Salary questions and discussions always happen well before someone goes through the program (typically during the interviews or soon after an invitation is offered). Ultimately, the co-founders select how much they ask for, and many have asked for considerably higher amounts.
How reliably are those asks met? If someone needs (e.g.) a 25K uplift for childcare costs, when do they learn if that’s actually in the cards?
My understanding was that funding allocations were locked in fairly late in the program, but I could be mistaken. Even if the candidate exits prior to starting the program, they may have invested significant time, energy, and emotion into the process.
I definitely understand the realities of reliance on seed funding, and the fact that some uncertainty and opacity is unavoidable as a result. It remains unfortunate in my view.
[For reference, 25K is about what full-time childcare costs for a young child where I live. Some people are single parents, and many have more than one child, so I didn’t think it an unreasonable test case.]
About 75% of seed project proposals get funded at the amount they ask for. That part is not known until after the incubation process. The typical seed grants are between $100k-$200k. I do not expect a great proposal to be stopped by a $25k higher budget. I think entrepreneurship is a higher-risk career path, one that is probably not suited for the majority of people. CE is already extremely de-risked relative to equivalents in the for-profit and incubated nonprofit space, to the point where I think the founding step is not the highest-risk part of founding a charity (having an impact 3 years down the line is).
Salary questions and discussions always happen well before someone goes through the program (typically during the interviews or soon after an invitation is offered). Ultimately, the co-founders select how much they ask for, and many have asked for considerably higher amounts.
How reliably are those asks met? If someone needs (e.g.) a 25K uplift for childcare costs, when do they learn if that’s actually in the cards?
My understanding was that funding allocations were locked in fairly late in the program, but I could be mistaken. Even if the candidate exits prior to starting the program, they may have invested significant time, energy, and emotion into the process.
I definitely understand the realities of reliance on seed funding, and the fact that some uncertainty and opacity is unavoidable as a result. It remains unfortunate in my view.
[For reference, 25K is about what full-time childcare costs for a young child where I live. Some people are single parents, and many have more than one child, so I didn’t think it an unreasonable test case.]
About 75% of seed project proposals get funded at the amount they ask for. That part is not known until after the incubation process. The typical seed grants are between $100k-$200k. I do not expect a great proposal to be stopped by a $25k higher budget. I think entrepreneurship is a higher-risk career path, one that is probably not suited for the majority of people. CE is already extremely de-risked relative to equivalents in the for-profit and incubated nonprofit space, to the point where I think the founding step is not the highest-risk part of founding a charity (having an impact 3 years down the line is).