I’ve been a grantmaker (at Arnold Ventures, a $2 billion philanthropy), and I couldn’t agree more. Those kinds of questions are good if the aim is to reward and positively select for people who are good at bullshitting. And I also worry about a broader paradox—sometimes the highest impact comes from people who weren’t thinking about impact, had no idea where their plans would lead, and serendipitously stumbled into something like penicillin while doing something else.
Do you have any heuristics for identifying grants worth funding despite a lack of obvious path to enormous impact? I imagine “fling money at everyone” is not viable, and “do we like the founder?” has problems of its own.
It’s all a bit intuitive, but my heuristics were basically: Figure out the general issues that seem worth addressing; find talented people who are already trying to address those issues (perhaps in their spare time) and whose main constraint is capital; and give them more capital (e.g., time and employees) to do even better things (which they will often come up with on their own).
I’ve been a grantmaker (at Arnold Ventures, a $2 billion philanthropy), and I couldn’t agree more. Those kinds of questions are good if the aim is to reward and positively select for people who are good at bullshitting. And I also worry about a broader paradox—sometimes the highest impact comes from people who weren’t thinking about impact, had no idea where their plans would lead, and serendipitously stumbled into something like penicillin while doing something else.
Do you have any heuristics for identifying grants worth funding despite a lack of obvious path to enormous impact? I imagine “fling money at everyone” is not viable, and “do we like the founder?” has problems of its own.
It’s all a bit intuitive, but my heuristics were basically: Figure out the general issues that seem worth addressing; find talented people who are already trying to address those issues (perhaps in their spare time) and whose main constraint is capital; and give them more capital (e.g., time and employees) to do even better things (which they will often come up with on their own).