees. I’ll skip commenting on specific groups here, but here are some reasons that orgs can still have funding gaps even if we at CG agree they’re performing well and could probably spend more money productively: (a) they’re trying to diversify funders, and non-CG money is scarcer than CG money, (b) they could spend money in net-positive ways, but not above our ROI bar on the current margin, (c) they acquired ‘room for more funding’ recently, but we funded them not too long ago and can’t afford to investigate new RFMF claims for every grantee every few months, (d) they’re in our queue to investigate for renewal/expansion, but we don’t have staff capacity to do it anytime soon. In some cases the issue might also be “Scott heard they could spend more money but actually they just got approved for a huge CG grant and that info hasn’t propagated yet.”
Re: SFF. I’m not familiar with many of the grantees in the latest batch. Many are previous CG grantees we’re happy to fund generously, and I’m guessing a lot of those were cases of (a)-(d) above. In some cases I know of specific information that makes me bearish, and I wonder if grantmakers with more time and context would make the same decision.
But another point is that probably a majority of the FTE we acquire from this hiring round will (at least for my team) go into a mix of strategy development (for specific areas, like AI character or infosecurity or strategic communications) and “active grantmaking” (identify key gaps from the strategy work, outline and org/project that would address the gap, headhunt a founder for it) which usually takes a ton more time and context than “opportunitistic grantmaking” (responding to applications that come your way, which afaik is ~all SFF grants).
It strikes me that this implies it would be very useful if you were able to share some information with SFF about which bucket various applications fell into.
Maybe you can be more specific going forward, then? It’s easy to interpret your original post as a plea for smart people to help, but it sounds like your audience for these posts are much narrower.
I hadn’t seen Julian’s comment and I don’t fully agree with it.
Our needs vary over time and between roles. Some roles ~require several years of prior work experience (the more senior roles, specialist roles like infosec expert or China expert), but generalist grantmaker roles are often suitable for people straight out of undergrad or during/after grad school — e.g. on my team, that describes Trevor, Julian, Nick, and Catherine when we hired them, and they all moved tons of money, contributed to team-level strategy, etc. in their first 18mo. That said, there are only so many early-career folks we can hire before we need additional more-experienced management capacity to take them on.
Re: grantees. I’ll skip commenting on specific groups here, but here are some reasons that orgs can still have funding gaps even if we at CG agree they’re performing well and could probably spend more money productively: (a) they’re trying to diversify funders, and non-CG money is scarcer than CG money, (b) they could spend money in net-positive ways, but not above our ROI bar on the current margin, (c) they acquired ‘room for more funding’ recently, but we funded them not too long ago and can’t afford to investigate new RFMF claims for every grantee every few months, (d) they’re in our queue to investigate for renewal/expansion, but we don’t have staff capacity to do it anytime soon. In some cases the issue might also be “Scott heard they could spend more money but actually they just got approved for a huge CG grant and that info hasn’t propagated yet.”
Re: SFF. I’m not familiar with many of the grantees in the latest batch. Many are previous CG grantees we’re happy to fund generously, and I’m guessing a lot of those were cases of (a)-(d) above. In some cases I know of specific information that makes me bearish, and I wonder if grantmakers with more time and context would make the same decision.
But another point is that probably a majority of the FTE we acquire from this hiring round will (at least for my team) go into a mix of strategy development (for specific areas, like AI character or infosecurity or strategic communications) and “active grantmaking” (identify key gaps from the strategy work, outline and org/project that would address the gap, headhunt a founder for it) which usually takes a ton more time and context than “opportunitistic grantmaking” (responding to applications that come your way, which afaik is ~all SFF grants).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
It strikes me that this implies it would be very useful if you were able to share some information with SFF about which bucket various applications fell into.
Maybe you can be more specific going forward, then? It’s easy to interpret your original post as a plea for smart people to help, but it sounds like your audience for these posts are much narrower.