I’d love to hear more about any of this. In particular...
I don’t see fiscal sponsorship alone providing the benefits you describe in your post. I think those require active management, genuinely viewing one project as owned by an org, rather than two separate orgs/projects that happen to share a legal structure. When I (and I think others) say fiscal sponsorship, I mean only sharing legal structure and specifically not providing oversight.
But you had already done the work to establish QURI independently and chose to change to sponsorship, so I imagine there was a big win there. What was that?
Do you think there were warning signs of this at EVF? Because my understanding was it was a rubber stamp until it wasn’t, and by the time it wasn’t it was too late to fix. So I currently don’t think “I’ve haven’t seen things like this happen [at RP]” is strong evidence.
It’s true that large companies exist and benefit from size, but large companies rarely have department heads that want to risk their own organization in service of the public good. The prosocial motivation changes the math, although I don’t know by how much.
I don’t see fiscal sponsorship alone providing the benefits you describe in your post.
At least our relationship with RP now is fairly heavy. They take a lot of ownership over our finances and operations. If QURI were to do sketchy operations/financial activities, I’d expect them to object and/or to remove us.
So I think fiscal sponsorships can create a floor insofar as operations and basic policies go. They don’t help much with strategy/product, but ops is an area where orgs can really falter.
> But you had already done the work to establish QURI independently and chose to change to sponsorship, so I imagine there was a big win there. What was that?
I didn’t want to hire someone full-time or part-time to do ops. They have a team familiar with operations challenges, and available to do much of what we needed. If our ops liason leaves, they will find another—we don’t have to. We get some package of “direct operations support” with “oversight/availability from someone fairly junior” (the COO).
> Do you think there were warning signs of this at EVF? Because my understanding was it was a rubber stamp until it wasn’t, and by the time it wasn’t it was too late to fix.
I’m not a legal expert, but I’d expect that ones could have flagged this, if they would have spent much time searching. My impression is that EVF was sort of hastily set up for the level of complexity it was. For example, they brought in Howie to lead the UK side, but fairly late along.
> large companies rarely have department heads that want to risk their own organization in service of the public good
I’m not sure how unique this is. I’m sure that lots of company departments would like to take brand/liability risks that would be bad for the company as a whole—for example, maybe a very scammy/broken Sony product that would make a lot of money in the short term, but be really bad for the Sony brand. I think it’s generally assumed that subdivisions get more benefit from the good brand and organization, than they lose by the loss of flexibility. There’s a lot of writing about acquisitions and spinoffs—occasionally, various ones make sense, and I assume there are good heuristics as to when.
I’d love to hear more about any of this. In particular...
I don’t see fiscal sponsorship alone providing the benefits you describe in your post. I think those require active management, genuinely viewing one project as owned by an org, rather than two separate orgs/projects that happen to share a legal structure. When I (and I think others) say fiscal sponsorship, I mean only sharing legal structure and specifically not providing oversight.
But you had already done the work to establish QURI independently and chose to change to sponsorship, so I imagine there was a big win there. What was that?
Do you think there were warning signs of this at EVF? Because my understanding was it was a rubber stamp until it wasn’t, and by the time it wasn’t it was too late to fix. So I currently don’t think “I’ve haven’t seen things like this happen [at RP]” is strong evidence.
It’s true that large companies exist and benefit from size, but large companies rarely have department heads that want to risk their own organization in service of the public good. The prosocial motivation changes the math, although I don’t know by how much.
At least our relationship with RP now is fairly heavy. They take a lot of ownership over our finances and operations. If QURI were to do sketchy operations/financial activities, I’d expect them to object and/or to remove us.
So I think fiscal sponsorships can create a floor insofar as operations and basic policies go. They don’t help much with strategy/product, but ops is an area where orgs can really falter.
> But you had already done the work to establish QURI independently and chose to change to sponsorship, so I imagine there was a big win there. What was that?
I didn’t want to hire someone full-time or part-time to do ops. They have a team familiar with operations challenges, and available to do much of what we needed. If our ops liason leaves, they will find another—we don’t have to. We get some package of “direct operations support” with “oversight/availability from someone fairly junior” (the COO).
> Do you think there were warning signs of this at EVF? Because my understanding was it was a rubber stamp until it wasn’t, and by the time it wasn’t it was too late to fix.
I’m not a legal expert, but I’d expect that ones could have flagged this, if they would have spent much time searching. My impression is that EVF was sort of hastily set up for the level of complexity it was. For example, they brought in Howie to lead the UK side, but fairly late along.
> large companies rarely have department heads that want to risk their own organization in service of the public good
I’m not sure how unique this is. I’m sure that lots of company departments would like to take brand/liability risks that would be bad for the company as a whole—for example, maybe a very scammy/broken Sony product that would make a lot of money in the short term, but be really bad for the Sony brand. I think it’s generally assumed that subdivisions get more benefit from the good brand and organization, than they lose by the loss of flexibility. There’s a lot of writing about acquisitions and spinoffs—occasionally, various ones make sense, and I assume there are good heuristics as to when.