Any views stated are my own only (not those of the organisation I work for)
Peter4444
Karma: 268
Daniel’s comments:
On point #1, there’s a critical distinction in the type of “follow-on” strategy we’re employing, which is a standard template $100K into a large number of companies (generally known as the “spray and pray” model). This is characterized by low diligence per deal as opposed to most VC’s who do still put in a decent amount of effort. Spray and pray of course has it’s drawbacks in terms of validating the quality of the deal flow, but that’s the crux we’re exploring here regarding EA-aligned founders being potentially higher quality than average.
On point #2 not to be autobiographical but I personally am an example of an individual who would not have started an EA project without the onramp from Founders Pledge to actually introduce me to the community networks to get Snowball Fund up and running.
Great! Looking forward to working together.
I think this is an important point and there’s some truth to it: EA ‘startups’ are different from venture-backed startups. When you say ‘targeting’, what do you mean here exactly, and do you have any ideas on how to do this without increasing time costs a lot? An advantage of our proposed approach is that it’s time-cheap because it’s systematic (with some caveats, we offer investment if and only if someone else has). But if there were a cheap way to make this better at finding the people most helpful for EA projects, that would be great.
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If the claim is that, as a result of the differences between EA and venture-backed ‘startups’, it’s not worth doing something like this to attract entrepreneurs to EA, I’m not sure I agree:
1. There are some common skills to building both types of startup—you’re creating a new org to do something untested with a small number of people and often not much money, so there are at least some similarities. Maybe the overlapping skillset is quite small. Do you think you had already built that skillset before leaving your startup, such that any extra skill-building in that overlapping core wouldn’t be helpful for your work now? I’m unsure about this because I haven’t really built a startup of either type.
2. It’s not just reality but also the EA community.
a. Not everything can or should be tested by building a minimum viable product and seeing what reality throws at it, but for some types of problems this is useful. And, even for these types of problems, I think the default approach most EAs have is usually that problems are best solved by doing research and analytical thought instead. I think this probably leads to a bias against trying things. (We think hard when it’s appropriate, but also often when it would be better to just try it and see.)
b. I know of at least one example of bias against action in the community—someone applied for funding to distribute EA books at UPenn and said it was initially declined because CEA was concerned about possible downside risks. Both they and I thought this seemed crazy.
c. Technical skills are required for many of the types of startups that VCs fund, but there are few technically-skilled entrepreneurs in the EA community. This suggests EA is pushing away even entrepreneurs who could contribute to technically demanding projects.
3. Earning to give can still be high impact, especially if you’re right and a traditional entrepreneur wouldn’t be well-placed to start an EA (mega)project. If it works, Snowball Fund could either beat market returns (increasing the money in EA) or pay a small price (difference between market returns and its returns) per entrepreneur. If this means a higher number of EA-aligned entrepreneurs earning-to-give, or more giving from each, it may still be very cost-effective.
Good point—thanks for flagging this.
Snowball Fund—A Low-Cost, Low-Risk, and High-Upside Experiment
Yes. Classic example for me is doing tasks that don’t require much mental energy when I’m tired & reminding myself to do this (even though I sometimes can’t be bothered) because it saves me having to do these tasks at a later time when I could be doing more cognition-heavy things.
It looks like they’re quite similar, though I haven’t personally used Google Flights.
Apparently, its advantage over Google Flights is that it searches more online travel agents, so can sometimes uncover cheaper prices (though some online travel agents are a bit of a pain): https://scottscheapflights.com/guides/google-flights-vs-skyscanner
Peter4444′s Quick takes
Many EAs take a lot of flights. If you’re not already using it, consider using Skyscanner. It scans airlines and online travel agencies and can find cheap deals, flights from nearby airports, etc. And it may save you time and money.
Posting this partly because I’d like to support a norm of sharing knowledge when it’s low cost and has even a small chance of being very useful for someone.
Note: I’m not associated with Skyscanner; I’ve just used it for a while.
This is my impression too. For university groups, CEA was trying to fix this with the Campus Specialist program, which was then discontinued. I’m curious why an org isn’t hiring people on 2-year contracts / longer-term roles to lead promising city and national groups, since only being able to do the job on a grant already seems lower-prestige. (Someone might think: if people cared about community building enough, they would hire me to do it in a more stable way.)