My rough understanding is that funders seem to like taking bets on early orgs, which tend to be small, and funders tend to be more reluctant to give large amounts of funding to large orgs.
This is probably sensible—there indeed ought to be a higher bar for higher amounts of funding and you will actually have a track record to analyze which is probably not great as the initial bets even if just due to mean reversion—but I think implicitly pushes towards smaller orgs.
Another issue is that most funders—notably though not OpenPhil—don’t seem interested in entering into the enduring multi-year funding commitments that are necessary to sustain a large org. Which is totally fine as it is their money after all, but it also tilts the landscape towards smaller orgs as for a larger org it can be very difficult to handle the uncertainty of getting $1M one year but then having no idea if or when that funding could be expected to recur.
There’s a lot of management and organizational culture things to fix within EA to sustain larger orgs but I personally think if we wanted more larger orgs the key place to start would be to make the funding ecosystem better equipped to support larger orgs.
Note that these thoughts are my own personal ones and certainly shouldn’t be taken as complaints or comments on behalf of other RP execs tasked with running and sustaining a relatively large org.
This feels similar to me to how EA invests so much in very early career individuals, but they have a fairly limited window before being dropped or at least finding their options much more limited. It’s more like buying lottery tickets than making investments.
Is the “like taking bets on early orgs” thing true of OpenPhil? I think CEA is one of their larger grantees, and I don’t feel like their reluctance has been superlinear in the size of our budget, but I don’t have a ton of insight.
My rough understanding is that funders seem to like taking bets on early orgs, which tend to be small, and funders tend to be more reluctant to give large amounts of funding to large orgs.
This is probably sensible—there indeed ought to be a higher bar for higher amounts of funding and you will actually have a track record to analyze which is probably not great as the initial bets even if just due to mean reversion—but I think implicitly pushes towards smaller orgs.
Another issue is that most funders—notably though not OpenPhil—don’t seem interested in entering into the enduring multi-year funding commitments that are necessary to sustain a large org. Which is totally fine as it is their money after all, but it also tilts the landscape towards smaller orgs as for a larger org it can be very difficult to handle the uncertainty of getting $1M one year but then having no idea if or when that funding could be expected to recur.
There’s a lot of management and organizational culture things to fix within EA to sustain larger orgs but I personally think if we wanted more larger orgs the key place to start would be to make the funding ecosystem better equipped to support larger orgs.
Note that these thoughts are my own personal ones and certainly shouldn’t be taken as complaints or comments on behalf of other RP execs tasked with running and sustaining a relatively large org.
This feels similar to me to how EA invests so much in very early career individuals, but they have a fairly limited window before being dropped or at least finding their options much more limited. It’s more like buying lottery tickets than making investments.
Is the “like taking bets on early orgs” thing true of OpenPhil? I think CEA is one of their larger grantees, and I don’t feel like their reluctance has been superlinear in the size of our budget, but I don’t have a ton of insight.
In my personal opinion I think so but it’s hard to say.
Thanks!