Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?

Hey,

First I want to explain that I think it's misleading to think of this as a CEA decision (I've edited to be more explicit about this). To explain that I need to disambiguate between:

1. CEA, the project that runs the EA Forum, EA Global, etc.
   • This is what I think ~everyone usually thinks of when they think of "CEA", as it's the group that's been making public use of that brand
2. CEA, the former name of a legal entity which hosts lots of projects (including #1)
   • This is a legacy naming issue ... 
     • The name of the legal entity was originally intended as a background brand to house 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can; other projects have been added since, especially in recent years
     • Since then the idea of "effective altruism" has become somewhat popular in its own right! And one of the projects within the entity started making good use of the name "CEA"
   • We’ve now renamed the legal entity to EVF, basically in order to avoid this kind of ambiguity!
      

Wytham Abbey was bought by #2, and isn’t directly related to #1, except for being housed within the same legal entity. I was the person who owned the early development of the project idea, and fundraised for it. (The funding comes from a grant specifically for this project, and is not FTX-related.) I brought it to the rest of the board of EVF to ask for fiscal sponsorship (i.e. I would direct the funding to EVF and EVF would buy the property and employ staff to work on the project). So EVF made two decisions here: they approved fiscal sponsorship, agreeing to take funds for this new project; and they then followed through and bought the property with the funds that had been earmarked for that. The second of these is technically a decision to buy the building (and was done by a legal entity at the time called CEA), but at that point it was fulfilling an obligation to the donor, so it would have been wild to decide anything else. The first is a real decision, but the decision was to offer sponsorship to a project that would likely otherwise have happened through another vehicle, not to use funds to buy a building rather than for another purpose. Neither of these decisions were made by any staff of the group people generally understand as "CEA". (All of this ambiguity/confusion is on us, not on readers.)

I’d also like to speak briefly to the “why” — i.e. why I thought this was a good idea. The central case was this: 

I’ve personally been very impressed by specialist conference centres. When I was doing my PhD, I think the best workshops I went to were at Oberwolfach, a mathematics research centre funded by the German government. Later I went to an extremely productive workshop on ethical issues in measuring the global burden of disease at the Brocher Foundation. Talking to other researchers, including in other fields, I don’t think my impression was an outlier. Having an immersive environment which was more about exploring new ideas than showing off results was just very good for intellectual progress. In theory this would be possible without specialist venues, but researchers want to spend time thinking about ideas not event logistics. Having a venue which makes itself available to experts hosting events avoids this issue.

In the last few years, I’ve been seeing the rise of what seems to me an extremely important cluster of ideas — around asking what’s most important to do in the world, and taking chains of reasoning from there seriously. I think this can lead to tentative answers like “effective altruism” or “averting existential risk”, but for open-minded intellectual exploration I think it’s better to have the focus on questions than answers. I thought it would be great if we could facilitate more intellectual work of this type, and the specialist-venue model was a promising one to try. We will experiment with a variety of event types. 

We had various calculations about costings, which made it look somewhere between “moderately money-saving” and “mildly money-spending” vs renting venues for events that would happen anyway, depending on various assumptions e.g. about usage that we couldn’t get great data on before running the experiment. The main case for the project was not a cost-saving one, but that if it was a success it could generate many more valuable workshops than would otherwise exist. Note that this is a much less expensive experiment than it may look on face value, since we retain the underlying asset of the building.

We wanted to be close to Oxford for easy access to the intellectual communities there. (Property prices weren’t falling off significantly with distance until travel time from Oxford and London had become significantly higher.) We looked at a lot of properties online, and visited the three properties we found for sale with 20+ bedrooms within about 50 minutes of Oxford. These were all "country houses", which are commonly repurposed as event venues in England. The other two were cheaper (one ~£6M and one ~£9M at the end of a competitive process; compared to a purchase price for Wytham of a bit under £15M) but needed significantly more work before they were usable, which would have added large expense (running into the millions) and delay (likely years). (And renovation expense isn’t obviously recoverable if one sells — it depends on how much the buyers want the same things from the property as you do.)

We thought Wytham had the most long-term potential as a venue because it had multiple large common rooms that could take >40 people. The other properties had one large room each holding perhaps a max of 40, but there would be pressure on this space since it would be wanted as both a dining space and for workshop sessions, and would also reduce flexibility of use for meetings (extra construction might have been able to address this, but it was a big question mark whether you could get planning consent). Wytham also benefited from being somewhat larger (about 27,000 sq ft vs roughly 20,000 sq ft for each of the other two) and a more accessible location. Overall we thought that a combination of factors made it the most appropriate choice.

I did feel a little nervous about the optical effects, but think it’s better to let decisions be guided less by what we think looks good, and more by what we think is good — ultimately this was a decision I felt happy to defend.

On why we hadn’t posted publicly about this before: I'm not a fan of trying to create hype. I thought the natural time to post about the project publicly would be when we were ready to accept public applications to run events, and it felt a bit gauche to post before that. Now that there's a public discussion, of course, it seemed worth explaining some of the thinking.

I hope this is helpful.

Hey, I wanted to clarify that Open Phil gave most of the funding for the purchase of Wytham Abbey (a small part of the costs were also committed by Owen and his wife, as a signal of “skin in the game”). I run the Longtermist EA Community Growth program at Open Phil (we recently launched a parallel program for EA community growth for global health and wellbeing, which I don’t run) and I was the grant investigator for this grant, so I probably have the most context on it from the side of the donor. I’m also on the board of the Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF).

Why did we make the grant? There are two things I’d like to discuss about this, the process we used/context we were in, and our take on the case for the grant. I’ll start with the former. 

Process and context: At the time we committed the funding (November 2021, though the purchase wasn’t completed until April 2022), there was a lot more apparent funding available than there is today, both from Open Phil and from the Future Fund. Existential risk reduction and related efforts seemed to us to have a funding overhang, and we were actively looking for more ways to spend money to support more good work, especially by encouraging more people to dedicate their careers to addressing the associated risks. Also, given the large amounts of funding available at the time, and relatively lower number of grantmakers, we wanted to experiment with decentralizing some influence over funding to other people with experience in the space who understood our long-run priorities but had visions for how to use the funding that were somewhat different from our grantmakers’.

So, we were experimenting with more defaulting to saying “yes” to shovel-ready grant requests that seemed aimed at our core priorities, especially when they didn’t require enormous amounts of funding. (As others have noted and as I’ll explain below, we modeled the amount of funding at stake here as being in the low millions of dollars, rather than the higher sticker price, since it was to purchase a durable asset that can be resold.)

What did we think about this grant? In the abstract, we thought the idea of buying real estate to use for events was a reasonable one.

When evaluating a grant, my team tends to focus on the question “to what extent (per dollar) will this grant result in more promising people focusing their careers on doing as much good as possible in our longtermist focus areas?” (Other Open Philanthropy programs use different criteria.) I and other people on my team have invested a fair amount in collecting data and developing metrics for evaluating the value-for-money of grants aimed at this goal, though also it’s still a work in progress in many ways. 

When we surveyed ~200 people involved or interested in longtermist work, we found that many had been strongly influenced by in-person events they’d attended, particularly ones where people relatively new to a topic came into contact with relatively experienced people working full-time in that area. (Some other data and our general experiences in the space are largely supportive of this too). Overall, we feel fairly confident in-person events like workshops, learning retreats, and conferences can be very impactful for people considering big career changes, and have historically often been good value-for-money via helping people interested in our longtermist focus areas make professional connections and deepen their understanding about these topics. 

We support projects that cumulatively run dozens of events per year (disproportionately in the Bay Area and UK), and we saw several reasons a venue purchase could be valuable for both increasing the number and quality of impactful events, and potentially saving some money:

• The number of events was growing fast. 
• Suitable venues are often of limited availability and book up far in advance, making more spontaneous events challenging.
• Rented venues sometimes have issues that aren’t discovered until an event has begun (and we’ve seen events go substantially worse, or have to execute difficult mid-event moves, because of issues arising with the venues after the event was already underway). 
• Ops capacity to organize before and after events is a resource we value highly. Organizing and preparing for events takes more time and may go worse on average when you need to orient to the layout of different venues, move in and out all the equipment, learn about new areas (and travel to/from them) and available vendors that the event allows, etc.
• Renting venues varies a lot in price, but venues for events near top EA hubs can be very expensive. Often, the cost of the venues was in the $30-100k range (though there were also smaller, shorter events aimed at students with venue costs in the $10k-ish range, and large conferences can be much more expensive).
  • Other locations are often cheaper, but have a more difficult time attracting busy professionals, relative to ones that take place near where they live, and demand more time from ops staff, senior staff, and (sometimes) instructors helping with events (and, we generally highly value all those folks’ time, even if they are willing to travel). 

The fact that the funding was going to be used to purchase a durable asset means that for the purposes of our cost-effectiveness analysis, we modeled the financial stakes as being somewhere in the low millions (rather than the meaningfully higher sticker price of the property).  Our grantees also stood to potentially save money through the investment, since they wouldn’t end up paying rental costs to run their events. We still wouldn’t have been surprised if the investment turned out net negative from a financial perspective, but losing most of the investment seemed unlikely. Given this model of the costs, we thought it was consistent with our overall experiment in lowering barriers to longtermist funding to “default to yes” for a shovel-ready grant.

We discussed Owen’s reasoning behind selecting this kind of venue, and we thought it broadly made sense. The main goal was to have a venue relatively near Oxford with sufficient capacity for the types of events we thought could be highly impactful. 

Despite the points above, we were relatively uncertain about this specific opportunity, and there was some internal debate over the amount and structure of our funding; we also expressed our uncertainty to Owen.

 We were mainly uncertain about: 

• Owen being the person driving this forward, despite him not wanting to be the main point person actually helping oversee the property and run relevant events over the next few years
• Whether refurbishing and maintaining the property would end up being much more time-consuming and expensive than Owen forecasted
• Whether the process was moving too quickly and whether more should be done to investigate the state and expected value of the property, and whether a better opportunity might arise in the coming years
• Whether the number and kinds of events (and the value of those events) had been sufficiently well-scoped, and whether this venue would prove a good fit for a sufficient fraction of them. 

Internally at OP (including with our communications team), we discussed how this would reflect on us somewhat, but mostly from the perspective of us as a funder, rather than the wider ecosystem as a whole. I think that it was a mistake on my part that the funding conversations didn’t focus more on that broader question, and I regret it, though I think we should have a high bar to rejecting otherwise solid-seeming grants on optics grounds because that kind of approach can be hard to limit and then can end up being surprisingly costly to impact. (My recollection is that we thought of it mainly as a longtermist/existential risk reduction field resource and didn’t think enough about how what was then called CEA providing fiscal sponsorship might make it sound more like an EA project.) 

We also told Owen that we would want to check in about venue usage and think about the value it was generating in terms of the community growth metrics we generally use, and discuss selling the property if it didn’t seem like things were going well. (Proceeds from a sale would be used as general funding within EVF, and that funding would replace some of our and other funders’ future grants to EVF.)

Where do I stand on this grant now? With the huge decline in available funds since November 2021, I don’t know whether we’d make this grant again today. I still think it could turn out to be importantly effort-saving and event-increasing-and-improving relative to regularly renting one-off event venues, and it could also lead to a higher number of impactful events being run. But it’s currently too soon to say whether the usage will justify the investment. If we were considering a similar grant now, we’d want to get more into the details of modeling the effective financial cost (incorporating the resale possibility), hammering out plans and predictions for future operations and usage, etc. but I think we might consider it to be good enough value-for-money that we’d want to go forward with some possible projects in this vein.

Why isn’t there a published grant page right now? (This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we're currently working through a backlog of older grants. Wytham is one of many grants in that category.