To be fair, since announcing AISS shutting down, I am having a lot more conversations with people with negative experiences. So now I am comparing the counterfactual good to the bad. It is a big blind spot. People don’t make public posts about this. It’s no one’s job to collect all of the counter cases.
“Choose not to apply” is big part of the problem.
A person gets funded by LTFF but because they had a bad experience as an applicant they choose not to apply and put themselves through that experience again. They also choose not to apply or raise funds anywhere else. So we lost the value of that project continuing. Maybe they went on to do something pretty neutral or maybe they went on to work on capabilities.
People talk privately about this but not publicly. Which leads to others convincing themselves to not apply at all. Some potential donors have more people with bad experiences than good in their network and so don’t want to donate to LTFF. Yes, I’ve spoken to a few people in these cases and despite my own experience I encouraged people to apply anyway.
A core part of my decision to shut down AISS was that I didn’t want to have to be an applicant again. We had gotten funding from LTFF and SFF before but I had reached a point where if we had gotten the funding we were waiting for I would not be continuing after that funding had run out.
This is just some of the downstream effects of bad applicant experience for things actually funded by LTFF.
There are some issues with rejected applications too. Mostly related to the how the applicant and others update based on the rejection.
Project A get rejected, apparently because it might not be the best version of that kind of thing and could crowd out the market for a better version to come along. Someone sees the gap, starts planning Project B that could be better. They chose not to apply because in exploring the idea for their project they find out Project A wanted to do this but couldn’t get funding. Project B wrongly assumes that funders are not interested in funding this kind of project and so give up.
I think if we as the question “should the LTFF shutdown?” The answer is always “no, it clearly does good that no one else is trying to do”
But if you ask “if the LTFF never existed and you were designing a fund from scratch would it look exactly like the LTFF?” I think this is a clear “no” as well.
I don’t think LTFF is able to fix its current problems or be drastically modified to what you might have designed if it never existed. And of course it crowds out anyone else from solving this.
Lack of transparency around the full distribution of decision timeframes, and other aspects of the process, means it’s difficult to make an informed choice the first time around. And one bad experience can be enough to burn people long term, particularly if theyre making the reasonable assumption that LTFF is representative of the average funder.
Even considering that you could presumably choose not to apply? (I guess you think it is bad in a systematically surprising way).
To be fair, since announcing AISS shutting down, I am having a lot more conversations with people with negative experiences. So now I am comparing the counterfactual good to the bad. It is a big blind spot. People don’t make public posts about this. It’s no one’s job to collect all of the counter cases.
“Choose not to apply” is big part of the problem.
A person gets funded by LTFF but because they had a bad experience as an applicant they choose not to apply and put themselves through that experience again. They also choose not to apply or raise funds anywhere else. So we lost the value of that project continuing. Maybe they went on to do something pretty neutral or maybe they went on to work on capabilities.
People talk privately about this but not publicly. Which leads to others convincing themselves to not apply at all. Some potential donors have more people with bad experiences than good in their network and so don’t want to donate to LTFF. Yes, I’ve spoken to a few people in these cases and despite my own experience I encouraged people to apply anyway.
A core part of my decision to shut down AISS was that I didn’t want to have to be an applicant again. We had gotten funding from LTFF and SFF before but I had reached a point where if we had gotten the funding we were waiting for I would not be continuing after that funding had run out.
This is just some of the downstream effects of bad applicant experience for things actually funded by LTFF.
There are some issues with rejected applications too. Mostly related to the how the applicant and others update based on the rejection.
Project A get rejected, apparently because it might not be the best version of that kind of thing and could crowd out the market for a better version to come along. Someone sees the gap, starts planning Project B that could be better. They chose not to apply because in exploring the idea for their project they find out Project A wanted to do this but couldn’t get funding. Project B wrongly assumes that funders are not interested in funding this kind of project and so give up.
I think if we as the question “should the LTFF shutdown?” The answer is always “no, it clearly does good that no one else is trying to do”
But if you ask “if the LTFF never existed and you were designing a fund from scratch would it look exactly like the LTFF?” I think this is a clear “no” as well.
I don’t think LTFF is able to fix its current problems or be drastically modified to what you might have designed if it never existed. And of course it crowds out anyone else from solving this.
Lack of transparency around the full distribution of decision timeframes, and other aspects of the process, means it’s difficult to make an informed choice the first time around. And one bad experience can be enough to burn people long term, particularly if theyre making the reasonable assumption that LTFF is representative of the average funder.