Thanks for the feedback! Geographic diversity in particular does seem pretty important for getting the most out of regranting—much dissatisfaction about the current funding situation comes from how much harder it is to get funded if you’re not well-connected in the Bay Area community.
I’m disappointed that we currently don’t even have much UK representation, since that’s the other EA hub. This is largely because we are based in the SF so are better connected here. As Austin said, happy to hear suggestions for people connected in other areas who could better surface new opportunities!
First want to say that I was also pretty uncomfortable about this, and initially told Austin I didn’t want to do it—you’re right that I am not qualified to be a grant maker, at least in the sense that I would not be hired as one in another context. I don’t deserve whatever status that role happens to bestow upon me, and I don’t particularly want the power.
That said, me being a regrantor has made the UX much better, since I’m basically the sole person pushing code and dogfooding is so powerful: it’s changed the prompting questions on write-ups, the way projects in need of more funding are displayed, the way funding targets are specified, and lots of other tiny things that were a bit uglier or higher friction or simply broken before. Less concretely, my model of what it feels like to write a publicly visible grant writeup, to search for giving opportunities, to select grant amounts, etc. has become more vivid, which I expect to be strategically useful going forward. And it’s only been a few weeks so far.
So, I agree it’s bad optically (I agree-voted your comment), but ultimately think this was a good call. Especially because the counterfactual of having not given me the $50k is not that it would be going to some better-evaluated grants than the ones I’ve made, but that it would be sitting in a bank account, and (obviously) I think the grants I’ve made are better than that.