I think longtermist/x-security focused EA is probably making a strategic mistake by not having any effective giving/fundraising organization[1] based in the Bay Area, and instead locating the effective giving organizations elsewhere.
Consider the following factors:
SF has either the first or second highest density of billionaires among world cities, depending on how you count
AFAICT the distribution is not particularly bimodal (ie, you should expect there to be plenty of merely very rich or affluent people in the Bay, not just billionaires).
The rich people in the Bay are unusually likely to be young and new money, which I think means they’re more likely to give to weird projects like AI safety, compared to long-established family foundations.
The SF Bay scene is among the most technically literate social scenes in the world. People are already actively unusually disposed to having opinions about AI doom, synthetic biology misuse, etc.
Many direct work x-security researchers and adjacent people are based in the Bay. Naively, it seems easier to persuade a tech multimillionaire from SF to give to an AI safety research org in Berkeley (which she could literally walk into and ask probing questions of) than to persuade a fashion mogul in Paris to do the same.
Longtermist EA already has several organizations (counting orgs that I think lean >50% longtermist) with dedicated staff focused on effective giving:
Founders’ Pledge (has an office in SF, but I think most people are in London)
Longview (London)
Effective Giving (Netherlands)
There are other groups that are partially longtermist, like Giving What We Can (Australia-based). They are also not based in the Bay Area.
Between these groups, and some part-time people (eg local group organizers of local groups that invest more in giving than careers), I wouldn’t be surprised if there are >20 longtermist effective giving FTEs who are inexplicably outside the Bay Area.
The only organization with significant (>1 FTE) effective giving presence in the Bay Area that I’m aware of is GiveWell.
In GiveWell’s case, I believe they’re based in Oakland and have a reasonable number of people focused on fundraising (“major gifts officers”, etc).
But ofc they’re focused on global health and development, and the ex ante case for doing GHD fundraising in SF Bay (as opposed to other places) is weaker than the ex ante case for e.g. AI Safety fundraising.
Maybe Founders’ Pledge too? But I don’t actually know how many of their staff is in the Bay, and/or whether those specific staff focus on fundraising (as opposed to research or grantmaking)
All these factors combined makes me think there’s a significant strategic misallocation.
Possible counterarguments and my responses to them:
Maybe there are a lot of FTEs who work in this area but aren’t legibly part of an effective giving org, or who have other day jobs so only spend a fraction of their time?
Response: Maybe? The second one is definitely directionally true. But if there are many people working on this, I feel like I would’ve heard of them by now? I literally live in the Bay and work for a funding-constrained grantmaker, if someone is raising a lot of money for longtermist causes they really should talk to me.
The Bay Area is an insanely expensive to live. Unless you’re working in a field that has very high network effects that need to be in the Bay (AI safety, startup earning-to-give), you should live somewhere cheaper.
Response: this just feels like false economy to me. In the same way that earning-to-give in more expensive places usually make more sense (because salaries usually rise higher than expenses, especially at the top end) than earning-to-give in cheap places, I expect you want to fundraise where the rich people are, not in places with low costs-of-living.
London’s billionaires per capita is arguably one-seventh that of the Bay.
I expect a good fundraiser to generate >>1M/year in counterfactual donations. Is paying them 50k more (or even 100k(!) more) really not worth it?
Maybe in-person outreach doesn’t matter? People who want to give to effective charities care more about substance than presentation. Longtermist donors in particular are usually tech-literate. So public comms and emails/videocalls should be enough.
Response: I dunno, man, possible but sure sounds suspicious to me.
I would not expect most of traditional philanthropy to work this way;
also, EAGs seem to provide a bunch of value[1] despite EAs in theory also caring more about substance than presentation, and being tech-literate.
Does effective giving matter? Is Open Phil even going to spend down their billions before the singularity?
Response: having a diversity of funding seems important! Plus, in worlds where effective giving doesn’t matter, we should not see any orgs working in effective giving. Instead we see quite a few, just not based in the Bay. So it’s still a misallocation.
Maybe having fundraisers in the Bay will damage community epistemics etc, and make the object-level research a lot worse?
Response: possible but again, quite a suspicious argument. I feel like this is unlikely to be an overriding consideration, and if it is, there are quite a few ways to shield the researchers away from the fundraisers.
It’s not already being done. Maybe there’s a good reason?
I do find the outside view mildly convincing. Maybe for example, people have tried but not succeeded to set up effective giving shops in the Bay.
I thought about running this shortform by people who’d know more, before posting it. But I figured it’s just a shortform, done is better than perfect, and anyway I decided to follow Godwin’s Law (“the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”)
This consideration is not entirely theoretical for me. I’ve been thinking about what types of work I should be doing with my career, whether at Rethink, at EA Funds, or elsewhere. One plausible option to test (though likely very part-time) is in-person fundraising in the Bay. So I’d be interested in hearing about why this is a bad idea.
(My best guess is that in-person fundraising isn’t a good fit for me because I’m not very good at in-person charisma/presentation, and I have fairly valuable counterfactuals like grantmaking. But probably worth exploring anyway).
[1] By “effective giving/fundraising organization,” I mean an organization whose primary route to impact is via increasing the pool of funding available to effective direct work organizations. Examples in this category include Effective Giving, Longview, Founders’ Pledge, Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save and (edge case) EA Giving Tuesday. This is contrasted with orgs whose primary theory of change is by grantmaking (like Open Phil or Long-Term Future Fund), or who have a mixed theory of change (like GiveWell).
Hiring a fundraiser in the US, and perhaps in the Bay specifically, is something GWWC is especially interested in. Our main reason for not doing so is primarily our own funding situation. We’re in the process of fundraising generally right now—if any potential donor is interested, please send me a DM as I’m very open to chatting.
Sorry if my question is ignorant, but why does an effective giving organization needs specialized donors, instead of being mostly self-sustaining?
It makes sense if you are an early organization that needs startup funds (eg a national EA group in a new country, or the first iteration of Giving What We Can). But it seems like GWWC has been around for a while (including after the reboot with you at the helm).
This is the kind of project that seems like a natural fit for Manifund. After all, one of the key variables in the value of the grant is how much money it raises.
We (Founders Pledge) do have a significant presence in SF, and are actively trying to grow much faster in the U.S. in 2024.
A couple weakly held takes here, based on my experience:
Although it’s true that issues around effective giving are much more salient in the Bay Area, it’s also the case that effective giving is nearly as much of an uphill battle with SF philanthropists as with others. People do still have pet causes, and there are many particularities about the U.S. philanthropic ecosystem that sometimes push against individuals’ willingness to take the main points of effective giving on board.
Relatedly, growing in SF seems in part to be hard essentially because of competition. There’s a lot of money and philanthropic intent, and a fair number of existing organizations (and philanthropic advisors, etc) that are focused on capturing that money and guiding that philanthropy. So we do face the challenge of getting in front of people, getting enough of their time, etc.
Since FP has historically offered mostly free services to members, growing our network in SF is something we actually need to fundraise for. On the margin I believe it’s worthwhile, given the large number of potentially aligned UHNWs, but it’s the kind of investment (in this case, in Founders Pledge by its funders) that would likely take a couple years to bear fruit in terms of increased amounts of giving to effective charities. I expect this is also a consideration for other existing groups that are thinking about raising money for a Bay Area expansion.
It’s great that you have a presence in SF and are trying to grow it substantially in 2024! That said, I’m a bit confused about what Founders’ Pledge does; in particular how much I should be thinking about Founders’ Pledge as a fairly GCR-motivated organization vs more of a “broad tent” org more akin to Giving What We Can or even the Giving Pledge. In particular, here are the totals when I look at your publicly-listed funds:
Climate Change ($9.1M)
Global Catastrophic Risks ($5.3M in 7 grants)
$3M of which went to NTI in October 2023. Congrats on the large recent grant btw!
Global Health and Development ($1.3M)
Patient Philanthropy Fund (~0)
Though to be fair that’s roughly what I’d expect from a patient fund.
From a GCR/longtermist/x-risk focused perspective, I’m rather confused about how to reconcile the following considerations for inputs vs outputs:
~$10B(!) donations pledged, according to your website.
~$1B moved to charitable sector
<20M total donations tracked publicly
<10 total grants made (which is maybe ~1.5-2 OOMs lower than say EA Funds)
Presumably you do great work, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get funding and/or reasonable hires. But I’m confused about what your organizational mandate and/or planned path-to-impact is. Possibilities:
You have a broad tent strategy aiming for greater philanthropic involvement of startup founders in general, not a narrow focus on locally high-impact donations
Founders’ Pledge sees itself as primarily a research org with a philanthropic arm attached, not primarily a philanthropic fund that also does some research to guide giving
A very large fraction of your money moved to impactful charities is private/”behind the scenes”, so your public funds are a very poor proxy for your actual impact.
Easily reconciled — most of our money moved is via advising our members. These grants are in large part not public, and members also grant to many organizations that they choose irrespective of our recommendations. We provide the infrastructure to enable this.
The Funds are a relatively recent development, and indeed some of the grants listed on the current Fund pages were actually advised by the fund managers, not granted directly from money contributed to the Fund (this is noted on the website if it’s the case for each grant). Ideally, we’d be able to grow the Funds a lot more so that we can do much more active grantmaking, and at the same time continue to advise members on effective giving.
My team (11 people at the moment) does generalist research across worldviews — animal welfare, longtermism/GCRs, and global health and development. We also have a climate vertical, as you note, which I characterize in more detail in this previous forum comment.
EDIT:
Realized I didn’t address your final question. I think we are a mix, basically — we are enabling successful entrepreneurs to give, period (in fact, we are committing them to do so via a legally binding pledge), and we are trying to influence as much of their giving as possible toward the most effective possible things. It is probably more accurate to represent FP as having a research arm, simply given staff proportions, but equally accurate to describe our recommendations as being “research-driven.”
I doubt anyone made a strategic decision to start fundraising orgs outside the Bay Area instead of inside it. I would guess they just started orgs while having personal reasons for living where they lived. People aren’t generally so mobile or project-fungible that where projects are run is something driven mostly by where they would best be run.
That said, I half-remember that both 80k and CEA tried being in the Bay for a bit and then left. I don’t know what the story there was.
Huh, I actually kinda thought that Open Phil also had a mixed portfolio, just less prominently/extensively than GiveWell. Mostly based on hearling like once or twice that they were in talks with interested UHNW people, and a vague memory of somebody at Open Phil mentioning them being interested in expanding their donors beyond DM&CT…
I think longtermist/x-security focused EA is probably making a strategic mistake by not having any effective giving/fundraising organization[1] based in the Bay Area, and instead locating the effective giving organizations elsewhere.
Consider the following factors:
SF has either the first or second highest density of billionaires among world cities, depending on how you count
AFAICT the distribution is not particularly bimodal (ie, you should expect there to be plenty of merely very rich or affluent people in the Bay, not just billionaires).
The rich people in the Bay are unusually likely to be young and new money, which I think means they’re more likely to give to weird projects like AI safety, compared to long-established family foundations.
The SF Bay scene is among the most technically literate social scenes in the world. People are already actively unusually disposed to having opinions about AI doom, synthetic biology misuse, etc.
Many direct work x-security researchers and adjacent people are based in the Bay. Naively, it seems easier to persuade a tech multimillionaire from SF to give to an AI safety research org in Berkeley (which she could literally walk into and ask probing questions of) than to persuade a fashion mogul in Paris to do the same.
Longtermist EA already has several organizations (counting orgs that I think lean >50% longtermist) with dedicated staff focused on effective giving:
Founders’ Pledge (has an office in SF, but I think most people are in London)
Longview (London)
Effective Giving (Netherlands)
There are other groups that are partially longtermist, like Giving What We Can (Australia-based). They are also not based in the Bay Area.
Between these groups, and some part-time people (eg local group organizers of local groups that invest more in giving than careers), I wouldn’t be surprised if there are >20 longtermist effective giving FTEs who are inexplicably outside the Bay Area.
The only organization with significant (>1 FTE) effective giving presence in the Bay Area that I’m aware of is GiveWell.
In GiveWell’s case, I believe they’re based in Oakland and have a reasonable number of people focused on fundraising (“major gifts officers”, etc).
But ofc they’re focused on global health and development, and the ex ante case for doing GHD fundraising in SF Bay (as opposed to other places) is weaker than the ex ante case for e.g. AI Safety fundraising.
Maybe Founders’ Pledge too? But I don’t actually know how many of their staff is in the Bay, and/or whether those specific staff focus on fundraising (as opposed to research or grantmaking)
All these factors combined makes me think there’s a significant strategic misallocation.
Possible counterarguments and my responses to them:
Maybe there are a lot of FTEs who work in this area but aren’t legibly part of an effective giving org, or who have other day jobs so only spend a fraction of their time?
Response: Maybe? The second one is definitely directionally true. But if there are many people working on this, I feel like I would’ve heard of them by now? I literally live in the Bay and work for a funding-constrained grantmaker, if someone is raising a lot of money for longtermist causes they really should talk to me.
The Bay Area is an insanely expensive to live. Unless you’re working in a field that has very high network effects that need to be in the Bay (AI safety, startup earning-to-give), you should live somewhere cheaper.
Response: this just feels like false economy to me. In the same way that earning-to-give in more expensive places usually make more sense (because salaries usually rise higher than expenses, especially at the top end) than earning-to-give in cheap places, I expect you want to fundraise where the rich people are, not in places with low costs-of-living.
London’s billionaires per capita is arguably one-seventh that of the Bay.
I expect a good fundraiser to generate >>1M/year in counterfactual donations. Is paying them 50k more (or even 100k(!) more) really not worth it?
Maybe in-person outreach doesn’t matter? People who want to give to effective charities care more about substance than presentation. Longtermist donors in particular are usually tech-literate. So public comms and emails/videocalls should be enough.
Response: I dunno, man, possible but sure sounds suspicious to me.
I would not expect most of traditional philanthropy to work this way;
also, EAGs seem to provide a bunch of value[1] despite EAs in theory also caring more about substance than presentation, and being tech-literate.
Does effective giving matter? Is Open Phil even going to spend down their billions before the singularity?
Response: having a diversity of funding seems important! Plus, in worlds where effective giving doesn’t matter, we should not see any orgs working in effective giving. Instead we see quite a few, just not based in the Bay. So it’s still a misallocation.
Maybe having fundraisers in the Bay will damage community epistemics etc, and make the object-level research a lot worse?
Response: possible but again, quite a suspicious argument. I feel like this is unlikely to be an overriding consideration, and if it is, there are quite a few ways to shield the researchers away from the fundraisers.
It’s not already being done. Maybe there’s a good reason?
I do find the outside view mildly convincing. Maybe for example, people have tried but not succeeded to set up effective giving shops in the Bay.
I thought about running this shortform by people who’d know more, before posting it. But I figured it’s just a shortform, done is better than perfect, and anyway I decided to follow Godwin’s Law (“the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”)
This consideration is not entirely theoretical for me. I’ve been thinking about what types of work I should be doing with my career, whether at Rethink, at EA Funds, or elsewhere. One plausible option to test (though likely very part-time) is in-person fundraising in the Bay. So I’d be interested in hearing about why this is a bad idea.
(My best guess is that in-person fundraising isn’t a good fit for me because I’m not very good at in-person charisma/presentation, and I have fairly valuable counterfactuals like grantmaking. But probably worth exploring anyway).
[1] By “effective giving/fundraising organization,” I mean an organization whose primary route to impact is via increasing the pool of funding available to effective direct work organizations. Examples in this category include Effective Giving, Longview, Founders’ Pledge, Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save and (edge case) EA Giving Tuesday. This is contrasted with orgs whose primary theory of change is by grantmaking (like Open Phil or Long-Term Future Fund), or who have a mixed theory of change (like GiveWell).
Though they are also very expensive, and I’m not certain that they’re worth the costs.
Hiring a fundraiser in the US, and perhaps in the Bay specifically, is something GWWC is especially interested in. Our main reason for not doing so is primarily our own funding situation. We’re in the process of fundraising generally right now—if any potential donor is interested, please send me a DM as I’m very open to chatting.
Sorry if my question is ignorant, but why does an effective giving organization needs specialized donors, instead of being mostly self-sustaining?
It makes sense if you are an early organization that needs startup funds (eg a national EA group in a new country, or the first iteration of Giving What We Can). But it seems like GWWC has been around for a while (including after the reboot with you at the helm).
This is the kind of project that seems like a natural fit for Manifund. After all, one of the key variables in the value of the grant is how much money it raises.
We (Founders Pledge) do have a significant presence in SF, and are actively trying to grow much faster in the U.S. in 2024.
A couple weakly held takes here, based on my experience:
Although it’s true that issues around effective giving are much more salient in the Bay Area, it’s also the case that effective giving is nearly as much of an uphill battle with SF philanthropists as with others. People do still have pet causes, and there are many particularities about the U.S. philanthropic ecosystem that sometimes push against individuals’ willingness to take the main points of effective giving on board.
Relatedly, growing in SF seems in part to be hard essentially because of competition. There’s a lot of money and philanthropic intent, and a fair number of existing organizations (and philanthropic advisors, etc) that are focused on capturing that money and guiding that philanthropy. So we do face the challenge of getting in front of people, getting enough of their time, etc.
Since FP has historically offered mostly free services to members, growing our network in SF is something we actually need to fundraise for. On the margin I believe it’s worthwhile, given the large number of potentially aligned UHNWs, but it’s the kind of investment (in this case, in Founders Pledge by its funders) that would likely take a couple years to bear fruit in terms of increased amounts of giving to effective charities. I expect this is also a consideration for other existing groups that are thinking about raising money for a Bay Area expansion.
It’s great that you have a presence in SF and are trying to grow it substantially in 2024! That said, I’m a bit confused about what Founders’ Pledge does; in particular how much I should be thinking about Founders’ Pledge as a fairly GCR-motivated organization vs more of a “broad tent” org more akin to Giving What We Can or even the Giving Pledge. In particular, here are the totals when I look at your publicly-listed funds:
Climate Change ($9.1M)
Global Catastrophic Risks ($5.3M in 7 grants)
$3M of which went to NTI in October 2023. Congrats on the large recent grant btw!
Global Health and Development ($1.3M)
Patient Philanthropy Fund (~0)
Though to be fair that’s roughly what I’d expect from a patient fund.
From a GCR/longtermist/x-risk focused perspective, I’m rather confused about how to reconcile the following considerations for inputs vs outputs:
Founders’ Pledge being around for ~7 years.
Founders’ Pledge having ~50 employees on your website (though I don’t know how many FTEs, maybe only 20-30?)
~$10B(!) donations pledged, according to your website.
~$1B moved to charitable sector
<20M total donations tracked publicly
<10 total grants made (which is maybe ~1.5-2 OOMs lower than say EA Funds)
Presumably you do great work, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get funding and/or reasonable hires. But I’m confused about what your organizational mandate and/or planned path-to-impact is. Possibilities:
You have a broad tent strategy aiming for greater philanthropic involvement of startup founders in general, not a narrow focus on locally high-impact donations
Founders’ Pledge sees itself as primarily a research org with a philanthropic arm attached, not primarily a philanthropic fund that also does some research to guide giving
A very large fraction of your money moved to impactful charities is private/”behind the scenes”, so your public funds are a very poor proxy for your actual impact.
Some other reason that I haven’t thought of.
Easily reconciled — most of our money moved is via advising our members. These grants are in large part not public, and members also grant to many organizations that they choose irrespective of our recommendations. We provide the infrastructure to enable this.
The Funds are a relatively recent development, and indeed some of the grants listed on the current Fund pages were actually advised by the fund managers, not granted directly from money contributed to the Fund (this is noted on the website if it’s the case for each grant). Ideally, we’d be able to grow the Funds a lot more so that we can do much more active grantmaking, and at the same time continue to advise members on effective giving.
My team (11 people at the moment) does generalist research across worldviews — animal welfare, longtermism/GCRs, and global health and development. We also have a climate vertical, as you note, which I characterize in more detail in this previous forum comment.
EDIT:
Realized I didn’t address your final question. I think we are a mix, basically — we are enabling successful entrepreneurs to give, period (in fact, we are committing them to do so via a legally binding pledge), and we are trying to influence as much of their giving as possible toward the most effective possible things. It is probably more accurate to represent FP as having a research arm, simply given staff proportions, but equally accurate to describe our recommendations as being “research-driven.”
Bay Area is one of GWWC’s priority areas to start a local group.
Thanks Imma! We’re still very much looking for people to put their hands up for this. If anyone thinks they’d be a good fit please to let us know!
I doubt anyone made a strategic decision to start fundraising orgs outside the Bay Area instead of inside it. I would guess they just started orgs while having personal reasons for living where they lived. People aren’t generally so mobile or project-fungible that where projects are run is something driven mostly by where they would best be run.
That said, I half-remember that both 80k and CEA tried being in the Bay for a bit and then left. I don’t know what the story there was.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most people had assumed that Founder’s Pledge had this covered.
Huh, I actually kinda thought that Open Phil also had a mixed portfolio, just less prominently/extensively than GiveWell. Mostly based on hearling like once or twice that they were in talks with interested UHNW people, and a vague memory of somebody at Open Phil mentioning them being interested in expanding their donors beyond DM&CT…