Still, you might be able to turn that into a few easy sentences. Ex. “We don’t think you have enough expertise on the topic”, “We don’t think you have the right skills for the project, we think there are likely better other candidates out there” “You’re research project is poorly scoped”,...
These are just quick examples I had on top of my brain, they likely could be massively improved.
Even just sharing something in the rejection letter like
“Unfortunately, even if the problem is solely due to project-specific competence and fit, there aren’t many tractable and high-EV levers for grantmakers to pull. If somebody applies with a poorly scoped research project, they may well be an amazing operations hire or entrepreneur but unfortunately a) the grantmaking process is not set up to evaluate this well, and b) we are specialized in evaluating grants, not in giving open-ended career advice.”
If you come across as insulting, someone might say you’re an asshole to everyone they talk to for the next five years, which might make it harder for you to do other things you’d hoped to do.
Not giving feedback on proposals is sometimes seen as insulting as well. We got rejected about 4 times by EA grants without feedback and we probably spent 50 hours writing and honing the proposals. Getting a “No” is harder to swallow than “No, because...”. I wasn’t insulted because I get all of the reasons for no feedback, but it doesn’t leave you feeling happy about all the work that went into it.
I also agree with various comments here that the ROI of very short feedback is likely very high, and I don’t think it’s a big time burden to phrase it in a non-insulting way. I’m going to reapply again in the upcoming months and it’s likely we get rejected again. If I knew the reason why I might not reapply or reapply better, both of which would save the grant maker considerable time (perhaps X more than writing one minute feedback).
Hi, this is a ruthless comment because you said you spent a lot of time on this.
Note that no one likes me and I am not in any EA org or anything.
Feedback
Note the feedback you got here:
“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.” source here
I don’t think the EA community is uniquely suited to answer your question. Whether this is a great startup idea or not is difficult for me to figure out and I think speaking to people in the startup and venture-capital community will get you better answers. source here
Frankly, these people are being nice. My remix/take on the above is:
There’s a high bar for average startups trying to get money in the real world. We’re not sure if EAs should fund average startups (that don’t have some theory of change or direct externality), maybe even if they are lead by aligned EAs. In this case, what you’re presenting doesn’t indicate it meets the bar of an average startup.
EAs should definitely not fund below-average startups that are for-profit because this would just fund lemons and things would runaway with unaligned behavior.
Pitch isn’t good and suggests underlying business is unpromising
Your “pitch” is really bad, even for a for-profit. It literally consists of saying that if you’re very very successful, you will have lots of money to donate to EA.
This seems like an argument someone would say about any endeavor, profit or non-profit, so there’s no content.
It is a form of 1% fallacy, but even more extreme, literally , as you are going through 0.01% scenarios, in addition to relying on network effects (which are both hit and miss, and can rationalize almost any behavior).
This is bad because it suggests the absence of any advisor reviewing this, or experience presenting. Which while not substantive, frankly is a large part of a startup.
In my opinion, when pitching or under high incentives to demonstrate latent traits that you could just list off, “absence of evidence is also evidence of absence”. For example: if you had connections with previous online marketplaces, or even just a reasonable exit, or even reasonable online marketplace experience, you could have mentioned it.
Like, every business, non-profit or project, at least has one or more “hypotheses” or “angles” or “unfair advantages” they try to argue they have.
More:
There’s more subtle/ideological/opinionated points: of all the things that might be influenced by “motivated reasoning”, it seems like becoming a powerful CEO “for altruism”, is like the canonical pattern.
So someone coming in and asking to make them CEO of a powerful online business empire, without a strong past or maybe contract or limit on their profit, can make many people roll their eyes.
As a meta point, it’s unclear if this comment is the same reasoning as what EA funds believes (but maybe some of the above reasoning applies?). My guess is that a difference is that they focus on non-profit, directly (or meta directly) impactful projects. Making a for-profit is possible, but they have a tighter focus.
Thanks for responding and I’m sure people like you, at least I do for being ruthless, that honestly helps a lot so thank you!
I should start by clarifying that the EA forum post is not the proposal that we put many hours in, that was probably written in about 30 minutes and checked by one EA, and it’s not meant to be a full pitch but just an intro to what we do. We did get feedback on that (and I got a lot more later at EAG, even from some of the grantmakers that rejected us) but when I refer to getting no feedback I mean the rejections from grants with no feedback.
About your remix/take on the EA forum, I agree that EA shouldn’t fund average startups and/or for-profits (I don’t consider our venture a for-profit though). I can’t be an unbiased judge on whether we’re average or below/above average, but I can send you the pitch deck and answer any questions/concerns you might have and then you can be the judge. You also mention previous experience, advisor reviews, hypotheses and unfair advantages, and those are all in the pitch. I’m now thinking it might have been a mistake to do a quick write up for feedback and thoughts, maybe a thorough one would have been better because I think I can address most of the concerns that you and others have but wanted to avoid a 10 page post outlining all of the questions and criticisms and how we’re addressing them.
Can I send you the deck and relay your questions in a quick call? I learn the most from the harshest critics and you seem to be one.
I think it’s worth mentioning the recent paper that Brad West wrote on this subject. It explains very well why we exist and what we’re trying to do, much better than my quick and dirty writeup. Happy to hear any feedback on that!
As mentioned in my post, “No because of personal factors or person-project fit reasons” is probably the most common situation in a lot of cases.
Still, you might be able to turn that into a few easy sentences. Ex. “We don’t think you have enough expertise on the topic”, “We don’t think you have the right skills for the project, we think there are likely better other candidates out there” “You’re research project is poorly scoped”,...
These are just quick examples I had on top of my brain, they likely could be massively improved.
Even just sharing something in the rejection letter like
“Unfortunately, even if the problem is solely due to project-specific competence and fit, there aren’t many tractable and high-EV levers for grantmakers to pull. If somebody applies with a poorly scoped research project, they may well be an amazing operations hire or entrepreneur but unfortunately a) the grantmaking process is not set up to evaluate this well, and b) we are specialized in evaluating grants, not in giving open-ended career advice.”
might be very helpful.
It’s hard to say some of those without coming off as insulting.
I think it’s okay to come off as a bit insulting in the name of better feedback, especially when you’re unlikely to be working with them long-term.
If you come across as insulting, someone might say you’re an asshole to everyone they talk to for the next five years, which might make it harder for you to do other things you’d hoped to do.
Not giving feedback on proposals is sometimes seen as insulting as well. We got rejected about 4 times by EA grants without feedback and we probably spent 50 hours writing and honing the proposals. Getting a “No” is harder to swallow than “No, because...”. I wasn’t insulted because I get all of the reasons for no feedback, but it doesn’t leave you feeling happy about all the work that went into it.
I also agree with various comments here that the ROI of very short feedback is likely very high, and I don’t think it’s a big time burden to phrase it in a non-insulting way. I’m going to reapply again in the upcoming months and it’s likely we get rejected again. If I knew the reason why I might not reapply or reapply better, both of which would save the grant maker considerable time (perhaps X more than writing one minute feedback).
Hi, this is a ruthless comment because you said you spent a lot of time on this.
Note that no one likes me and I am not in any EA org or anything.
Feedback
Note the feedback you got here:
“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.” source here
I don’t think the EA community is uniquely suited to answer your question. Whether this is a great startup idea or not is difficult for me to figure out and I think speaking to people in the startup and venture-capital community will get you better answers. source here
Frankly, these people are being nice. My remix/take on the above is:
There’s a high bar for average startups trying to get money in the real world. We’re not sure if EAs should fund average startups (that don’t have some theory of change or direct externality), maybe even if they are lead by aligned EAs. In this case, what you’re presenting doesn’t indicate it meets the bar of an average startup.
EAs should definitely not fund below-average startups that are for-profit because this would just fund lemons and things would runaway with unaligned behavior.
Pitch isn’t good and suggests underlying business is unpromising
Your “pitch” is really bad, even for a for-profit. It literally consists of saying that if you’re very very successful, you will have lots of money to donate to EA.
This seems like an argument someone would say about any endeavor, profit or non-profit, so there’s no content.
It is a form of 1% fallacy, but even more extreme, literally , as you are going through 0.01% scenarios, in addition to relying on network effects (which are both hit and miss, and can rationalize almost any behavior).
This is bad because it suggests the absence of any advisor reviewing this, or experience presenting. Which while not substantive, frankly is a large part of a startup.
In my opinion, when pitching or under high incentives to demonstrate latent traits that you could just list off, “absence of evidence is also evidence of absence”. For example: if you had connections with previous online marketplaces, or even just a reasonable exit, or even reasonable online marketplace experience, you could have mentioned it.
Like, every business, non-profit or project, at least has one or more “hypotheses” or “angles” or “unfair advantages” they try to argue they have.
More:
There’s more subtle/ideological/opinionated points: of all the things that might be influenced by “motivated reasoning”, it seems like becoming a powerful CEO “for altruism”, is like the canonical pattern.
So someone coming in and asking to make them CEO of a powerful online business empire, without a strong past or maybe contract or limit on their profit, can make many people roll their eyes.
As a meta point, it’s unclear if this comment is the same reasoning as what EA funds believes (but maybe some of the above reasoning applies?). My guess is that a difference is that they focus on non-profit, directly (or meta directly) impactful projects. Making a for-profit is possible, but they have a tighter focus.
Hi Charles,
Thanks for responding and I’m sure people like you, at least I do for being ruthless, that honestly helps a lot so thank you!
I should start by clarifying that the EA forum post is not the proposal that we put many hours in, that was probably written in about 30 minutes and checked by one EA, and it’s not meant to be a full pitch but just an intro to what we do. We did get feedback on that (and I got a lot more later at EAG, even from some of the grantmakers that rejected us) but when I refer to getting no feedback I mean the rejections from grants with no feedback.
About your remix/take on the EA forum, I agree that EA shouldn’t fund average startups and/or for-profits (I don’t consider our venture a for-profit though). I can’t be an unbiased judge on whether we’re average or below/above average, but I can send you the pitch deck and answer any questions/concerns you might have and then you can be the judge. You also mention previous experience, advisor reviews, hypotheses and unfair advantages, and those are all in the pitch. I’m now thinking it might have been a mistake to do a quick write up for feedback and thoughts, maybe a thorough one would have been better because I think I can address most of the concerns that you and others have but wanted to avoid a 10 page post outlining all of the questions and criticisms and how we’re addressing them.
Can I send you the deck and relay your questions in a quick call? I learn the most from the harshest critics and you seem to be one.
I think it’s worth mentioning the recent paper that Brad West wrote on this subject. It explains very well why we exist and what we’re trying to do, much better than my quick and dirty writeup. Happy to hear any feedback on that!
I agree, and like I said, I’m sure those sentences can be massively improved.
I prefer to have my feelings a little hurt than remain in the dark as to why a grant didn’t get accepted.
I agree