Agree with this. I just want to be super clear that I think entrepreneurs should optimise for something like cost-effectiveness x scale.

I think research & advocacy orgs can often be 10x more cost-effective than big physical projects, so a $10m research org might be as impactful as a $100m physical org, so it's sometimes going to be the right call.

But I think the EA mindset probably focuses a bit too much on cost-effectiveness rather than scale (since we approach it from the marginal donor perspective rather than the entrepreneur one). If we're also leadership constrained, we might prefer a smaller number of bigger projects, and the bigger projects often have bigger externalities.

Overall, I agree we should be considering big physical projects, and agree these probably require different skills.

I think its a really good point that there's something very different between research/policy orgs and orgs that deliver products and services at scale. I basically agree, but I'd slightly tweak this to
"It is very hard for a charity to scale to more than $100 million per year without delivering a physical product or service."

Because  digital orgs/companies who deliver a digital service (GiveDirectly, Facebook/Google/etc) obviously can scale to $100 million per year. 

One point of reference to note is that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had about 240 million in "management and general expenses" for about 5 billion in "total program expenses" (which I assume is grants made but I haven't checked). Open Phil is relatively lean right now, but if the EA community hits the point where the community is granting several billion dollars a year, it might make sense for our grantmaking institutions to also be operating at >100M/year scale.

Another point of reference is that a number of US universities each spend >1B/year on research. Now they probably have large sources of inefficency and ways costs can be cut, but otoh probably also have ways that productivity can be increased by spending money.

And in terms of scope, it does naively seem like EA has enough sufficiently important questions that the equivalent of a single top-tier US university should not be quite enough to solve all of them.

So on balance I'm not convinced that EA research is not something that can't use up greater (potentially much greater) than 100M/year, but of course our current research institutions are not quite designed for scaling*

*see scalably using labor

I believe that in time EA research/analysis orgs both could and should spend > $100m pa.

There are many non-EA orgs whose staff largely sit at a desk, and who spend >$100m, and I believe an EA org could too.

Let's consider one example. Standard & Poors  (S&P) spent c.$3.8bn in 2020 (source: 2020 accounts). They produce ratings on companies, governments, etc. These ratings help answer the question: "if I lend the company money, will I get my money back". Most major companies have a rating with S&P. (S&P also does other things like indices, however I'm sure the ratings bit alone spends >$100m p.a.)

S&P for charities?

Currently, very few analytical orgs in the EA space aim to have as broad a coverage of charities as S&P does of companies/governments/etc.

However an org which did this would have significant benefits.

• They would have a broader appeal because they would be useful to so many more people; it could conceivably achieve the level of brand recognition achieved by charity evaluators such as Charity Navigator, which have high levels of brand recognition in the US (c50% with a bit of rounding).
• Lots of the impact here is the illegible impact that comes from being well-known and highly influential; this could lead to more major donors being attracted to EA-style donating, or many other things.
• There's also the impact that could come from donating to higher impact things within a lower impact cause area, and the impact of influencing the charity sector to have more impact.

I find these arguments convincing enough that I founded an organisation (SoGive) to implement them.

At the margin, GiveWell is likely more cost-effective, however I'd allude to Ben's comments about cost-effectiveness x scale in a separate comment.

S&P for companies' impact?

Human activity, as measured by GDP (for all that measure has flaws) is split roughly 60%(ish) by for-profit companies, 30%(ish) by governments and a little bit from other things (like charities).

• As I have argued elsewhere, EA has likely neglected the 60% of human activity, and should be investing more in helping companies to have more positive impact (or avoiding their negative impact)
• The charity CDP spent £16.5m (c.$23m) in the year to March 2019 (source). They primarily focus on the question of how much carbon emissions are associated with each company. The bigger question of how much overall impact is associated with each company would no doubt require a substantially larger organisation, spending at least an order of magnitude more than the c$23m spent by CDP.

(Note: I haven't thought very carefully about whether "S&P for companies' impact" really is a high-impact project)

When Benjamin_Todd wanted to encourage new projects by mentioning $100M+ size orgs and CSET, my take was that he wanted to increase awareness of an important class of orgs that can now  be built.

In this spirit, I think there might be some perspectives  not mentioned yet in the consequent discussions:

1. Projects with 100m+ of required capital/talent has different patterns of founding and success

There may be reasons why building such 100m+ projects are different both from many smaller  "hits based" funding of Open Phil projects (as a high chance of failure is unacceptable) and also different than the GiveWell-style interventions.

One reason is that orgs like OpenAI and CSET require such scale just to get started, e.g. to interest the people involved:

Here are examples of members of the founding team of OpenAI and CSET:

CSET - Jason Matheny - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Gaverick_Matheny

OpenAI - Sam Altman - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

If you look at these profiles, I think you can infer that if you have an org that is capped at $10M, or has to internalize a GiveWell-style cost effectiveness aesthetic, this wouldn't work and nothing would be founded. The people wouldn't be interested (as another datapoint, see 1M salaries at OpenAI).

2. Skillset and training patterns might differ than previous patterns used in the EA movement

I think it's important to add nuance to a 80,000 hours-style article of "get 100m+ org skills":

Being an executive at a charity that delivers a tangible product requires different skills to running a research or advocacy charity. A smaller charity will likely need to recruit all-rounders who are pretty good at strategy, finance, communications and more. In contrast, in a $100 million you will also need people with specialized skills and experience in areas like negotiating contracts or managing supply chains.

Note that being good at the most senior levels usually involves mastering or being fluent in many smaller, lower status skills. 

For evidence, when you work together with them, you often see senior leaders flaunting or actively using these skills, when they don't apparently have to. 

This is because the gears-level knowledge improves judgement of all decisions (e.g. "kicking tires"/"tasting the soup"). 

Also, the most important skill of senior leaders is fostering and selecting staff and other leaders, and again, gears-level observation of these skills is essential to such judgement.

specialized skills and experience in areas like negotiating contracts or managing supply chains.

Note that in a 100M+ org, these specialized skills can be fungible in  way that "communication" or "strategy" is not.

If you want to start or join an EA charity that can scale to $100 million per year, you should consider developing skills in managing large-scale projects in industry, government or another large charity in addition to building relationships and experience within the EA community.

From the primal motivation of impact and under the premise in Benjamin_Todd's statement, I think we would expect the goal is to try to create these big projects within 3 or 5 years. 

Some of these skills, especially founding a 100M+ org, would be extremely difficult to acquire within this time. 

There are other reasons to be cautious:

• Note that approximately every ambitious person wants these skills and profile, and this set of people is immensely larger than the set of people in more specialized skill sets (ML, science, economics, policy) that has been encouraged in the past.
• The skills are hard to observe (outputs like papers or talks are far less substantive, and blogging/internet discussion is often looked down).
• The skillsets and characters can be orthogonal or opposed to EA traits such as conscientiousness or truth seeking.
• Related to the above, free-riding and other behavior that pools with altruism is often used to mask very conventional ambition (see Theranos, and in some points of view, approximately every SV startup).

I guess my point is that I don't want to see EAs get Rickon'd by running in a straight line in some consequence of these discussions.

Note that underlying all of this is a worldview that views founder effects/relationships/leadership as critical and the founders as not fungible. 

It's important to explicitly notice this, as this worldview may be very valid for some interventions but is not for others. 

It is easy for these worldviews to spill over harmfully, especially if packaged with the high status we might expect to be associated with new EA mega projects.

3. Pools of EA leaders already exist

I also think there exists large pool of EA-aligned people (across all cause areas/worldviews) who have the judgement to lead such orgs but may not feel fully comfortable creating and carrying them from scratch. 

Expanding on this, I mean that, conditional on seeing an org with them in the top role, I would trust the org and the alignment. However, these people may not want to work with the intensity or deal with the operational and political issues (e.g. put down activist revolts, noxious patterns such as "let fires burn", and winning two games of funding and impact).

This might leave open important opportunities related to training and other areas of support.

Interesting analysis. One thing to note is that Anthropic raised $124m at a reported valuation of $845m, and I guess that their work isn't that "physical" in a narrow sense. (But potentially such orgs are still in the spirit of your analysis.)

I strongly agree with the premise of this post and really like the analysis, but feel unhappy with the strong focus on physical products. I think we should instead think about a broader set of scalable ways to usefully spend money, including but not limited to physical products. E.g. scholarships aren't a physical product, but large scholarship programs could plausibly scale to >$100 million.

(Perhaps this has been said already; I haven't bothered reading all the comments.)

Other than regranting, GiveWell's largest expense in 2020 was staff salaries - they spent just over $3 million on salaries. In total, they spent about $6 million (excluding regranting). GiveWell would have to grow to 20x the size in order to become a $100 million 'megaproject' [1].

I don't see why we should treat the funds they regrant differently than their salary expenses (in this context). GiveWell is a good counter example to the claim that "It is very hard for a charity to scale to more than $100 million per year without delivering a physical product." GiveWell can easily use another an additional $100M (e.g. by simply regranting it to GiveDirectly).