Below are some brief updates on EA Ventures for those who followed our launch thread.

Request for Projects

We've recently released EA Ventures' Request for Projects which details some of the projects that the EA Ventures team and funders find especially promising. We modeled this after YCombinator's Request for Startups in two senses: 1) we plan to mostly recommend funding from projects not on this list, but find this list to be a helpful starting point for project brainstorming; 2) implementation matters, so submitting a project that we suggest is definitely not a guarantee of a funding recommendation.

Current progress

We received over 70 applications before our first official deadline which exceeded our expectations. The quality of the projects was also higher than I expected. We've done a first-pass review of most of these project and plan to send some feedback to projects in the near future.

We also recommended our first project for funding: Effective Altruism Policy Analytics which is an EA political influence project being run out of DC. You can see their application here. The project was successfully funded for $19,000. We found the fundraising process to take slightly longer and be slightly more difficult than we were expecting. We'll be looking to see if a trend emerges as we recommend other projects.

Current bottlenecks

We're mostly bottlenecked on time currently. Most of the EA Ventures team is also working on EA Global which is slowly taking up all of our time. We're interesting in looking for someone who would like to help with evaluations with an eye towards potentially having someone work on this full time in the future. Interested people should contact me.

We would also like to expand our funder pool. If you're a donor to EA project interesting in hearing about new EA projects, please let me know.