Just want to flag that I’m really happy to see this. I think that the funding space could really use more labor/diversity now.
Some quick/obvious thoughts:
- Website is pretty great, nice work there. I’m jealous of the speed/performance, kudos. - I imagine some of this information should eventually be private to donors. Like, the medical expenses one. - I’d want to eventually see Slack/Discord channels for each regrantor and their donors, or some similar setup. I think that communication between some regranters and their donors could be really good. - I imagine some regranters would eventually work in teams. From being both on LTFF and seeing the FTX regrantor program, I did kind of like the LTFF policy of vote averaging. Personally, I think I do grantmaking best when working on a team. I think that the “regrantor” could be a “team leader”, in the sense that they could oversee people under them. - As money amounts increase, I’d like to see regranters getting paid. It’s tough work. I think we could really use more part-time / full-time work here. - I think if I were in charge of something like this, I’d have a back-office of coordinated investigations for everyone. Like, one full-time person who just gathers information about teams/people, and relays that to regranters. - As I wrote about here, I’m generally a lot more enthusiastic about supporting sizeable organizations than tiny ones. I’d hope that this could be a good project to fund projects within sizeable organizations. - I want to see more attention on reforming/improving the core aspects/community/bureaucracy of EA. These grantmakers seem very AI safety focused. - Ideally it could be possible to have ratings/reviewers of how the regranters are to work with. Some grantmakers can be far more successful than others at delivering value to grantees and not being a pain to work with. - I probably said this before, but I’m not very excited by Impact Certificates. More “traditional” grantmaking seems much better. - One obvious failure mode is that regranters might not actually spend much of their money. It might be difficult to get good groups to apply. This is not easy work.
Thanks, Ozzie! I expect we’ll be chatting more about working together. Some point-by-point replies:
I imagine some of this information should eventually be private to donors. Like, the medical expenses one.
Yeah, idk, this is one of the areas I think I’m idiosyncratic; I think in an ideal world that almost no information would be kept private (maybe excepting infohazards like bomb construction techniques.) I think this attitude has been incredibly good for Manifold’s growth and development, and am patterning my approach to Manifund based on this.
In any case, right now we’re one small player amidst a variety of EA funders, so I’m not very worried about our radical transparency stance. I do also think there’s a good chance we change courses (maybe 30% in the next 12 months?) based on grantee/regrantor/donor feedback.
I’d want to eventually see Slack/Discord channels for each regrantor and their donors, or some similar setup.
Interesting idea! My best guess is that our specific donor for Round 1 doesn’t have the time/interest to do this, but if other donors are looking for a more hands-on role, we’d be open to that as well!
I imagine some regranters would eventually work in teams
This sounds promising. Right now we’re in a pretty proto-mvp stage, trying to catch up to what other funders have figured out. I do think collaboration across grantmakers is generally good; though caveat that teamwork does impose coordination costs, and for small (<$20k?) grants I’d lean towards moving faster.
As money amounts increase, I’d like to see regranters getting paid. It’s tough work.
We went back and forth on this. Right now all our regrantors are volunteers, while FF paid theirs. I think getting the specific compensation scheme right is tricky (pay by grant? by hour? by % commission?) and I suspect FF’s may have had bad incentives + optics, so we opted to launch first and revisit this later.
Even assuming radical transparency within the relevant communities is the best policy, there are ways to mitigate the Googleability of the information for someone searching on the grantee’s name.
As a practical matter, not taking those steps makes the publicness of the sensitive information significantly depend on the distinctiveness of the person’s name. John Smith has significantly less of a downside to applying than someone with a near-unique moniker, and that will result in suboptimal distributions.
> but if other donors are looking for a more hands-on role, we’d be open to that as well!
My guess is that some donors don’t exactly want to be hands-on for specific grants, but do want to get updates and ask specific questions to the grantmaker. This could be a bit of a pain to the grantmaker, but would be a better experience for the funder. In some cases, this seems worth it (mainly if we want to get more funders).
> trying to catch up to what other funders have figured out For what it’s worth, at the LTFF (and I think other EA Funds), there’s a voting system where people vote on scores, and proposals that achieve a certain average or higher get funded. I agree this is overkill for many small grants.
> and I suspect FF’s may have had bad incentives + optics, so we opted to launch first and revisit this later. I like that strategy. Later on though, I’d imagine that maybe regranters could request different perks. If there were a marketplace—funders choose regranters—then some regranter could request ~5%, and funders would take that into consideration. I suspect some granters don’t need the money, but others might only be able to do it if there were pay.
do want to get updates and ask specific questions to the grantmaker
Ah, I see, makes sense. Perhaps a strategy of “we send out weekly updates to the donor about where their money has been going” is a better fit than “live chat”. Will think about this!
a voting system where people vote on scores
Def makes sense for grants above some dollar threshold (eg $100k?) I would love to be a fly on the wall (or even participate in LTFF grantmaking?) to learn what best practices have been, and see if they make sense for us
If there were a marketplace—funders choose regranters
Haha, love the idea of a regrantors picking their own compensation models in a competitive marketplace!
one full-time person who just gathers information about teams/people, and relays that to regranters.
Open to this as well, if there are specific individuals you think would do this well as a fulltime job! (Though, in this model I’m not quite sure what the role of the regrantor is—just to scout out opportunities?)
As I wrote about here, I’m generally a lot more enthusiastic about supporting sizeable organizations than tiny ones. I’d hope that this could be a good project to fund projects within sizeable organizations.
Yes, we’d love for individual projects to apply through Manifund regranting, because we think we could pay for those in a pretty lightweight manner. I like RP’s model of having individual projects apply for funding themselves.
On the larger point of large vs small orgs, I’m personally someone who thrived moving from Google ⇒ Streamlit (series B startup) ⇒ founding Manifold. I agree EA is pretty strange, and think we could benefit from overhauling the ecosystem to be more like the tech scene, which seems to be much better than EA at executing at their objectives. This could be either management practices at high-growth startups like Stripe (see High Growth Handbook) applied to the ecosystem as a whole; or instituting a more efficient venture ecosystem like YC for seed-stage orgs.
I want to see more attention on reforming/improving the core aspects/community/bureaucracy of EA. These grantmakers seem very AI safety focused.
I agree with you on the importance of organizational reform, though it’s extra unclear if that kind of thing is addressable by a regranting program (vs someone enacting change from within OpenPhil). Perhaps we’ll ourselves address this if/when Manifund itself represents a significant chunk of EA funding, but that seems like a version 2 problem while we’re currently at v0.
Ideally it could be possible to have ratings/reviewers of how the regranters are to work with.
Yeah! One of my pet ideas is “Yelp for EA orgs”; useful for individual regrantors, but also for EA grantmakers as a whole? Could integrate into our platform if we end up becoming a directory for all EA projects and funders… (also a v1/v2 problem, though regrantor reviews might be v0)
I’m not very excited by Impact Certificates. More “traditional” grantmaking seems much better.
Agree to disagree for now! I have written up what I think are outstanding issues with impact certs, but I’m still bullish on the idea (esp with a large eg AI Safety yearly prize set up). Would love to do a podcast/debate on this sometime!
One obvious failure mode is that regranters might not actually spend much of their money. It might be difficult to get good groups to apply. This is not easy work.
Yes, this is one of my top concerns with our regranting program so far; we’ve issued budgets to regrantors a few weeks ago and so far grantmaking pace is slower than expected. I do think this public launch will help though, as it solicits more applications for them to look over.
Open to this as well, if there are specific individuals you think would do this well as a fulltime job! (Though, in this model I’m not quite sure what the role of the regrantor is—just to scout out opportunities?)
I get the impression there’s a lot of human work that could be done to improve the process. - Communicate with potential+historic recipients. Get information from them (to relay to grantmakers), and also inform them about the grantmaker’s preferences. - Follow up with grantees to see how progress went / do simple evaluations. - Do due diligence into several of the options. - Maintain a list of expert advisors that could be leaned on in different situations. - Do ongoing investigations and coordination with funded efforts. I think a lot of value comes from funding relationships that last 3-10+ years.
> I agree EA is pretty strange, and think we could benefit from overhauling the ecosystem to be more like the tech scene, which seems to be much better than EA at executing at their objectives.
This is a long discussion. To me, a lot of the reason way startups work is that the tail outcomes are really important—important enough to justify lots of effective payment for talent early on. But this only makes sense under the expectations of lots of growth, which is only doable with what eventually need to be large organizations.
> I agree with you on the importance of organizational reform, though it’s extra unclear if that kind of thing is addressable by a regranting program (vs someone enacting change from within OpenPhil). Perhaps we’ll ourselves address this if/when Manifund itself represents a significant chunk of EA funding, but that seems like a version 2 problem while we’re currently at v0.
My guess is that this depends a lot on finding the right grantmaker, and it’s very possible that’s just not realistic soon. I agree this can wait, there’s a lot of stuff to do, just giving ideas to be thinking about for later.
> Would love to do a podcast/debate on this sometime! That sounds fun! Maybe we could just try to record a conversation next time we might see each other in person.
Just want to flag that I’m really happy to see this. I think that the funding space could really use more labor/diversity now.
Some quick/obvious thoughts:
- Website is pretty great, nice work there. I’m jealous of the speed/performance, kudos.
- I imagine some of this information should eventually be private to donors. Like, the medical expenses one.
- I’d want to eventually see Slack/Discord channels for each regrantor and their donors, or some similar setup. I think that communication between some regranters and their donors could be really good.
- I imagine some regranters would eventually work in teams. From being both on LTFF and seeing the FTX regrantor program, I did kind of like the LTFF policy of vote averaging. Personally, I think I do grantmaking best when working on a team. I think that the “regrantor” could be a “team leader”, in the sense that they could oversee people under them.
- As money amounts increase, I’d like to see regranters getting paid. It’s tough work. I think we could really use more part-time / full-time work here.
- I think if I were in charge of something like this, I’d have a back-office of coordinated investigations for everyone. Like, one full-time person who just gathers information about teams/people, and relays that to regranters.
- As I wrote about here, I’m generally a lot more enthusiastic about supporting sizeable organizations than tiny ones. I’d hope that this could be a good project to fund projects within sizeable organizations.
- I want to see more attention on reforming/improving the core aspects/community/bureaucracy of EA. These grantmakers seem very AI safety focused.
- Ideally it could be possible to have ratings/reviewers of how the regranters are to work with. Some grantmakers can be far more successful than others at delivering value to grantees and not being a pain to work with.
- I probably said this before, but I’m not very excited by Impact Certificates. More “traditional” grantmaking seems much better.
- One obvious failure mode is that regranters might not actually spend much of their money. It might be difficult to get good groups to apply. This is not easy work.
Good luck!
Thanks, Ozzie! I expect we’ll be chatting more about working together. Some point-by-point replies:
Yeah, idk, this is one of the areas I think I’m idiosyncratic; I think in an ideal world that almost no information would be kept private (maybe excepting infohazards like bomb construction techniques.) I think this attitude has been incredibly good for Manifold’s growth and development, and am patterning my approach to Manifund based on this.
In any case, right now we’re one small player amidst a variety of EA funders, so I’m not very worried about our radical transparency stance. I do also think there’s a good chance we change courses (maybe 30% in the next 12 months?) based on grantee/regrantor/donor feedback.
Interesting idea! My best guess is that our specific donor for Round 1 doesn’t have the time/interest to do this, but if other donors are looking for a more hands-on role, we’d be open to that as well!
This sounds promising. Right now we’re in a pretty proto-mvp stage, trying to catch up to what other funders have figured out. I do think collaboration across grantmakers is generally good; though caveat that teamwork does impose coordination costs, and for small (<$20k?) grants I’d lean towards moving faster.
We went back and forth on this. Right now all our regrantors are volunteers, while FF paid theirs. I think getting the specific compensation scheme right is tricky (pay by grant? by hour? by % commission?) and I suspect FF’s may have had bad incentives + optics, so we opted to launch first and revisit this later.
(to be continued)
Even assuming radical transparency within the relevant communities is the best policy, there are ways to mitigate the Googleability of the information for someone searching on the grantee’s name.
As a practical matter, not taking those steps makes the publicness of the sensitive information significantly depend on the distinctiveness of the person’s name. John Smith has significantly less of a downside to applying than someone with a near-unique moniker, and that will result in suboptimal distributions.
Thanks for the replies! Quickly,
> but if other donors are looking for a more hands-on role, we’d be open to that as well!
My guess is that some donors don’t exactly want to be hands-on for specific grants, but do want to get updates and ask specific questions to the grantmaker. This could be a bit of a pain to the grantmaker, but would be a better experience for the funder. In some cases, this seems worth it (mainly if we want to get more funders).
> trying to catch up to what other funders have figured out
For what it’s worth, at the LTFF (and I think other EA Funds), there’s a voting system where people vote on scores, and proposals that achieve a certain average or higher get funded. I agree this is overkill for many small grants.
> and I suspect FF’s may have had bad incentives + optics, so we opted to launch first and revisit this later.
I like that strategy. Later on though, I’d imagine that maybe regranters could request different perks. If there were a marketplace—funders choose regranters—then some regranter could request ~5%, and funders would take that into consideration. I suspect some granters don’t need the money, but others might only be able to do it if there were pay.
Ah, I see, makes sense. Perhaps a strategy of “we send out weekly updates to the donor about where their money has been going” is a better fit than “live chat”. Will think about this!
Def makes sense for grants above some dollar threshold (eg $100k?) I would love to be a fly on the wall (or even participate in LTFF grantmaking?) to learn what best practices have been, and see if they make sense for us
Haha, love the idea of a regrantors picking their own compensation models in a competitive marketplace!
Part 2:
Open to this as well, if there are specific individuals you think would do this well as a fulltime job! (Though, in this model I’m not quite sure what the role of the regrantor is—just to scout out opportunities?)
Yes, we’d love for individual projects to apply through Manifund regranting, because we think we could pay for those in a pretty lightweight manner. I like RP’s model of having individual projects apply for funding themselves.
On the larger point of large vs small orgs, I’m personally someone who thrived moving from Google ⇒ Streamlit (series B startup) ⇒ founding Manifold. I agree EA is pretty strange, and think we could benefit from overhauling the ecosystem to be more like the tech scene, which seems to be much better than EA at executing at their objectives. This could be either management practices at high-growth startups like Stripe (see High Growth Handbook) applied to the ecosystem as a whole; or instituting a more efficient venture ecosystem like YC for seed-stage orgs.
I agree with you on the importance of organizational reform, though it’s extra unclear if that kind of thing is addressable by a regranting program (vs someone enacting change from within OpenPhil). Perhaps we’ll ourselves address this if/when Manifund itself represents a significant chunk of EA funding, but that seems like a version 2 problem while we’re currently at v0.
Yeah! One of my pet ideas is “Yelp for EA orgs”; useful for individual regrantors, but also for EA grantmakers as a whole? Could integrate into our platform if we end up becoming a directory for all EA projects and funders… (also a v1/v2 problem, though regrantor reviews might be v0)
Agree to disagree for now! I have written up what I think are outstanding issues with impact certs, but I’m still bullish on the idea (esp with a large eg AI Safety yearly prize set up). Would love to do a podcast/debate on this sometime!
Yes, this is one of my top concerns with our regranting program so far; we’ve issued budgets to regrantors a few weeks ago and so far grantmaking pace is slower than expected. I do think this public launch will help though, as it solicits more applications for them to look over.
Thank you again for the extensive feedback!
I get the impression there’s a lot of human work that could be done to improve the process.
- Communicate with potential+historic recipients. Get information from them (to relay to grantmakers), and also inform them about the grantmaker’s preferences.
- Follow up with grantees to see how progress went / do simple evaluations.
- Do due diligence into several of the options.
- Maintain a list of expert advisors that could be leaned on in different situations.
- Do ongoing investigations and coordination with funded efforts. I think a lot of value comes from funding relationships that last 3-10+ years.
> I agree EA is pretty strange, and think we could benefit from overhauling the ecosystem to be more like the tech scene, which seems to be much better than EA at executing at their objectives.
This is a long discussion. To me, a lot of the reason way startups work is that the tail outcomes are really important—important enough to justify lots of effective payment for talent early on. But this only makes sense under the expectations of lots of growth, which is only doable with what eventually need to be large organizations.
> I agree with you on the importance of organizational reform, though it’s extra unclear if that kind of thing is addressable by a regranting program (vs someone enacting change from within OpenPhil). Perhaps we’ll ourselves address this if/when Manifund itself represents a significant chunk of EA funding, but that seems like a version 2 problem while we’re currently at v0.
My guess is that this depends a lot on finding the right grantmaker, and it’s very possible that’s just not realistic soon. I agree this can wait, there’s a lot of stuff to do, just giving ideas to be thinking about for later.
> Would love to do a podcast/debate on this sometime!
That sounds fun! Maybe we could just try to record a conversation next time we might see each other in person.