On EA providing for-profit funding: hard to say. Considerations against:
Wave looks like a very good investment by non-EA standards, so additional funding from EAs wouldn’t have affected our fundraising very much (not sure how much this generalizes to other companies)
At later stages, this is very capital-intensive, so probably wouldn’t make sense except as a thing for eg Open Phil to do with its endowment
Founding successful companies requires putting a lot of weight on inside-view considerations, a trait that’s not particularly compatible with typical EA epistemology. (Notably, Wave gets the most of this trait from Drew, the CEO, who, while value-aligned with EA, finds it hard to engage with standard EA-style reasoning for this reason.)
Considerations in favor:
Helps keep the company controlled by value-aligned people (not sure how important this is, I think the founders of Wave will end up retaining full control)
If the companies are good, it doesn’t actually cost anything except tying up capital for a while
Overall, I think it could make sense at early stages, where people matter more and metrics matter less (and capital goes further), but even at early stages there’s probably much more of a talent constraint than a funding constraint.
On EA providing for-profit funding: hard to say. Considerations against:
Wave looks like a very good investment by non-EA standards, so additional funding from EAs wouldn’t have affected our fundraising very much (not sure how much this generalizes to other companies)
At later stages, this is very capital-intensive, so probably wouldn’t make sense except as a thing for eg Open Phil to do with its endowment
Founding successful companies requires putting a lot of weight on inside-view considerations, a trait that’s not particularly compatible with typical EA epistemology. (Notably, Wave gets the most of this trait from Drew, the CEO, who, while value-aligned with EA, finds it hard to engage with standard EA-style reasoning for this reason.)
Considerations in favor:
Helps keep the company controlled by value-aligned people (not sure how important this is, I think the founders of Wave will end up retaining full control)
If the companies are good, it doesn’t actually cost anything except tying up capital for a while
Overall, I think it could make sense at early stages, where people matter more and metrics matter less (and capital goes further), but even at early stages there’s probably much more of a talent constraint than a funding constraint.