it is actually more fun for us than you might expect
(also helps us understand which questions need clarification)
but the sentiment is appreciated!
Lily Jordan
Karma: 33
Participate in Manifund Microgrants: an ACX Grants giving game
If the project is funded at a valuation of $5, it wouldn’t necessarily receive $5 – it would receive whatever percentage of $5 the investor bought equity in. So if the investor bought 80%, the project would receive $4; if the investor bought 20%, the project would receive $1. If Alice didn’t think she could put the extra dollar on top of the first four to use, then she presumably wouldn’t sell more than $4 worth of equity, or 80%, because the purpose of selling equity is to receive cash upfront to cover your immediate costs.
(Almost everything about impact markets has a venture-capital equivalent – for example, if an investor valued your company at $10 million, you might sell them 10% equity for $1 million – you wouldn’t actually sell them all $10 million worth if $1 million gave you enough runway.)
On Manifund itself, the UI doesn’t actually provide an option to overfund a project beyond its maximum goal, but theoretically this isn’t impossible. But there’s not much of an incentive for a project founder to take that funding, unless they’re more pessimistic about their project’s valuation than investors are; otherwise, it’s better for them to hold onto the equity. (And if the founder is signaling pessimism in their own valuation, then an investor might be unwise to offer to overfund in the first place.)
Does that answer your question?
They’d get retroactive funding for the rest, yes. When you say it seems very bad, do you mean because then LTFF (for example) has less money to spend on other things, compared to the case where they just gave the founder a (normal, non-retroactive) grant for the estimated cost of the project?
(1) Nope, first name is fine, as long as you’re okay with privately giving the Manifund team your real name for bookkeeping purposes.
(2) We’re pretty agnostic as to how the micrograntors view their strategies – one of our main goals is to stoke thoughtful discussion and get data not only on how the investments get allocated but also why. There’s something to be said for acting like you’re in a scenario more similar to that of a larger, more typical funder, but there’s also something to be said for the information value of spending the money you actually have and not having to pretend anything. So we’d be happy to read a comment or a retro saying “I’m making my choices imagining I have $50k because I want to send a signal about which projects I like the most, but if I didn’t care about that then I’d spend my whole budget in one place because I think my favorite project can easily absorb the funding,” or something like that.