Is it possible to somehow disentangle the funding for continuing the current project with funding for scaling it up? It seems to me there is a large exploratory value in EA Hotel, and the project should totally get funding to continue, but I would guess before significant up-scaling, it may make sense to do so some careful cost-benefit analysis whether it’s better to grow the existing hotel in Blackpool, or copy the model and create similar places e.g. one somewhere in the US and one somewhere within EU. (It is possible to get to the same costs in other places).
The scaling up is a stretch goal, and we could in theory have separate pots, but in practice one would funge against the other to some extent (due to e.g. me being more likely to spend my money on buying next door instead of paying for current running costs). Personally I think we should get next door whilst we can, as it will make scaling up by ~75% so much easier than buying a building even on the other side of the street (adding a door in the wall would create effectively one big building, which could be run with the same kitchen, buffet, laundry and staff as the current one). It’s also a relatively low risk investment as I don’t think the prices can get much lower. Adding capacity is also much easier than being more selective, and it’s more in keeping with the original idea (I’d rather the hotel didn’t end up super exclusive like all other sources of EA funding).
I’m all for franchaising the model to mainland Europe and the US though. Happy to let people copy everything we have. In practice this will require someone to step up and buy a building like I did though I think (unless this fundraiser exceeds all expectations!)
You might precommit to only spending some amount of your money on expansion if this amount has already been matched by donations from others. I’d personally be happy to refrain from expansion until we got the green light from external parties. It would be a good incentive to document our work.
I do have a sense that if the Blackpool hotel scaled to a population of 60 for example, this would give information that couldn’t at all be captured by having 3 distant 20-person hotels. Said information is probably? more interesting to me for social network effect reasons, but I’m not very experienced with EA meetups and stuff, so I might overrate the value of that.
Is it possible to somehow disentangle the funding for continuing the current project with funding for scaling it up? It seems to me there is a large exploratory value in EA Hotel, and the project should totally get funding to continue, but I would guess before significant up-scaling, it may make sense to do so some careful cost-benefit analysis whether it’s better to grow the existing hotel in Blackpool, or copy the model and create similar places e.g. one somewhere in the US and one somewhere within EU. (It is possible to get to the same costs in other places).
The scaling up is a stretch goal, and we could in theory have separate pots, but in practice one would funge against the other to some extent (due to e.g. me being more likely to spend my money on buying next door instead of paying for current running costs). Personally I think we should get next door whilst we can, as it will make scaling up by ~75% so much easier than buying a building even on the other side of the street (adding a door in the wall would create effectively one big building, which could be run with the same kitchen, buffet, laundry and staff as the current one). It’s also a relatively low risk investment as I don’t think the prices can get much lower. Adding capacity is also much easier than being more selective, and it’s more in keeping with the original idea (I’d rather the hotel didn’t end up super exclusive like all other sources of EA funding).
I’m all for franchaising the model to mainland Europe and the US though. Happy to let people copy everything we have. In practice this will require someone to step up and buy a building like I did though I think (unless this fundraiser exceeds all expectations!)
You might precommit to only spending some amount of your money on expansion if this amount has already been matched by donations from others. I’d personally be happy to refrain from expansion until we got the green light from external parties. It would be a good incentive to document our work.
I do have a sense that if the Blackpool hotel scaled to a population of 60 for example, this would give information that couldn’t at all be captured by having 3 distant 20-person hotels. Said information is probably? more interesting to me for social network effect reasons, but I’m not very experienced with EA meetups and stuff, so I might overrate the value of that.