I primarily do research rather than grantmaking, but I can give my speculations about what grant opportunities people on the grantmaking side of the organization would be excited about. In general, I think it’s exciting when there is an opportunity to fund a relatively senior person with a strong track record who can manage or mentor a number of earlier-career people, because that provides an opportunity for exponential growth in the pool of people who are working on these issues. For example, this could look like funding a new professor who is aligned with our priorities in a sub-area and wants to mentor students to work on problems we are excited about in that sub-area.
In terms of why more people and projects don’t get funded: at least at Open Phil, grantmakers generally try not to evaluate large numbers of applications or inquiries from earlier-career people individually, because each evaluation can be fairly intensive but the grant size is often relatively small; grantmakers at Open Phil prefer to focus on investigations that could lead to larger grants. Open Phil does offer some scholarships for early career researchers (e.g. here and here), but in general we prefer that this sort of grantmaking be handled by organizations like EA Funds.
I primarily do research rather than grantmaking, but I can give my speculations about what grant opportunities people on the grantmaking side of the organization would be excited about. In general, I think it’s exciting when there is an opportunity to fund a relatively senior person with a strong track record who can manage or mentor a number of earlier-career people, because that provides an opportunity for exponential growth in the pool of people who are working on these issues. For example, this could look like funding a new professor who is aligned with our priorities in a sub-area and wants to mentor students to work on problems we are excited about in that sub-area.
In terms of why more people and projects don’t get funded: at least at Open Phil, grantmakers generally try not to evaluate large numbers of applications or inquiries from earlier-career people individually, because each evaluation can be fairly intensive but the grant size is often relatively small; grantmakers at Open Phil prefer to focus on investigations that could lead to larger grants. Open Phil does offer some scholarships for early career researchers (e.g. here and here), but in general we prefer that this sort of grantmaking be handled by organizations like EA Funds.