Some of my thoughts on Lightspeed Grants from what I remember: I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to name something after the key feature everyone else in the market is failing at. It leads to particularly high expectations and is really hard to get away from. (Eg OpenAI) The S-process seemed like a strange thing to include for something intended to be fast. As far as I know the S-process has never been done quickly.
You seem to be misunderstanding both Lightspeed Grants and the S-Process. The S-Process and Lightspeed Grants both feature speculation/venture grants which enable a large group of people to make fast unilateral grants. They are by far the fastest grant-decision mechanism that I know out there, and it’s been going strong for multilple years now. If you need funding quickly, an SFF speculation grant is by far the best bet, I think.
It ended up taking much longer than expected for decisions but still pretty quick overall.
I think we generally stayed within our communicated timelines, or only mildly extended them. We did also end up getting more money which caused us to reverse some rejections afterwards, but we did get back to everyone within 2 weeks on whether they would get a speculation grant, and communicated the round decisions at the deadline (or maybe a week or two later, I remember there was a small hiccup).
I’m interested to know why we haven’t seen Lightspeed Grants again?
Ironically one of the big bottlenecks was funding. OpenPhil was one funder who told us they wouldn’t fund us for anything but our LW work (and that also soon after disappeared) and ironically funding coordination work doesn’t seem to pay well. Distributing millions of dollars also didn’t combine very well with being sued by FTX.
I am interested in picking it back up again, but it is also not clear to me how sustainable working on that is.
What kind of numbers are we talking about needing here???
How much did it cost for the last Lightspeed round?
How were the operations funded?
How much distributed? $5mm?
How much would you need for operations in order to run it again?
If you had the operations funding would the grants funding still be a problem?
How much would you need for operations just for the grant decisions but not the distribution of funds?
Lightspeed Grants and the S-Process paid $20k honorariums to 5 evaluators. In addition, running the round probably cost around 8-ish months of Lightcone staff time, with a substantial chunk of that being my own time, which is generally at a premium as the CEO (I would value it organizationally at ~$700k/yr on the margin, with increasing marginal costs, though to be clear, my actual salary is currently $0), and then it also had some large diffuse effects on organizational attention.
This makes me think it would be unsustainable for us to pick up running Lightspeed Grants rounds without something like ~$500k/yr of funding for it. We distributed around ~$10MM in the round we ran.
I’m hesitant to ask you about this so feel free to pass.
Can you say more about how it is that your current salary is $0?
I think most people would be surprised you are not currently receiving a salary. I also assume that as a not-for-profit founder even when you have had a salary it is lower than most or all of your team.
You seem to be misunderstanding both Lightspeed Grants and the S-Process. The S-Process and Lightspeed Grants both feature speculation/venture grants which enable a large group of people to make fast unilateral grants. They are by far the fastest grant-decision mechanism that I know out there, and it’s been going strong for multilple years now. If you need funding quickly, an SFF speculation grant is by far the best bet, I think.
I think we generally stayed within our communicated timelines, or only mildly extended them. We did also end up getting more money which caused us to reverse some rejections afterwards, but we did get back to everyone within 2 weeks on whether they would get a speculation grant, and communicated the round decisions at the deadline (or maybe a week or two later, I remember there was a small hiccup).
Ironically one of the big bottlenecks was funding. OpenPhil was one funder who told us they wouldn’t fund us for anything but our LW work (and that also soon after disappeared) and ironically funding coordination work doesn’t seem to pay well. Distributing millions of dollars also didn’t combine very well with being sued by FTX.
I am interested in picking it back up again, but it is also not clear to me how sustainable working on that is.
What kind of numbers are we talking about needing here???
How much did it cost for the last Lightspeed round? How were the operations funded? How much distributed? $5mm?
How much would you need for operations in order to run it again? If you had the operations funding would the grants funding still be a problem? How much would you need for operations just for the grant decisions but not the distribution of funds?
Lightspeed Grants and the S-Process paid $20k honorariums to 5 evaluators. In addition, running the round probably cost around 8-ish months of Lightcone staff time, with a substantial chunk of that being my own time, which is generally at a premium as the CEO (I would value it organizationally at ~$700k/yr on the margin, with increasing marginal costs, though to be clear, my actual salary is currently $0), and then it also had some large diffuse effects on organizational attention.
This makes me think it would be unsustainable for us to pick up running Lightspeed Grants rounds without something like ~$500k/yr of funding for it. We distributed around ~$10MM in the round we ran.
I’m hesitant to ask you about this so feel free to pass. Can you say more about how it is that your current salary is $0?
I think most people would be surprised you are not currently receiving a salary. I also assume that as a not-for-profit founder even when you have had a salary it is lower than most or all of your team.
I donate more to Lightcone than my salary, so it doesn’t really make any sense for me to receive a salary, since that just means I pay more in taxes.
I of course donate to Lightcone because Lightcone doesn’t have enough money.