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.
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.