Another consideration is turn around time. Grant decisions are slow, deadlines are, imperfectly timed, distribution can be slow. So you need to apply many months before you need the money, which means well before you’ve used up your current grant, which means planning your work to have something to show ~6 months into a one year grant. Which is just pretty slow.
I don’t know what the right duration is, but the process needs to be built so that continuous funding for good work is a possibility, and possible to plan around.
My hope for addressing that problem is for grantmakers (including us) to suck less in the future and have speedier turnaround times, especially reducing the long tail of very slow responses.
How feasible do you think this is? From my outsider perspective, I see grantmakers and other types of application-reviewers taking 3-6 months across the board and it’s pretty rare to see them be faster than that, which suggests it might not be realistic to consistently review grants in <3 months.
eg the only job application process I’ve ever done that took <3 months was an application to a two-person startup.
It’s a good question. I think several grantmaking groups local to us (Lightspeed grants, Manifund, the ill-fated FF regranting program) have promised and afaict delivered on a fairly fast timeline. Though all of them are/were young and I don’t have a sense of whether they can reliably be quick after being around for longer than say 6 months.
LTFF itself has a median response time of about 4 weeks or so iirc. There might be some essential difficulties with significantly speeding up (say) the 99th percentile (eg needing stakeholder buy-in, complicated legal situations, trying to pitch a new donor for a specific project, trying to screen for infohazard concerns when none of the team are equipped to do so), but if we are able to get more capacity, I’d like us to at least get (say) the 85th or 95th tail down a lot lower.
I feel like reliability is more important than speed here, and it’s ~impossible to get this level of reliability from orgs run by unpaid volunteers with day jobs. Especially when volunteer hours aren’t fungible and the day jobs are demanding.
I think Lightspeed set a fairly ambitious goal it has struggled to meet. I applied for a fast turn around and got a response within a week, but two months later I haven’t received the check. The main grants were supposed to be announced on 8⁄6 and AFAIK still haven’t been. This is fine for me, but if people didn’t have to plan around it or risk being screwed I think it would be better.
Based on some of Ozzie’s comments here, I suspect that that using a grant process made for organizations to fund individuals is kind of doomed, and you either want to fund specific projects without the expectation it’s someone’s whole income (which is what I do), or do something more employer like with regular feedback cycles and rolling payments. And if you do the former, it needs to be enough money to compensate for the risk and inconvenience of freelancing.
I kind of get the arguments against paying grantmakers, but from my perspective I’d love to see you paid more with a higher reliability level.
I think Lightspeed set a fairly ambitious goal it has struggled to meet. I applied for a fast turn around and got a response within a week, but two months later I haven’t received the check. The main grants were supposed to be announced on 8⁄6 and AFAIK still haven’t been. This is fine for me, but if people didn’t have to plan around it or risk being screwed I think it would be better.
Yeah, this is a bit sad. I am happy to offer anyone who received a venture grant to have some money advanced if they need it, and tried to offer this to people where I had a sense it might help.
I am sad that we can’t get out final grant confirmations in time, though we did get back to the vast majority of applicants with a negative response on-time. I am also personally happy to give people probability estimates of whether they will get funding, which for some applicants is very high (95%+), which hopefully helps a bit. I also expect us to hit deadlines more exactly in future rounds.
What would have had to change to make the date? My impression was the problem was sheer volume, which sounds really hard and maybe understandable to prep for. You can put a hard cap, but that loses potentially good applications. You could spend less time per application, but that biases towards legibility and familiarity. You could hire more evaluators, but my sense is good ones are hard to find and have costly counterfactuals.
The one thing I see is “don’t use a procedure that requires evaluating everyone before giving anyone an answer” (which I think you are doing?), but I assume there are reasons for that.
The central bottleneck right now is getting funders to decide how much money to distribute, and through which evaluators to distribute the funds through.
I budgeted around a week for that, but I think realistically it will take more like 3. This part was hard to forecast because I don’t have a super high-bandwidth channel to Jaan, his time is very valuable, and I think he was hit with a bunch of last-minute opportunities that made him busy in the relevant time period.
I also think even if that had happened on my original 7 day timeline, we still would have been delayed by 4 days or so, since the volume caused me to make some mistakes in the administration which then required the evaluators going back and redoing some of their numbers and doing a few more evaluations.
I wonder if some more formalized system for advances would be worth it? I think this kind of chaos is one of the biggest consequences of delays for payments, and a low-friction way to get bridge loans would remove a lot of the costs.
You could run it as pure charity or charge reasonable fees to grantmakers for the service.
Yeah, I would quite like that. In some sense the venture granting system we have is trying to be exactly that, but that itself is currently delayed on getting fully set up legally and financially. But my current model is that as soon as its properly set up, we can just send out money on like a 1-2 day turnaround time, reliably.
EA Funds offers pay to grantmakers (~$60/h which I think should be fairly competitive with people’s nonprofit counterfactuals); most people have other day jobs however.
I don’t think pay is the limiting factor for people, who usually have day jobs and also try to do what they consider to be the highest impact (plus other personal factors).
Though I can imagine there might be some sufficiently high numbers to cause part-time grantmakers to prioritize grantmaking highly, but a) this might result in a misallocation of resources, b) isn’t necessarily sustainable, and c) might have pretty bad incentives.
Great point about the reliability overall though. I do think it’d be hard to make real promises of the form “we’ll definitely get back to you by X date” for various factors, including practical/structural ones.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was no good way to speed up grantmaking, given the existing constraints. If that’s true, I’d love to shift the system to something that recognizes that and plans around it (through bridge loans, or big enough grants that people can plan around delays, or something that looks more like employment), rather than hope that next year is the year that will be different for unspecified reasons.
Another consideration is turn around time. Grant decisions are slow, deadlines are, imperfectly timed, distribution can be slow. So you need to apply many months before you need the money, which means well before you’ve used up your current grant, which means planning your work to have something to show ~6 months into a one year grant. Which is just pretty slow.
I don’t know what the right duration is, but the process needs to be built so that continuous funding for good work is a possibility, and possible to plan around.
My hope for addressing that problem is for grantmakers (including us) to suck less in the future and have speedier turnaround times, especially reducing the long tail of very slow responses.
How feasible do you think this is? From my outsider perspective, I see grantmakers and other types of application-reviewers taking 3-6 months across the board and it’s pretty rare to see them be faster than that, which suggests it might not be realistic to consistently review grants in <3 months.
eg the only job application process I’ve ever done that took <3 months was an application to a two-person startup.
It’s a good question. I think several grantmaking groups local to us (Lightspeed grants, Manifund, the ill-fated FF regranting program) have promised and afaict delivered on a fairly fast timeline. Though all of them are/were young and I don’t have a sense of whether they can reliably be quick after being around for longer than say 6 months.
LTFF itself has a median response time of about 4 weeks or so iirc. There might be some essential difficulties with significantly speeding up (say) the 99th percentile (eg needing stakeholder buy-in, complicated legal situations, trying to pitch a new donor for a specific project, trying to screen for infohazard concerns when none of the team are equipped to do so), but if we are able to get more capacity, I’d like us to at least get (say) the 85th or 95th tail down a lot lower.
I feel like reliability is more important than speed here, and it’s ~impossible to get this level of reliability from orgs run by unpaid volunteers with day jobs. Especially when volunteer hours aren’t fungible and the day jobs are demanding.
I think Lightspeed set a fairly ambitious goal it has struggled to meet. I applied for a fast turn around and got a response within a week, but two months later I haven’t received the check. The main grants were supposed to be announced on 8⁄6 and AFAIK still haven’t been. This is fine for me, but if people didn’t have to plan around it or risk being screwed I think it would be better.
Based on some of Ozzie’s comments here, I suspect that that using a grant process made for organizations to fund individuals is kind of doomed, and you either want to fund specific projects without the expectation it’s someone’s whole income (which is what I do), or do something more employer like with regular feedback cycles and rolling payments. And if you do the former, it needs to be enough money to compensate for the risk and inconvenience of freelancing.
I kind of get the arguments against paying grantmakers, but from my perspective I’d love to see you paid more with a higher reliability level.
Yeah, this is a bit sad. I am happy to offer anyone who received a venture grant to have some money advanced if they need it, and tried to offer this to people where I had a sense it might help.
I am sad that we can’t get out final grant confirmations in time, though we did get back to the vast majority of applicants with a negative response on-time. I am also personally happy to give people probability estimates of whether they will get funding, which for some applicants is very high (95%+), which hopefully helps a bit. I also expect us to hit deadlines more exactly in future rounds.
What would have had to change to make the date? My impression was the problem was sheer volume, which sounds really hard and maybe understandable to prep for. You can put a hard cap, but that loses potentially good applications. You could spend less time per application, but that biases towards legibility and familiarity. You could hire more evaluators, but my sense is good ones are hard to find and have costly counterfactuals.
The one thing I see is “don’t use a procedure that requires evaluating everyone before giving anyone an answer” (which I think you are doing?), but I assume there are reasons for that.
The central bottleneck right now is getting funders to decide how much money to distribute, and through which evaluators to distribute the funds through.
I budgeted around a week for that, but I think realistically it will take more like 3. This part was hard to forecast because I don’t have a super high-bandwidth channel to Jaan, his time is very valuable, and I think he was hit with a bunch of last-minute opportunities that made him busy in the relevant time period.
I also think even if that had happened on my original 7 day timeline, we still would have been delayed by 4 days or so, since the volume caused me to make some mistakes in the administration which then required the evaluators going back and redoing some of their numbers and doing a few more evaluations.
I wonder if some more formalized system for advances would be worth it? I think this kind of chaos is one of the biggest consequences of delays for payments, and a low-friction way to get bridge loans would remove a lot of the costs.
You could run it as pure charity or charge reasonable fees to grantmakers for the service.
Yeah, I would quite like that. In some sense the venture granting system we have is trying to be exactly that, but that itself is currently delayed on getting fully set up legally and financially. But my current model is that as soon as its properly set up, we can just send out money on like a 1-2 day turnaround time, reliably.
EA Funds offers pay to grantmakers (~$60/h which I think should be fairly competitive with people’s nonprofit counterfactuals); most people have other day jobs however.
I don’t think pay is the limiting factor for people, who usually have day jobs and also try to do what they consider to be the highest impact (plus other personal factors).
Though I can imagine there might be some sufficiently high numbers to cause part-time grantmakers to prioritize grantmaking highly, but a) this might result in a misallocation of resources, b) isn’t necessarily sustainable, and c) might have pretty bad incentives.
Great point about the reliability overall though. I do think it’d be hard to make real promises of the form “we’ll definitely get back to you by X date” for various factors, including practical/structural ones.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was no good way to speed up grantmaking, given the existing constraints. If that’s true, I’d love to shift the system to something that recognizes that and plans around it (through bridge loans, or big enough grants that people can plan around delays, or something that looks more like employment), rather than hope that next year is the year that will be different for unspecified reasons.