Deciding which projects to fund is hard, and one of the reasons for that is that it’s hard to guess which projects will succeed and which will fail. But wait, startups have solved this problem perfectly: Anybody is allowed to vet a startup and decide to invest (bet) their money on this startup succeeding, and if the startup does succeed, then the early investors get a big financial return.
The EA community could do the same, only it is missing the part where we give big financial returns to projects that turned out good.
This would make the fund’s job much easier: They would have to vet which project helped IN RETROSPECT, which is much easier, and they’ll leave the hard prediction work to the market.
Context for proposing this
I heard of a promising EA project that is for some reason having trouble raising funds. I’m considering funding it myself, though I am not rich and that would be somewhat broken to do. But I AM rich enough to fund this project and bet on it working well enough to get a Retroactive Public Good grant in the future, if such a thing existed. I also might have some advantage over the EA Fund in vetting this project.
TL;DR: EA Retroactive Public Good’s Funding
In your format:
Deciding which projects to fund is hard, and one of the reasons for that is that it’s hard to guess which projects will succeed and which will fail. But wait, startups have solved this problem perfectly: Anybody is allowed to vet a startup and decide to invest (bet) their money on this startup succeeding, and if the startup does succeed, then the early investors get a big financial return.
The EA community could do the same, only it is missing the part where we give big financial returns to projects that turned out good.
This would make the fund’s job much easier: They would have to vet which project helped IN RETROSPECT, which is much easier, and they’ll leave the hard prediction work to the market.
Context for proposing this
I heard of a promising EA project that is for some reason having trouble raising funds. I’m considering funding it myself, though I am not rich and that would be somewhat broken to do. But I AM rich enough to fund this project and bet on it working well enough to get a Retroactive Public Good grant in the future, if such a thing existed. I also might have some advantage over the EA Fund in vetting this project.
In Vitalik’s words:
https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c
Related: Impact Certificates