It seems like the majority of individual grantees (over several periods) are doing academic-related research.
Can Caleb or other fund managers say more about why “One heuristic we commonly use (especially for new, unproven grantees) is to offer roughly 70% of what we anticipate the grantee would earn in an industry role” rather than e.g. “offer roughly the same as what we anticipate the grantee would earn in academia”?
A significant portion of professor’s pay is prestige, tenure, and the ability to tyrannize your grad students, which the LTFF cannot provide. It’s much more similar to industry in only really being able to pay in actual money.
Separately, I wonder how representative those numbers are for computer science professors, or if it includes only base salary. The very first CS professor at UC Berkeley I looked up on the sacbee database earned over $300,000 , and that excludes any outside income from consulting etc.
Makes sense! I think the seniority levels of most of our grantees are in the grad student/postdoc/early professor range, which means famous professors will be a poor comparison class (but so will e.g. early humanities professors).
It’s worth noting that this salary scale is for the UC system in general (i.e., all ten UC universities/campuses). Most of these campuses are in places with low costs of living (by Bay Area standards), and most are not top-tier universities (therefore I’d expect salaries to naturally be lower). I think UC Berkeley salaries would make for a better reference. (However, I’m finding it surprisingly hard to find an analogous UC Berkeley-specific salary table.)
Most universities allow their faculty to do some outside consulting for pay, I think? So if the target were “how much would this person have made counterfactually in academia,” you would want to account for that as well.
It seems like the majority of individual grantees (over several periods) are doing academic-related research.
Can Caleb or other fund managers say more about why “One heuristic we commonly use (especially for new, unproven grantees) is to offer roughly 70% of what we anticipate the grantee would earn in an industry role” rather than e.g. “offer roughly the same as what we anticipate the grantee would earn in academia”?
See e.g. the UC system salary scale:
A significant portion of professor’s pay is prestige, tenure, and the ability to tyrannize your grad students, which the LTFF cannot provide. It’s much more similar to industry in only really being able to pay in actual money.
Separately, I wonder how representative those numbers are for computer science professors, or if it includes only base salary. The very first CS professor at UC Berkeley I looked up on the sacbee database earned over $300,000 , and that excludes any outside income from consulting etc.
FWIW the first one I looked at (second-year assistant professor I think) was $150k.
I’m guessing you know more professors there than I do so the ones I know are more filtered on seniority.
Makes sense! I think the seniority levels of most of our grantees are in the grad student/postdoc/early professor range, which means famous professors will be a poor comparison class (but so will e.g. early humanities professors).
It’s worth noting that this salary scale is for the UC system in general (i.e., all ten UC universities/campuses). Most of these campuses are in places with low costs of living (by Bay Area standards), and most are not top-tier universities (therefore I’d expect salaries to naturally be lower). I think UC Berkeley salaries would make for a better reference. (However, I’m finding it surprisingly hard to find an analogous UC Berkeley-specific salary table.)
Most universities allow their faculty to do some outside consulting for pay, I think? So if the target were “how much would this person have made counterfactually in academia,” you would want to account for that as well.