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.
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.