EA Ventures Request for Projects + Update
Below are some brief updates on EA Ventures for those who followed our launch thread.
Request for Projects
We’ve recently released EA Ventures’ Request for Projects which details some of the projects that the EA Ventures team and funders find especially promising. We modeled this after YCombinator’s Request for Startups in two senses: 1) we plan to mostly recommend funding from projects not on this list, but find this list to be a helpful starting point for project brainstorming; 2) implementation matters, so submitting a project that we suggest is definitely not a guarantee of a funding recommendation.
Current progress
We received over 70 applications before our first official deadline which exceeded our expectations. The quality of the projects was also higher than I expected. We’ve done a first-pass review of most of these project and plan to send some feedback to projects in the near future.
We also recommended our first project for funding: Effective Altruism Policy Analytics which is an EA political influence project being run out of DC. You can see their application here. The project was successfully funded for $19,000. We found the fundraising process to take slightly longer and be slightly more difficult than we were expecting. We’ll be looking to see if a trend emerges as we recommend other projects.
Current bottlenecks
We’re mostly bottlenecked on time currently. Most of the EA Ventures team is also working on EA Global which is slowly taking up all of our time. We’re interesting in looking for someone who would like to help with evaluations with an eye towards potentially having someone work on this full time in the future. Interested people should contact me.
We would also like to expand our funder pool. If you’re a donor to EA project interesting in hearing about new EA projects, please let me know.
I’d like to help with the evaluations. My e-mail is oge@nnadi.org
BTW, in Section 2 of the RFP page, the headings should use the singular, “criterion 1” rather than “criteria 1″ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/criteria?s=t
Hey Kerry, I’m listed as one of the funders on the eaventures.org front page, but I didn’t hear anything about this fund raise. Should I have?
We sent it to a selected group of people whose funding priorities we thought it fit with. I think when I emailed you to ask about what things you’re interested in funding I didn’t hear back. I’ll resend that email now.
Kerry, I would be interested in helping with evaluations. I’m sure there is probably a way to contact you through this site, but for the life of me, I can’t find it. Let me know what the next step is.
robinson.zack@gmail.com
I’d also be interested in helping with evaluations. nettra.pan@epfl.ch