TylerMaule

His­tor­i­cal EA fund­ing data

To­tal Fund­ing by Cause Area

• TylerMaule 6 Aug 2023 17:16 UTC

  50 points

  7 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Univer­sity EA Groups Need Fixing

  Regarding the funding aspect:

  • As far as I can tell, Open Phil has always given the majority of their budget to non-longtermist focus areas.

    • This is also true of the EA portfolio more broadly.

  • GiveWell has made grants to less established orgs for several years, and that amount has increased dramatically of late.

• TylerMaule 2 Jan 2023 18:53 UTC

  24 points

  6 ∶ 1

  on: En­trepreneur­ship ETG Might Be Bet­ter Than 80k Thought

  I worry that this presents the case for entrepreneurship as much stronger than it is^[1]

  1. The sample here is companies that went through Y-Combinator, which has a 2% acceptance rate^[2]

  2. As stated in the post, roughly all of the value comes from the top 8% of these companies

  3. To take it one step further, 25% of the total valuation comes from the top 0.1%, i.e. the top 5 companies (incl. Stripe & Instacart)

  So at best, if a founder is accepted into YC, and talented enough to have the same odds of success as a random prior YC founder, $4M/​yr might be a reasonable estimate of the EV from that point. But I guess my model is more like Stripe and Instacart had great product market fit and talented founders, and this can make a marginal YC startup look much more valuable than it is.

  1. ^

     I know you’re not explicitly saying that the EV of quitting one’s job to start a company is $4M/​yr, but I think it’s worth spelling out more explicitly how far removed this reference class is from that hypothetical.

  2. ^

     The post does allude to this, but I think it’s worth flagging more explicitly.

Cash Trans­fers as a Sim­ple First Argument

• TylerMaule 17 Aug 2021 3:03 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Is effec­tive al­tru­ism grow­ing? An up­date on the stock of fund­ing vs. people

  For each person in a leadership role, there’s typically a need for at least several people in the more junior versions of these roles or supporting positions — e.g. research assistants, operations specialists, marketers, ML engineers,...I’d typically prefer someone in these roles to an additional person donating $400,000–$4 million per year

  If this is true, why not spend way more on recruiting and wages? It’s surprising to me that the upper bound could be so much larger than equivalent salary in the for-profit sector.

  I might be missing something, but it seems to me the basic implication of the funding overhang is that EA should convert more of its money into ‘talent’ (via Meta spending or just paying more).

  What links here?

  • TylerMaule's comment on In­creas­ing De­mand­ing­ness in EA by Jeff Kaufman (29 Apr 2022 23:19 UTC; 8 points)

• TylerMaule 28 Sep 2022 20:29 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: William MacAskill—The Daily Show

  UK version

• TylerMaule 28 Feb 2022 0:18 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The value of small dona­tions from a longter­mist perspective

  Some of the comments here are suggesting that there is in fact tension between promoting donations and direct work. The implication seems to be that while donations are highly effective in absolute terms, we should intentionally downplay this fact for fear that too many people might ‘settle’ for earning to give.

  Personally, I would much rather employ honest messaging and allow people to assess the tradeoffs for their individual situation. I also think it’s important to bear in mind that downplaying cuts both ways—as Michael points out, the meme that direct work is overwhelmingly effective has done harm.

  There may be some who ‘settle’ for earning to give when direct work could have been more impactful, and there may be some who take away that donations are trivial and do neither. Obviously I would expect the former to be hugely overrepresented on the EA Forum.

• TylerMaule 30 Aug 2023 22:28 UTC

  18 points

  5 ∶ 2

  in reply to: calebp’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  IDK 160% annualized sounds a bit implausible. Surely in that world someone would be acting differently (e.g. recurring donors would roll some budget forward or take out a loan)?

  I would be curious to hear from someone on the recipient side who would genuinely prefer $10k in hand to $14k in three months’ time.

• TylerMaule 20 Jun 2023 11:09 UTC

  17 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Third Wave Effec­tive Altruism

  Substantially less money, through a combination of Meta stock falling, FTX collapsing, and general market/​crypto downturns^[3]...[3] Although Meta stock is back up since I first wrote this; I would be appreciative if someone could do an update on EA funding

  Looking at this table, I expect the non-FTX total is about the same^[1]—I’d wager that there is more funding commited now than during the first ~70% of the second wave period.^[2]

  I think most people have yet to grasp the extent to which markets have bounced back:

  • The S&P 500 Total Return Index is within 6% of its all-time high; only ever spent ~4 months above today’s value

  • META is −26% from ATH, but now highest since Jan ’22 and ~10 months ever above this price

  1. ^

     Dustin’s net worth looks to be about about -$7Bn from the peak (per his preferred source). Meanwhile, GiveWell (2-3x), Founders Pledge (3x), and GWWC (1.5x) numbers all seem to be higher

  2. ^

     I still think that the waves framing is useful and captures the prevailing narrative tbc

• TylerMaule 23 Nov 2021 14:09 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: De­spite billions of ex­tra fund­ing, small donors can still have a sig­nifi­cant impact

  Thanks for writing; I too have worried that many folks got the wrong impression here.

• TylerMaule 31 Aug 2023 7:56 UTC

  15 points

  5 ∶ 0

  in reply to: calebp’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  A quick scan of the marginal grants list tells me that many (most?)^[1] of these take the form of a salary or stipend over the course of 6-12 months. I don’t understand how the time-value of money could be so out of whack in this case—surely you could grant say half of the requested amount, then do another round in three months once the large donors come around?^[2]

  1. ^

     As for the rest, I don’t see anything on the list that wouldn’t exist in three months.

  2. ^

     Daniel’s comment says “there are a whole host of issues” with this approach. I’d be curious to know what those are, and how they aren’t worth unlocking 40% additional value.

• TylerMaule 1 Sep 2023 11:06 UTC

  14 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  If you expect to take in $3-6M by the end of this year, borrowing say $300k against that already seems totally reasonable.

  Not sure if this is possible, but I for one would be happy to donate to LTFF today in exchange for a 120% regrant to the Animal Welfare Fund in December^[1]

  1. ^

     This would seem to be an abuse of the Open Phil matching, but perhaps that chunk can be exempt

• TylerMaule 18 Aug 2022 18:28 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: HenryStanley’s comment on: What We Owe The Fu­ture is out today

  Relevant excerpt from his prior 80k interview:

  Rob Wiblin: …How have you ended up five or 10 times happier? It sounds like a large multiple.

  Will MacAskill: One part of it is being still positive, but somewhat close to zero back then...There’s the classics, like learning to sleep well and meditate and get the right medication and exercise. There’s also been an awful lot of just understanding your own mind and having good responses. For me, the thing that often happens is I start to beat myself up for not being productive enough or not being smart enough or just otherwise failing or something. And having a trigger action plan where, when that starts happening, I’m like, “OK, suddenly the top priority on my to-do list again is looking after my mental health.” Often that just means taking some time off, working out, meditating, and perhaps also journaling as well to recognize that I’m being a little bit crazy.

• TylerMaule 3 Jan 2023 0:09 UTC

  11 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: En­trepreneur­ship ETG Might Be Bet­ter Than 80k Thought

  I’m definitely not suggesting a 98% chance of zero, but I do expect the 98% rejected to fare much worse than the 2% accepted on average, yes. The data as well as your interpretation show steeply declining returns even within that top 2%.

  I don’t think I implied anything in particular about the qualification level of the average EA. I’m just noting that, given the skewedness of this data, there’s an important difference between just clearing the YC bar and being representative of that central estimate.

• TylerMaule 6 Jul 2023 11:02 UTC

  9 points

  6 ∶ 9

  in reply to: Austin’s comment on: An­nounc­ing Man­i­fund Regrants

  Could you not dogfood just as easily with $50 (or fake money in a dev account)?

• TylerMaule 2 Jan 2023 19:01 UTC

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: TylerMaule’s comment on: En­trepreneur­ship ETG Might Be Bet­ter Than 80k Thought

  A couple of nitpicky things, which I don’t think change the bottom line, and have opposing sign in any case:

  1. In most cases, quite a bit of work has gone in prior to starting the YC program (perhaps about a year on average?) This might reduce the yearly value by 10-20%

  2. I think the 12% SP500 return cited is the arithmetic average of yearly returns. The geometric average, i.e. the realized rate of return should be more like 10.4%

• TylerMaule 15 Aug 2022 7:41 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: His­tor­i­cal EA fund­ing data

  Fixed

• TylerMaule 17 Oct 2021 15:38 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AppliedDivinityStudies’s comment on: An up­date in fa­vor of try­ing to make tens of billions of dollars

  Depends immensely on if you think there are EAs who could start billion-dollar companies, but would not be able to without EA funding. I.e. they’re great founders, but can’t raise money from VCs.

  I think the core argument here is that not enough EAs try to start a company, as opposed to try and are rejected by VCs. IMO the point of seeding would be to take more swings.

  Also, presumably the bar should be lower for an EA VC, because much of the founders’ stake will also go to effective charity.

• TylerMaule 29 Apr 2022 23:19 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: In­creas­ing De­mand­ing­ness in EA

  Re footnote, the only public estimate I’ve seen is $400k-$4M here, so you’re in the same ballpark.

  Personally I think $3M/​y is too high, though I too would like to see more opinions and discussion on this topic.