It’s hard to say for sure without knowing the fraction of solicited EA startups that get funding, but GiveWell has made some angel-esque investments in the past (e.g. New Incentives), and I think some large individual donors have as well.
I get the impression that these are going mostly to programs that already have a lot of evidence and aren’t really exploring the space of possible interventions. I tend to believe that the effectiveness of projects probably follows a power law, and that therefore the most effective interventions are probably ones people haven’t tried yet, so funding variants on existing programs doesn’t help us find those interventions.
This is pretty plausible for AI risk, but not so obvious for generic organization-starting, IMO. Are there specific skills you can think of that might be a factor here?
GiveWell style research seems very trainable, and it is plausible that GiveWell could hire less experienced people & provide more training if they had significantly more money (I have no information on this though.)
The right way to learn organization-starting skills might be to start an organization; Paul Graham suggests that this is the right way to learn startup-building skills. In that case we’d want to fund more people running experimental EA projects.
To play devil’s advocate (these don’t actually represent my beliefs):
This doesn’t necessarily mean much, because fundraising targets have a lot to do with how much money EA orgs believe they can raise.
It’s pretty hard to get funding for a new organization, e.g. Spencer and I put a lot of effort into it without much success. The general problem I see is a lack of “angel investing” or its equivalent–the idea of putting money into small, experimental organizations and funding them further as they grow. (As a counter-counterpoint, EA Ventures seems well poised to function as an angel investor in the nonprofit world.)
Also, to address the general point that EA is talent-constrained, the problem might be that there are very few people with the skills needed, and more funding can be used to train people, like MIRI is doing with the summer fellows program. In that case earning to give is still a good solution to the talent constraint.