EA Angel Group: Applications Open for Personal/Project Funding

This post was intended as a grant application announcement post that also happened to contain some information about new funder-friendly and applicant-friendly policies we are adopting. I did not include any information about our evaluation process or risk reduction process in the body of the post, so I would not expect the post to convey high awareness of either reasons why long-termist applications don't get funded.

I am curious what ideas we included you think address your first point about grantmakers being unable to vet the project. I'm not sure if application sharing, rolling applications, or providing feedback to grant applicants address your first or second points.

To elaborate more on risk, I wrote in another comment on this post that:

We have several layers of checks to help reduce risks and improve grant decision making including initial staff review of incoming applications, angels sharing their evaluations with one another and talking with external contacts/experts if appropriate, and hearing opinions of external grantmakers on grant applications we have received (we still need to talk with grantmakers to set this up).

I think that an initial staff review can help detect risks, and if we notice a large problem with downside risk in incoming projects, we can enhance the initial staff review process. The angel evaluation period is where a lot of nuanced considerations about risk can come up, since angels can share their perspectives on a grant proposal with other angels and external experts, and we have angels with significant experience in areas like meta and AI. Finally, this wasn't mentioned in the post, but we are aiming to share evaluations both ways with funders in EA. I think this can go a long way towards making all funders aware of all of the potential risks of a project.

Angels in the group seem to actively avoid funding projects that they feel they are not qualified to evaluate. Angels can point out funding behavior that they perceive is risky from other angels, although from what I've seen, our angels lean more on the side of risk avoidance than anything else.

High-quality grant applications tend to get funded quickly and are thereby eliminated from the pool of proposals available to the EA community, while applicants with higher-risk proposals tend to apply/pitch to lots of funders. This means that on average, proposals submitted to funders will be skewed towards high-downside-risk projects, and funders could themselves easily do harm if they end up supporting many of them. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.

As Denise mentioned in a post on Jan's project evaluation idea, there is a category of project that is "projects which are simply bad because they do have approximately zero impact, but aren't particularly risky. I think this category is the largest of the the four." This lines up with many of the applications I am seeing. This might be different with long-term/x-risk projects specifically, but since we are a general funding group with individual EA funders with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, we are not receiving a large number of such applications relative to the entire pool of applications.

Therefore, I wouldn't say that our applications are likely to be "skewed towards high-downside-risk projects." I expect to continue to receive a large number of projects that may have very low impact just like other funders are likely receiving. As Oliver mentioned, "in practice I think people will have models that will output a net-positive impact or a net-negative impact, depending on certain facts that they have uncertainty about, and understanding those cruxes and uncertainties is the key thing in understanding whether a project will be worth working on." I think that other EA funders will fund projects that match the model of the funders, but because people's models differ wildly and are very likely wrong in many cases due to the high failure rate of funded startups for the most successful VCs, I don't know if other funders are actually funding a significant fraction of the opportunities that end up having the highest impact.

To my understanding EA Grants is the only other funder that is funding general grants, with BERI Grants and EAF Fund focusing on long-term projects exclusively, and the EA Funds focusing on their respective areas and funding larger organizations as well. Since EA Grants is currently closed for applications (I support rolling applications rather than application rounds), we are receiving applications that have not been funded by other funders because the only other funder isn't accepting applications right now. Since I support funder application sharing, with this method funders will be able to see the entire pool of proposals, rather than the pool without the projects other funders have funded. This will help each funder evaluate the quality of the projects they are funding relative to the quality of other projects that other funders have funded.

I really like that you're providing feedback to applicants! In general, I wish the EA community was more proactive with providing critical feedback.

Thanks! I completely agree.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Ruth! I agree, I was surprised both by the negative votes and also by the lack of comments, particularly since our original article announcing the EA Angel Group was received quite positively. I linked to the EA Forum Post introducing the EA Angel Group at the beginning of the article. I felt that if people had thoughts or concerns with the idea of the angel group they could comment or vote on the original angel group article, but the article had no new votes or comments.

Regarding the many different funding systems and separate application forms that currently exist across EA, I wholeheartedly agree with your perspective. Simplifying a bit, if we assume there are 3 EA funders and 15 EA projects and each funder's application captures an equal fraction of all projects, each funder can only make funding decisions from their pool of 5 projects rather than the 15 projects that exist. Choosing the best projects to fund out of a smaller set of projects that are randomly selected out of a larger pool seems clearly suboptimal.

+1 I'm confused about why this is being downvoted.

Definitely

Historically, approximately every 3 weeks we've apprised applicants of what the shape of the conversation is on their proposal among the angels. The applicant can then provide additional details if they think it will inform the internal conversation.

If the conversation seems to have stopped, then we inform the applicant of the low likelihood of their receiving a grant, although we haven't enforced a strict turnaround time in the past since each angel donor could have a different cadence for donating e.g. "At the end of each quarter, I give out 25% of my annual donations to the most promising project(s)."

This is something most grantmakers in the EA community are doing a pisspoor job at right now IMO (e.g. see our earlier Messenger exchange on online communication of EA Funds).

Could you link to this exchange or expand on this point more?

Altruism.vc is the umbrella name we chose for our efforts on early-stage project grant making in general.

The EA Angel Group is our first endeavor, supporting individuals making large donations to early-stage EA projects.

According to information that we requested from angels around our launch in October 2018, our individual funders had ~$600,000 in available capital to make early-stage grants for the remainder of 2018. Angels have been making grants during the time the group has been operating, although I am not sure of the exact volume aside from the fact that one angel recently made a grant of ~$25,000 to a project.

I am not sure of the exact volume because angels have not made a grant through a project that has submitted our grant application form yet. This is because we had lower than expected grant application volume since we were unexpectedly delayed for many months pursuing grant sharing with EA funders and trying to launch the EA Project Platform rather than doing a public call for applications and working with volunteers to source evaluations. We are now switching to doing public requests for proposals and active grant opportunity sourcing which I expect will significantly increase the number of grant opportunities we can present to angels. We are continuing to talk with EA funders about grant sharing, and one major funder just expressed an interest in sharing grant applications, so things may be moving forward on that front.

I wrote a progress update comment regarding the EA Angel Group which covered our grant opportunity discovery activities over the last few months. We spoke with EA Grants several months ago, and to the best of my knowledge they are still determining whether to send and receive grant applications with other funders. At least one major funding group has expressed significant interest in sending and receiving grant applications with the EA Angel Group, and we are in the process of talking with various funders about this.

I mentioned the one concern I heard and my response to it in my progress update comment:

One objection to sharing grant applications among funders is that a funder would fund all of the grant proposals they felt were good and classify all other grant proposals as not suitable to be funded. From the funder's perspective, sharing the unfunded grant proposals would be bad since other organizations could subsequently fund them, and the funder classified those grant proposals as not worth funding. I personally disagree with this objection because the argument assumes that a funder has developed a grant evaluation process that can actually identify successful projects with a high degree of accuracy. Since the norm in the for-profit world involves large and successful venture capital firms with lots of experienced domain experts regularly passing on opportunities that later become multibillion-dollar companies, I find it unlikely that any EA funding organization will develop a grant evaluation process that is so good it justifies hiding some or all unfunded applications.

Can you elaborate on:

I think for example that a ‘just-another-universal-protocol’ worry would be very reasonable to have here.

Are you suggesting that funders may be concerned about adopting a protocol which ends up providing limited value? As I've stated in several other comments, I think sharing grant applications can be of considerable value since arbitrarily limiting the pool of projects seems pretty suboptimal.

To avoid that I think we need to do the hard work of reaching out to involved parties and have many conversations to incorporate their most important considerations and start mutually useful collaborations. I.e. consensus building.

I agree. I did some initial outreach at first and will begin additional outreach shortly.