Thanks for the substantial engagement! You cover a lot, so I’ll just pick out quotes and respond to ~most points.(As you note, I don’t work for CG and haven’t worked for them in over a year. I now work for Longview, but none of this is based on private information, and none of it represents views of either org).
it’s not obvious that the biggest corporations are the most impactful, like I wouldn’t allocate more philanthropic capital to NVIDIA or SpaceX
Even if they were impactful, why would you consider allocating any philanthropic capital to incredibly rich companies? The marginal case would be terrible.
allocation of credit between individual humans is much much better in forprofits—Jensen Huang or Elon Musk are much much richer than the median employee of their org
I think the right allocation of credit isn’t obviously better here. It is hard to figure out who were most responsible for an org’s success, in both for- and non-profits. CEOs get massive pay. There’s lots of reasons for that (high leverage, small market, rent-extraction via CEO’s influence on boards, equity-based pay, and so on). I don’t think you can assume that because CEO’s get enormous pay, they therefore deserve such pay (that may be true, but you’d want to actually try and investigate the credit allocation story—which is the question you started out with). I think there would be many cases of failed credit allocation in SpaceX, NVIDIA, and most other companies—i.e. many senior engineers or leaders who contributed much more value than the CEO, but were paid orders of magnitude less.
The pay is at least some signal of how the companies’ board values the executive’s performance. And if news of a CEO considering leaving or committing shifts investor sentiment and stock price, that is a good signal of how the market evaluates their performance. But these are merely okay instruments of assessing credit, and are usually strictly aligned with profit maximising. I don’t think they solve the credit allocation problem, and are a minor factor in comparing for- and non-profits.
Why should an impact-minded founder care? Because if they push really hard and actually succeed at doing something impactful, they then have to go and pray that the grant evaluators up above agree with their assessment.
I agree that for-profits reward extreme success much, much better than non-profits, especially given that extreme success may require taking personal risk and extreme levels of commitment. This is a problem that changes to the non-profit funding ecosystem should seek to fix.
Why should you, cG grantmaker shepherding the AIS ecosystem, care? Because without good credit allocation
I don’t agree that extreme CEO pay is a useful signal, so I don’t think it provides much useful information on credit allocation. It just shifts credit allocation from the grantmakers’ view to the view of a board—where such a board is significantly more constrained and incentivised away from impact optimisation.
Okay, but what happens to the founder managing a $100m/y charity? Will cG and 501c3 law allow them to draw a proportionally larger salary?
Higher salaries are possible, and may be probable if there is funding abundance. There are some restrictions around what is ‘reasonable’ executive pay in the non-profit sector—maybe this could be a limit. But what is reasonable should scale with the size of the charity. For example, the CEO of the Gates Foundation earns $1.7M/yr. Extremely high salaries in the for-profit world are significantly equity-based, and this is the harder hurdle. I guess a key question is whether you think non-profit founders should get compensation in excess of low-seven-figures. That might be reasonable, but it’s a weaker case than assuming they still get paid poorly.
There’s one kind of EA answer which is “who cares, I was going to donate it to charity anyways, so it’s equivalent to have this money be in my personal bank account vs in my charity vs in cG”. I find elements of that answer which are compelling and noble and good, but also elements which are suspect wrt ecosystem-level feedback effects. I think it’s important that successful individuals (and orgs) gain more ability to then influence what happens next in the ecosystem, and $ and equity are good numeric ways of building that feedback mechanism.
I don’t really get why very high salaries would lead to greater influence on the ecosystem. Is it by directing their personal capital? I think in an era of funding abundance such capital is unlikely to be a major factor. If it is by their capital signalling apparent excellence, I don’t think that would work. I trust people according to how well they think and argue, my perception of their character, and their track record (and what other people I trust think of them). The amount of money they earn is close to irrelevant. There are countless people on very high salaries who I think are completely useless; there are countless people on very low salaires who I trust far, far more.
(also, seems good to nerdsnipe the non-fully-EA-aligned founders into working on problems we think are good)
Agreed. Though there’s a slight worry about how internalised their altruistic motivations are, with the risk of value drift over time and making the wrong high-stakes call when incentives clash. But in general, yes we should want to leverage this talent pool.
One thing that has made the forprofit tech scene work is that, when a founder exits, they have extra $ to invest, and also experience running new orgs
Yep agree that past success should translate into ability to influence future grantmaking. Regranting is a method of doing this. However, my impressions is that regranting has often struggled because it takes real time to do it well. The usual failure mode of regranting is that the regrantor doesn’t spend enough money. In general you kind of need it to be a part of their job to do it effectively (like 0.2 FTE or more if I had to guess). But those with past successes have high opportunity cost—you would need to think that the regranting is a better use of their time than their counterfactual efforts at continuing their successful track record. That will be only true in some cases.
To raise a recent example, our fundraising for our own projects (Surplus and Mox) has been annoyingly bogged down in classic traps of philanthropic funding norms, namely “funder chicken”. X asks “why isn’t Y funding you instead” and Y asks the same question in reverse and we’re waiting weeks to months to litigate. Grantmakers are already pressed for time and nobody has the chance to coordinate properly, and end up deferring too much.
Sorry that that’s been your experience, and yes these issues are still live. One reason for optimism is that if there is funding abundance, and funders are all opportunity-constrained, the reasons for worrying about funging and coordination become less important. Seems plausible that much better solutions are out there that should be pursued anyway, as you mention.
Tech forprofit venture funding is already operating at the 100x scale that AI safety philanthropic funding hopes to get to, and so I think copying their homework (where reasonable) is wise.
Yes, I agree there are many lessons and structures from VC land that should be of interest to funders. Two caveats:
VC-land also has many problems, which we’d want to avoid. Those problems are significantly worse in the context of chasing impact, because VCs basically only care about money, and bankruptcy caps downside risk. If you care about moral impact, you have to consider all the externalities, and you have to countenance extreme (indeed, existential) downside risk. It’s also harder to operationalise, since VCs can just use profits, but impacts needs very uncertain judgments or metrics that could be Goodharted on. My impression is that there have some attempts at impact metrics to guide capital allocation, without much success so far (though people should keep trying).
VCs move $4–8M per employee per year (Fable reckons for global VC there is $425B–513B deployed each year ÷ 60,000–100,000 employees). That’s only a little higher than than than the $-moved per employee at mainstream philanthropic orgs (typically $1M-$5M), and CG is about bang in the middle if we think that they do $1B in annual grants with about 170 employees ($5.9M/yr). So at least on these loose numbers, VC is not significantly more ‘efficient’ than grant making—maybe 2x compared to mainstream, and ~no difference compared to CG (and possibly other EA funders). VC just has orders of magnitude more employees.
My guess is that currently cG overall is trying to instead move down in size and get into earlier-stage funding and incubation.
I don’t think earlier stage funding and incubation is ‘moving down in size’. It’s what you would do if you wanted many more organisations to be able to receive money. Orgs can only grow so fast without other things breaking, so if all your good grantees are growing as fast as possible, moving earlier is the main way to scale the relevant ecosystem. Your other option is to give lots to already-big organisations that are outside the relevant ecosystem. Maybe in some cases that will make sense, but it doesn’t seem that promising a strategy.
outside cG’s core competency (eg have the people who are now in charge of those programs, previously founded successful orgs?)
Most VCs are not past founders. So if you like the VC approach, you shouldn’t worry about this. CG also has a great deal of experience in guiding the founding, early stages, and rapid growth of hundreds of organisations. I think that could actually be a more useful training ground than founding a single company, but they’re at least comparable.
I’m unsure whether it makes sense to house all of these initiatives under a single cG banner, vs have a somewhat more diversified ecosystem.
Agreed, a more diversified ecosystem would be good.
Thanks for the substantial engagement! You cover a lot, so I’ll just pick out quotes and respond to ~most points.(As you note, I don’t work for CG and haven’t worked for them in over a year. I now work for Longview, but none of this is based on private information, and none of it represents views of either org).
Even if they were impactful, why would you consider allocating any philanthropic capital to incredibly rich companies? The marginal case would be terrible.
I think the right allocation of credit isn’t obviously better here. It is hard to figure out who were most responsible for an org’s success, in both for- and non-profits. CEOs get massive pay. There’s lots of reasons for that (high leverage, small market, rent-extraction via CEO’s influence on boards, equity-based pay, and so on). I don’t think you can assume that because CEO’s get enormous pay, they therefore deserve such pay (that may be true, but you’d want to actually try and investigate the credit allocation story—which is the question you started out with). I think there would be many cases of failed credit allocation in SpaceX, NVIDIA, and most other companies—i.e. many senior engineers or leaders who contributed much more value than the CEO, but were paid orders of magnitude less.
The pay is at least some signal of how the companies’ board values the executive’s performance. And if news of a CEO considering leaving or committing shifts investor sentiment and stock price, that is a good signal of how the market evaluates their performance. But these are merely okay instruments of assessing credit, and are usually strictly aligned with profit maximising. I don’t think they solve the credit allocation problem, and are a minor factor in comparing for- and non-profits.
I agree that for-profits reward extreme success much, much better than non-profits, especially given that extreme success may require taking personal risk and extreme levels of commitment. This is a problem that changes to the non-profit funding ecosystem should seek to fix.
I don’t agree that extreme CEO pay is a useful signal, so I don’t think it provides much useful information on credit allocation. It just shifts credit allocation from the grantmakers’ view to the view of a board—where such a board is significantly more constrained and incentivised away from impact optimisation.
Higher salaries are possible, and may be probable if there is funding abundance. There are some restrictions around what is ‘reasonable’ executive pay in the non-profit sector—maybe this could be a limit. But what is reasonable should scale with the size of the charity. For example, the CEO of the Gates Foundation earns $1.7M/yr. Extremely high salaries in the for-profit world are significantly equity-based, and this is the harder hurdle. I guess a key question is whether you think non-profit founders should get compensation in excess of low-seven-figures. That might be reasonable, but it’s a weaker case than assuming they still get paid poorly.
I don’t really get why very high salaries would lead to greater influence on the ecosystem. Is it by directing their personal capital? I think in an era of funding abundance such capital is unlikely to be a major factor. If it is by their capital signalling apparent excellence, I don’t think that would work. I trust people according to how well they think and argue, my perception of their character, and their track record (and what other people I trust think of them). The amount of money they earn is close to irrelevant. There are countless people on very high salaries who I think are completely useless; there are countless people on very low salaires who I trust far, far more.
Agreed. Though there’s a slight worry about how internalised their altruistic motivations are, with the risk of value drift over time and making the wrong high-stakes call when incentives clash. But in general, yes we should want to leverage this talent pool.
Yep agree that past success should translate into ability to influence future grantmaking. Regranting is a method of doing this. However, my impressions is that regranting has often struggled because it takes real time to do it well. The usual failure mode of regranting is that the regrantor doesn’t spend enough money. In general you kind of need it to be a part of their job to do it effectively (like 0.2 FTE or more if I had to guess). But those with past successes have high opportunity cost—you would need to think that the regranting is a better use of their time than their counterfactual efforts at continuing their successful track record. That will be only true in some cases.
Sorry that that’s been your experience, and yes these issues are still live. One reason for optimism is that if there is funding abundance, and funders are all opportunity-constrained, the reasons for worrying about funging and coordination become less important. Seems plausible that much better solutions are out there that should be pursued anyway, as you mention.
Yes, I agree there are many lessons and structures from VC land that should be of interest to funders. Two caveats:
VC-land also has many problems, which we’d want to avoid. Those problems are significantly worse in the context of chasing impact, because VCs basically only care about money, and bankruptcy caps downside risk. If you care about moral impact, you have to consider all the externalities, and you have to countenance extreme (indeed, existential) downside risk. It’s also harder to operationalise, since VCs can just use profits, but impacts needs very uncertain judgments or metrics that could be Goodharted on. My impression is that there have some attempts at impact metrics to guide capital allocation, without much success so far (though people should keep trying).
VCs move $4–8M per employee per year (Fable reckons for global VC there is $425B–513B deployed each year ÷ 60,000–100,000 employees). That’s only a little higher than than than the $-moved per employee at mainstream philanthropic orgs (typically $1M-$5M), and CG is about bang in the middle if we think that they do $1B in annual grants with about 170 employees ($5.9M/yr). So at least on these loose numbers, VC is not significantly more ‘efficient’ than grant making—maybe 2x compared to mainstream, and ~no difference compared to CG (and possibly other EA funders). VC just has orders of magnitude more employees.
I don’t think earlier stage funding and incubation is ‘moving down in size’. It’s what you would do if you wanted many more organisations to be able to receive money. Orgs can only grow so fast without other things breaking, so if all your good grantees are growing as fast as possible, moving earlier is the main way to scale the relevant ecosystem. Your other option is to give lots to already-big organisations that are outside the relevant ecosystem. Maybe in some cases that will make sense, but it doesn’t seem that promising a strategy.
Most VCs are not past founders. So if you like the VC approach, you shouldn’t worry about this. CG also has a great deal of experience in guiding the founding, early stages, and rapid growth of hundreds of organisations. I think that could actually be a more useful training ground than founding a single company, but they’re at least comparable.
Agreed, a more diversified ecosystem would be good.