I find myself particularly disappointed in this as I was working for many years on projects that were intended to diversify the funding landscape, but Open Phil declined to fund those projects, and indeed discouraged me from working on them multiple times (most notably SFF and most recently Lightspeed Grants).
I think Open Phil could have done a much better job at using the freedom it had to create a diverse funding landscape, and I think Open Phil is largely responsible for the degree to which the current funding landscape is as centralized as it currently is.
I’m surprised to hear you say SFF and Lightspeed were trying to diversify the funding landscape, AND that it was bad that OpenPhil didn’t fund them. My understanding was that there was already another donor (Jaan Tallinn) who wanted to make large donations, and you were trying to help them. To me, it seems natural for Jaan to fund these, and that this is great because it results in a genuinely independent donor. OpenPhil funding it feels more like a regranting program, and I don’t see how that genuinely diversifies the landscape in the longterm (unless eg OpenPhil funded a longterm endowment for such a program that they can’t later take away). Was the ask for them to fund the operations, or to add to the pool of money donated? Was the idea that, with more funding, these programs could be more successful and attract more mega donors from outside the community?
The point of Lightspeed Grants was explicitly to create a product that would allow additional funders (beyond Jaan) to distribute funding to important causes.
It also had the more immediate positive effect of increasing the diversity and impact of Jaan’s funding, though that’s not where I expected the big wins to come from and not my primary motivation for working on it. I still feel quite excited about this, but stopped working on it in substantial parts because Open Phil cut funding for all non-LW programs to Lightcone.
The ask here was for development cost and operations, not for any regranting money.
Was the idea that, with more funding, these programs could be more successful and attract more mega donors from outside the community?
Basically.
To be clear, I think it’s not a crazy decision for Open Phil to think that Jaan is in a better position to fund our SFF and Lightspeed work (though not funding us for Lightspeed did have a pretty substantial effect on our ability to work on it). The bigger effect came from both the implicit and explicit discouragement of working on SFF and Lightspeed over the years, mostly picked up from random conversations with Open Phil staff and people very close to Open Phil staff.
I generally don’t have a ton of bandwidth with my grantmakers at Open Phil, but during our last funding request around 14 months ago, I got the strong sense they thought working on SFF and Lightspeed was a waste of time and money (and indeed, they didn’t give us approximately any funding for Lightspeed when we asked for money for it then). Also, to be clear, they never got to the point of asking us how much money we wanted, or how much it would cost, and just kind of told us out of the blue, after 6 months of delays, that they aren’t interested in funding any non-LW projects when I was still expecting to communicate more of our plans and needs to them, so my best guess is they never actually considered it, or it was dismissed at a pretty early stage.
I feel quite aligned with you spiritually on this topic: we both want more diversified funding for these causes, and see Good Ventures-as-sole-funder both getting in the way of that outcome and creating a variety of second order problems. I’m sorry to hear that OP may have actively dissuaded you from pursuing diversification. Folks like you, as well as OP staff, will now spend more of their time pursuing other funding sources, and I expect that to be strongly positive for the causes and the general EA project over the long run.
In the short run, I agree we have recently lost valuable time and energy via this path, and I regret that and accept a good deal of responsibility. When FTX showed up on the scene, it felt like plurality was happening, and as soon as they went away, I became quite fixated on this topic again.
Thanks for your thoughts, Dustin. I think it was a mistake at the time—and I said as much—to think that FTX and OpenPhil represented sufficient plurality. But I definitely didn’t think FTX would blow up as it did and given that people can only do so many things, it’s understandable that people didn’t focus enough on donor diversification.
I find myself particularly disappointed in this as I was working for many years on projects that were intended to diversify the funding landscape, but Open Phil declined to fund those projects, and indeed discouraged me from working on them multiple times (most notably SFF and most recently Lightspeed Grants).
I think Open Phil could have done a much better job at using the freedom it had to create a diverse funding landscape, and I think Open Phil is largely responsible for the degree to which the current funding landscape is as centralized as it currently is.
I’m surprised to hear you say SFF and Lightspeed were trying to diversify the funding landscape, AND that it was bad that OpenPhil didn’t fund them. My understanding was that there was already another donor (Jaan Tallinn) who wanted to make large donations, and you were trying to help them. To me, it seems natural for Jaan to fund these, and that this is great because it results in a genuinely independent donor. OpenPhil funding it feels more like a regranting program, and I don’t see how that genuinely diversifies the landscape in the longterm (unless eg OpenPhil funded a longterm endowment for such a program that they can’t later take away). Was the ask for them to fund the operations, or to add to the pool of money donated? Was the idea that, with more funding, these programs could be more successful and attract more mega donors from outside the community?
The point of Lightspeed Grants was explicitly to create a product that would allow additional funders (beyond Jaan) to distribute funding to important causes.
It also had the more immediate positive effect of increasing the diversity and impact of Jaan’s funding, though that’s not where I expected the big wins to come from and not my primary motivation for working on it. I still feel quite excited about this, but stopped working on it in substantial parts because Open Phil cut funding for all non-LW programs to Lightcone.
The ask here was for development cost and operations, not for any regranting money.
Basically.
To be clear, I think it’s not a crazy decision for Open Phil to think that Jaan is in a better position to fund our SFF and Lightspeed work (though not funding us for Lightspeed did have a pretty substantial effect on our ability to work on it). The bigger effect came from both the implicit and explicit discouragement of working on SFF and Lightspeed over the years, mostly picked up from random conversations with Open Phil staff and people very close to Open Phil staff.
I generally don’t have a ton of bandwidth with my grantmakers at Open Phil, but during our last funding request around 14 months ago, I got the strong sense they thought working on SFF and Lightspeed was a waste of time and money (and indeed, they didn’t give us approximately any funding for Lightspeed when we asked for money for it then). Also, to be clear, they never got to the point of asking us how much money we wanted, or how much it would cost, and just kind of told us out of the blue, after 6 months of delays, that they aren’t interested in funding any non-LW projects when I was still expecting to communicate more of our plans and needs to them, so my best guess is they never actually considered it, or it was dismissed at a pretty early stage.
I feel quite aligned with you spiritually on this topic: we both want more diversified funding for these causes, and see Good Ventures-as-sole-funder both getting in the way of that outcome and creating a variety of second order problems. I’m sorry to hear that OP may have actively dissuaded you from pursuing diversification. Folks like you, as well as OP staff, will now spend more of their time pursuing other funding sources, and I expect that to be strongly positive for the causes and the general EA project over the long run.
In the short run, I agree we have recently lost valuable time and energy via this path, and I regret that and accept a good deal of responsibility. When FTX showed up on the scene, it felt like plurality was happening, and as soon as they went away, I became quite fixated on this topic again.
Thanks for your thoughts, Dustin. I think it was a mistake at the time—and I said as much—to think that FTX and OpenPhil represented sufficient plurality. But I definitely didn’t think FTX would blow up as it did and given that people can only do so many things, it’s understandable that people didn’t focus enough on donor diversification.
I didn’t think of it as sufficient, but I did think of it as momentum. “Tomorrow, there will be more of us” doesn’t feel true anymore.
Thanks for clarifying! That sounds like a pretty unpleasant experience from a grantee perspective, I’m sorry that happened.