Thanks for pulling this together! The methodology is going to slightly overemphasize the degree to which funding increased over time, because increasing funding came at the same time as increased centralization of funding and it’s easier to get the numbers for more central funding.
One way to get a lower bound on funding would be to look at how much 80k and GWWC raised for operating expenses in the early years that you haven’t already accounted for.
Individual Donors: A number of (U)HNW & earning-to-give donors, many of whom are still active today, such as Jaan Tallinn, Luke Ding, Matt Wage and Jeff Kaufman & Julia Wise. I expect I’m missing somewhere between ~$100,000 to $1,000,000 of donations from individuals in this chart per year from 2012 to 2016.
That’s right. You have records of non-Tallin donors giving $5k in 2012 and $74k in in 2013, which I think doesn’t include the $25k in 2012 and $51k in 2013 from Julia and me?
Yep that’s true! I was originally planning to calculate the operating expenses and backfill the chart but it was time consuming, and it was really hard to find data for GWWC /​ CEA data more generally (I requested CEA for numbers but they declined to provide historical financial figures)
Let me check on your early donations from you and Julia—there may have been an error in my charts!
Thanks for pulling this together! The methodology is going to slightly overemphasize the degree to which funding increased over time, because increasing funding came at the same time as increased centralization of funding and it’s easier to get the numbers for more central funding.
One way to get a lower bound on funding would be to look at how much 80k and GWWC raised for operating expenses in the early years that you haven’t already accounted for.
That’s right. You have records of non-Tallin donors giving $5k in 2012 and $74k in in 2013, which I think doesn’t include the $25k in 2012 and $51k in 2013 from Julia and me?
Yep that’s true! I was originally planning to calculate the operating expenses and backfill the chart but it was time consuming, and it was really hard to find data for GWWC /​ CEA data more generally (I requested CEA for numbers but they declined to provide historical financial figures)
Let me check on your early donations from you and Julia—there may have been an error in my charts!
Update: The 2012 numbers don’t include your donations, but the 2013 ones do—I’ve corrected the 2012 numbers. Thanks for the flag!