Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of grant programs, from small microgrants to regranting to ambitious new platforms to galaxy-brained schemes for impact markets. Here are five components that I think any grant program needs to be good:
1. Money
This one is obvious: a grant program needs money to give out.
Historically in EA and AI safety, this started as individual small donations from earning-to-give, to Dustin Moskovitz’s money via Good Ventures, to an ill-fated boom around the FTX Future Fund, and now everyone preparing for the frothy Anthropic and OpenAI dollars.
2. Taste
This is also kind of obvious. Most people’s image of “what makes a good grantmaker” is “excellent taste”, which is to say, the ability to discern between good or bad projects.
Grant taste comes in a few forms:
- Taste in people: founders of projects, leaders of orgs
- Taste in ideas: whether a particular idea might succeed; whether it’d be good if it did
- Taste in fields: cause prio across technical AI safety vs policy vs fieldbuilding
One problem with taste is that everyone invariably thinks that they have good taste. Also, there isn’t necessarily One True Taste, so it can be a bit confusing to think about “better” or “worse” taste. Money might instead consider whether one particular Taste is aligned with her values.
How do you improve your taste? Probably: doing similar work yourself; seeing many examples; getting feedback from peers or a mentor; watching grant results over time.
3. Dealflow
“Dealflow” is a term of art among startup investors, to refer to the funding opportunities (”deals”) that come across your table.
Good dealflow can look like:
- Seeing projects that other funders wouldn’t
- Seeing many more projects than other funders
- Good opportunities contact you first, or preferentially accept your funding
- Creating opportunities from scratch
“Improving dealflow” currently feels underrated among philanthropic funders. Compare the shenanigans VCs pull to generate dealflow (sponsor events, host podcasts, post thinkpieces, ask for intros), versus what EA funders do (…put up an RFP?).
Ways to improve dealflow include: reach outside your existing scene; invest into comms and marketing; offer a good grantee experience for retention + referrals; provide value beyond just Money (such as connections, advice, intros); share dealflow between other funders; chase hard on great founders.
4. Hustle
“Hustle” is my catch-all term for the legwork that goes into coordinating between money, taste, and dealflow; it also covers the logistics that go into getting the grants to the grantees. People with money or taste are often incredibly time-poor; hustle is the glue that keeps the grant program together.
The word hustle may conjure an image of some shady car salesman hustling to sell you a piece of junk. But hustle doesn’t have to look like that. It’s often a polite follow up, being relentless about moving the ball forward, in a way that your counterparties would endorse.
It doesn’t even have to come from a human; you could automate hustle with infrastructure that reduces the number of human touchpoints required, as we do on Manifund via digital grant agreements and self-serve payouts over Stripe Connect.
I think hustle is also currently quite underrated. Parts of EA & AI safety feel like a competition to demonstrate the highest IQ, or write the best-argued blog post — a culture inherited from academic norms. There’s a lot of room for generalists to contribute, by coordinating well and moving money quickly.
5. Trust
Trust, like hustle, is more of a meta component. If the different components above don’t trust each other, no grants will be made.
Ben Kuhn identifies trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly; across AI safety philanthropy, I expect trust will likewise be the bottleneck to deploy this wave of funding. The AI safety community has started with a lot of mutual trust due to being small, weird, demanding, and socially interwoven; this probably won’t scale.
Oli Habryka has spoken about the “cursed game of philanthropy”: the lack of trust behind the principal (Money) and agent (Taste) in any kind of philanthropic system. They’re designing Lightcone Commons to require less trust, by placing final funding decisions in the hands of money; I’m interested in seeing how that plays out.
Another way to resolve the trust bottleneck is to colocate Money and Taste in a single person. Leo Gao’s microgrants, giving out his own money from OpenAI, is one currently operating example. I’m excited for the Anthropic and OpenAI windfalls to empower more employees, and hope that they don’t just delegate it all away to funds. I like AI safety regranting because it likewise colocates Money with Taste or Dealflow, to individuals with a strong track record in AI safety nonprofits.
I’m also interested in other ways of increasing trust across the funding ecosystem. Manifund’s commitment to transparency is one way we push for more trust; we’d love to see other funders ask applicants to publish their project proposals, and in turn publish how much money they grant. Other ways to foster trust include in-person events and hubs; social vouching; writeups, retros, reasoning transparency, shared mental models; establishing track records of taste.
Breaking down some recent grant programs
ACX Grants
- Money: Mostly from well-monied patrons who are ACX readers; about a quarter from Scott directly.
- Taste: Scott Alexander, now increasingly via judges he recruits to help review proposals
- Dealflow: ACX readers
- Hustle: Scott sending a zillion emails and generally coordinating everything himself. (More recently, Manifund helping with payout logistics)
- Trust: Banked up in Scott over twenty years of blogging
- Money: Anton Makiiesvkyi put up $1m of his own money from earning to give
- Taste: Delegated to Manifund regrantors Gavin Leech, Marcus Abramovitch, and Ryan Kidd
- Dealflow: launched on LessWrong/EA Forum/Manifund/AISafety.com
- Hustle: Matt Brooks built the site, Melissa Samworth designed it, lots of legwork by Anton
- Trust: The team having collaborated for a while
Lightcone Commons
- Money: Jaan, Dustin, a mix of smaller donors and funds
- Taste: Evaluators like Zvi, Eliezer, Nate Soares et al
- Dealflow: a launch announcement, maybe more marketing to come?
- Hustle: Oli & the Lightcone team
- Trust: Banked up in Oli, having succeeded at various projects like LessWrong and Lighthaven, and more topically Lightspeed Grants and SFF
Coefficient Giving
- Money: Mostly via Dustin/Good Ventures, but now soliciting external donors
- Taste: a small army of specialized grantmakers across different sub-funds
- Dealflow: mix of RFPs and active grantmaking. Because they have a lot of money, basically all big orgs seek them out.
- Hustle: another army of ops/logistics people
- Trust: Originally inherited via Givewell, now stands as an institution in itself
Can money buy taste/dealflow/hustle/trust?
In some ways, yes:
- You can offer grantmakers a high salary and get better talent. (But beware principal-agent problems.)
- If you’re known to have a lot of money, the deals will come to you (for better or for worse). You can also buy dealflow via paid referrals and advertising.
- You can likewise hire people with hustle, or pay to develop systems that automate grant logistics
- You can design incentive systems that encourage trust between actors, eg Taste a % cut of Money granted. (Yes, this might incentivize recommending more $; no system is perfect.)
But also, it’s sometimes hard or expensive or suboptimal to directly convert money into things you want. There’s a lot of alpha in finding shortcuts.
So: if you have money, and want to give it away: think about what components you have and need. If there’s someone you trust with taste, dealflow, and hustle, you could simply hire them to do it.
If you have moderate trust in someone else’s taste and want to outsource the dealflow and hustle, come talk to us — this is what Manifund specializes in!
Appendix
Title inspired by Holden Karnofsky’s Rowing, Steering, Anchoring, Equity, Mutiny
I also love these reflections from new grantmakers:
I really like this framework! Thank you!