A non-trivial fraction of our most valuable grants require very short turn-around times, and more broadly, there is a huge amount of variance in how much time it takes to evaluate different kinds of applications. This makes a round model hard, since you both end up getting back much later than necessary to applications that were easy to evaluate, and have to reject applications that could be good but are difficult to evaluate.
I’m interested to know why we haven’t seen Lightspeed Grants again?
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. It also seems to be dependent on every parameter being in place in order to be run so can easily be held up by something small.
At the time of applications it had a clear date when decisions were expected, this is much better than everyone else’s vague expectations. It ended up taking much longer than expected for decisions but still pretty quick overall. This was managed really well though. Certainly much better than LTFFs handing of a large volume of slow decisions last year. I judge the timing of decisions more on how late they are than the total time, but this is a proxy for the real problem which is uncertainty. Lightspeed got the basics right when it comes to comms.
I think it was really good over all and I’d expect that the major issues not accounted for in the first round can be managed.
I would really like to see this run again or a variation of it.
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.
Yeah, I have personally appreciated the short turn around when needed. And seen plenty of situations where people need funds quickly.
I expect there are a lot of these tradeoffs. I think these should be solved by different services not by trying to solve all of the different types of funding together. LTFF ended up here for historical reasons, but now seems to be struggling to serve all of these markets while also crowding out any new funders in the space.
If I set up a new fund it would have rounds and I would just accept that this fund would not be able to support those kinds of applicants that need a fast turn around or longer investigations. A lot of the problems of the applicant experience with LTFF is uncertainty. Having one application form that try’s to solve all of these problems means that the expectations can’t be specific enough to be meaningful.
A non-trivial fraction of our most valuable grants require very short turn-around times, and more broadly, there is a huge amount of variance in how much time it takes to evaluate different kinds of applications. This makes a round model hard, since you both end up getting back much later than necessary to applications that were easy to evaluate, and have to reject applications that could be good but are difficult to evaluate.
I’m interested to know why we haven’t seen Lightspeed Grants again?
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. It also seems to be dependent on every parameter being in place in order to be run so can easily be held up by something small.
At the time of applications it had a clear date when decisions were expected, this is much better than everyone else’s vague expectations. It ended up taking much longer than expected for decisions but still pretty quick overall. This was managed really well though. Certainly much better than LTFFs handing of a large volume of slow decisions last year. I judge the timing of decisions more on how late they are than the total time, but this is a proxy for the real problem which is uncertainty. Lightspeed got the basics right when it comes to comms.
I think it was really good over all and I’d expect that the major issues not accounted for in the first round can be managed. I would really like to see this run again or a variation of it.
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.
Yeah, I have personally appreciated the short turn around when needed. And seen plenty of situations where people need funds quickly.
I expect there are a lot of these tradeoffs. I think these should be solved by different services not by trying to solve all of the different types of funding together. LTFF ended up here for historical reasons, but now seems to be struggling to serve all of these markets while also crowding out any new funders in the space.
If I set up a new fund it would have rounds and I would just accept that this fund would not be able to support those kinds of applicants that need a fast turn around or longer investigations. A lot of the problems of the applicant experience with LTFF is uncertainty. Having one application form that try’s to solve all of these problems means that the expectations can’t be specific enough to be meaningful.