I’m the person Yonatan is referring to. His feedback and your general feedback are very helpful, so thank you for that! I have been a lurker within EA for years and will write more content on the EA forum, including requesting feedback on the idea (soon). Hopefully that will help, although I don’t know because I didn’t get feedback.
Before I move into why I think grant makers should provide short feedback I want to be clear: I’m completely comfortable with being rejected and I completely understand that grant makers are very busy.
Having said that, I think grant makers should feedback the applications they reject. It doesn’t have to be more than 1-2 lines and one minute to write. I have applied to EA 6 months ago and got rejected and applied again last month and got rejected again. I had a lot of encouraging talks with EA’s (although criticism as well) and was more convinced this was going to get funding. I have no idea if they hated the idea and they think it will never work, or if they think it doesn’t fit them, they are not able to evaluate properly, etc. The potential impact of knowing why is very large. It might help me improve the idea, maximize the impact or pursue other paths that are more impactful and effective. I think that one minute feedback has a high expected value. Knowing why will also help me decide whether to reapply or not, either saving the grant makers future time if I don’t or improving the idea so it has more impact if I do. Feedback might help EA get less reapplications of higher quality, increasing overall impact and reducing the time to review. Win-win?
Here’s my super quick take, if I were evaluating this for funding:
Startups are pretty competitive. For me to put money into a business venture, I’d want quite a bit of faith that the team is very strong. This would be pretty high bar.
From looking at this, it’s not clear to me promising the team is at this point.
Generally, the bar for many sorts of projects is fairly high.
I’m the person Yonatan is referring to. His feedback and your general feedback are very helpful, so thank you for that! I have been a lurker within EA for years and will write more content on the EA forum, including requesting feedback on the idea (soon). Hopefully that will help, although I don’t know because I didn’t get feedback.
Before I move into why I think grant makers should provide short feedback I want to be clear: I’m completely comfortable with being rejected and I completely understand that grant makers are very busy.
Having said that, I think grant makers should feedback the applications they reject. It doesn’t have to be more than 1-2 lines and one minute to write. I have applied to EA 6 months ago and got rejected and applied again last month and got rejected again. I had a lot of encouraging talks with EA’s (although criticism as well) and was more convinced this was going to get funding. I have no idea if they hated the idea and they think it will never work, or if they think it doesn’t fit them, they are not able to evaluate properly, etc. The potential impact of knowing why is very large. It might help me improve the idea, maximize the impact or pursue other paths that are more impactful and effective. I think that one minute feedback has a high expected value. Knowing why will also help me decide whether to reapply or not, either saving the grant makers future time if I don’t or improving the idea so it has more impact if I do. Feedback might help EA get less reapplications of higher quality, increasing overall impact and reducing the time to review. Win-win?
If I could ask EA Infra Fund one binary question about your grant, it would be “did you reject me because this idea is not in your domain?”
Here’s the full idea:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A4hEM9ipq5aMeB7js/ea-startup-non-profit-sustainable-marketplace
Here’s my super quick take, if I were evaluating this for funding:
Startups are pretty competitive. For me to put money into a business venture, I’d want quite a bit of faith that the team is very strong. This would be pretty high bar.
From looking at this, it’s not clear to me promising the team is at this point.
Generally, the bar for many sorts of projects is fairly high.
Ok, for the record this is very far from my guess.
The closest thing I said was “Intra Fund don’t know how to evaluate startups, and specifically market places”