The coronavirus Fast Grants were great, but their competitive advantage seems to have been that they were they first (and fastest) people to move in a crisis.
The overall Emergent Ventures idea is interesting and worth exploring (I say, while running a copy of it), but has it had proven cost-effective impact yet? I haven’t been following the people involved but I don’t remember MR formally following up.
There’s a list of winners here, but I’m not sure how you would judge counterfactual impact. With a lot of these, it’s difficult to demonstrate that the grantee would have been unable to do their work without the grant.
At the very least, I think Alexey was fairly poor when he received the grant and would have had to get a day job otherwise.
The coronavirus Fast Grants were great, but their competitive advantage seems to have been that they were they first (and fastest) people to move in a crisis.
The overall Emergent Ventures idea is interesting and worth exploring (I say, while running a copy of it), but has it had proven cost-effective impact yet? I haven’t been following the people involved but I don’t remember MR formally following up.
There’s a list of winners here, but I’m not sure how you would judge counterfactual impact. With a lot of these, it’s difficult to demonstrate that the grantee would have been unable to do their work without the grant.
At the very least, I think Alexey was fairly poor when he received the grant and would have had to get a day job otherwise.