I’m glad someone is asking what happened with EA Ventures (EAV): it’s an important question that hasn’t yet received a satisfactory answer.

When EAV was discontinued, numerous people asked for a post-mortem of some type (e.g. here, here, and here) to help capture learning opportunities. But nothing formal was ever published. The “Celebrating Failed Projects” panel eventually shared a few lessons, but someone would need to watch an almost hour-long video (much of which does not relate to EAV) to see them all. And the lessons seem trivial (“if you’re doing a project which gives money to people, you need to have that money in your bank account first”) about as often as they seem insightful (“Finding excellent entrepreneurs is much, much harder than I thought it was going to be”).

If a proper post-mortem with community input had been conducted, I’m confident many other lessons would emerge*, including one prominent one: “Don’t over-promise and under-deliver.” This has obvious relevance to a grantmaking project that launched before it had lined up funds to grant (as far as I know EAV only made two grants- the one Jamie mentioned and a $19k grant to EA Policy Analytics). But it also relates to more mundane aspects of EAV: my understanding is that applicants were routinely given overly optimistic expectations about how quickly the process would move.

The missed opportunity to learn these lessons went on to impact other projects. As just one example, EA Grants was described as “the spiritual successor to EA Ventures”. And it did reflect the narrow lesson from that project, as it lined up money before soliciting grant applications. However, the big lesson wasn’t learned and EA Grants consistently overpromised and under-delivered throughout its entire history. EA Grants announced plans to distribute millions of dollars more money than it actually granted, repeatedly announced unrealistic and unmet plans to accept open applications, explicitly described educational grants as eligible when they were not, granted money to a very narrow set of projects, and (despite its public portrayal as a project capable of distributing millions of dollars annually) did not maintain an “appropriate operational infrastructure and processes [resulting] in some grant payments taking longer than expected [which in some cases] contributed to difficult financial or career situations for recipients.”

EAV and EA Grants have both been shuttered, and there’s a new management team in place at CEA. So if I had a sense that the new management had internalized the lessons from these projects, I wouldn’t bring any of this up. But CEA’s recently updated “Mistakes” page doesn’t mention over-promising/under-delivering, which makes me worry that’s not the case. That’s especially troubling because the community has repeatedly highlighted this issue: when CEA synthesized community feedback it had received, the top problem reported was “respondents mentioned several times that CEA ‘overpromised and under delivered’”. The most upvoted comment on that post? It was Peter Hurford describing that specific dynamic as “my key frustration with CEA over the past many years.”

To be fair, the “Mistakes” page discusses problems that are related to over-promising/under-delivering, such as acknowledging that “running too many projects from 2016-present” has been an “underlying problem.” But it’s possible to run too many projects without overpromising, and it’s possible to be narrowly focused on one or a few projects while still overpromising and under-delivering. “Running too many projects” explains why EA Grants had little or no dedicated staff in early 2018; it doesn’t explain why CEA repeatedly committed to scaling the project during that period despite not having the staff in place to execute. I agree CEA has had a problem of running too many projects, but I see the consistent over-promising/under-delivering dynamic as far more problematic. I hope that CEA will increasingly recognize and incorporate this recurring feedback from the EA community. And I hope that going forward, CEA will prioritize thorough post-mortems (that include stakeholder input) on completed projects, so that the entire community can learn as much as possible from them.

* Simple example: with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely that EAV significantly overinvested in developing a complex evaluation model before the project launched, and that EAV’s staff may have had an inflated sense of their own expertise. From the EAV website at its launch:

“We merge expert judgment with statistical models of project success. We used our expertise and the expertise of our advisers to determine a set of variables that is likely to be positively correlated with project success. We then utilize a multi-criteria decision analysis framework which provides context-sensitive weightings to several predictive variables. Our framework adjusts the weighting of variables to fit the context of the projects and adjusts the importance of feedback from different evaluators to fit their expertise.”

Some info here: https://youtu.be/Y4YrmltF2I0?t=157

We have a list of these projects that we've been circulating to interested people privately. After we've had a chance to add any additional funders on the basis of this blog post, we'll add the list projects we think are interesting and the list of projects funders think are interesting to the website.

What would you qualify as expertise? And, what are your "fields of interest?"

I don't know how to qualify experience. I think I'll know it when I see it. Fields of interest are anything important, uncrowded and tractable. Areas that we find particularly promising are animal rights, far future/existential risk projects and global poverty.

Are you interested in existing projects which could produce value for a flourishing world, and do a lot more of it if they received funding from EA Ventures?

Yes, but we focus on new projects or projects with only a little bit of traction. Established projects have their own funding mechanisms and networks, so we don't have as much value to add there.

In finding entrepreneurs to work with, is EA Ventures looking for any particular qualities, interests, or aptitudes?

We're looking for people who have outstanding skills along the attributes we mention in our team composition model. I would guess that the EA community is most scarce on persuasion but that's just a guess.

Are there any geographical limitations for whom EA Ventures can fund at this point?

No as such. Some funders may only be able to fund certain projects for tax reasons, but I think our network is vast enough to transcendent nationality.

A related question:

When you recommend funding a project, will you recommend a funding level? Presumably many projects will at many points have diminishing expected returns on extra funding. Will EA Ventures be aiming to make judgements about this curve in its recommendations?

Thanks for the vote of confidence :-)

To be clear, I think it's entirely possible that it will make sense to ask for funds for EAV in the future. Right now, I think a) the evidence isn't strong enough and b) we can gain the evidence we need without spending donor money.

I'm going to be posting the full equation on the website in the near future. It'll be easier to answer in-depth questions about the process after that has been posted.

The evaluation process includes an assessment of the importance of each characteristic to the project at hand which determines the weightings. So, if our raters assess persuasion as being particularly important to the project at hand, the weighting of persuasion in the overall score will be greater. This allows our weightings to be adaptable to the details of the project at hand. We also weight the assessment of the importance of a variable to the project by the expertise of the evaluater.

Right now, a good score in the evaluation process is necessary but not sufficient for a project to be funded. This is because I expect to significantly update the details of the evaluation process as we review our inaugural round of applicants.

I agree.

In cases where a project is promising but not yet ready to receive funding, we can define the conditions under which we might fund the project. For example, if a project lacks the necessary technical talent, but is otherwise promising we might provide this feedback in the evaluation. I think this kind of conditional feedback might make it significantly easier for the project to acquire the necessary talent because it comes with a strong likelihood of funding associated with it.

Over time we can also gain the necessary expertise to positively impact the plans of the entrepreneurs. In the way that 80K measures career plan changes, we might measure venture plan changes as an additional success metric.

In both cases we expect project sourcing to be the primary benefit of the collaboration. We plan to pass interesting projects along to YC and FC and vice-versa.