There was one expectation / takeaway that I was surprised about.
Getting sympathetic founders from adjacent networks to launch new projects related to our areas of interest—Worse than expected. We thought that maybe there was a range of people who aren’t on our radar yet (e.g., tech founder types who have read The Precipice) who would be interested in launching projects in our areas of interest if we had accessible explanations of what we were hoping for, distributed the call widely, and made the funding process easy. But we didn’t really get much of that. Instead, most of the applications we were interested in came from people who were already working in our areas of interest and/or from the effective altruism community. So this part of the experiment performed below our expectations.
You mentioned the call was open for three weeks. Would that have been sufficient for people who are not already deeply embedded in EA networks to formulate a coherent and fundable idea (especially if they currently have full-time jobs)? It seems likely that this kind of “get people to launch new projects” effect would require more runway. If so, the data from this round shouldn’t update one’s priors very much on this question.
I agree, I found out about FTX Future Fund in mid-April despite being connected to EA, being connected to the crypto community (following SBF on Twitter) and myself working on an application for the 776 Fellowship. I finally found out about it because Alexis Ohanian randomly retweeted a Future Fund tweet.
Clearly, they still had almost 2k applications, but I don’t think it was an easy find for anyone not actively looking. I would have never found it if I was busy actively working on a project, because I don’t check most of the channels this was advertised on.
Thanks for the detailed update!
There was one expectation / takeaway that I was surprised about.
You mentioned the call was open for three weeks. Would that have been sufficient for people who are not already deeply embedded in EA networks to formulate a coherent and fundable idea (especially if they currently have full-time jobs)? It seems likely that this kind of “get people to launch new projects” effect would require more runway. If so, the data from this round shouldn’t update one’s priors very much on this question.
I agree, I found out about FTX Future Fund in mid-April despite being connected to EA, being connected to the crypto community (following SBF on Twitter) and myself working on an application for the 776 Fellowship. I finally found out about it because Alexis Ohanian randomly retweeted a Future Fund tweet.
Clearly, they still had almost 2k applications, but I don’t think it was an easy find for anyone not actively looking. I would have never found it if I was busy actively working on a project, because I don’t check most of the channels this was advertised on.