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.
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.