The Nonlinear Library EA - [Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures by Alexander Berger
Jun 14, 2024
Alexander Berger, Publisher of the update from Good Ventures, shares insights about their grantmaking decisions, exiting certain sub-causes, and focus on diversifying funding sources. They discuss the impact on grant recommendations, the shift towards partnerships, and the decision not to expand into new causes.
02:54
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures, published by Alexander Berger on June 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I wanted to share
this update from Good Ventures (Cari and Dustin's philanthropy), which seems relevant to the EA community.
Tl;dr: "while we generally plan to continue increasing our grantmaking in our existing focus areas via our partner Open Philanthropy, we have decided to exit a handful of sub-causes (amounting to less than 5% of our annual grantmaking), and we are no longer planning to expand into new causes in the near term by default."
A few follow-ups on this from an Open Phil perspective:
I want to apologize to directly affected grantees (who've already been notified) for the negative surprise here, and for our part in not better anticipating it.
While this represents a real update, we remain deeply aligned with Good Ventures (they're expecting to continue to increase giving via OP over time), and grateful for how many of the diverse funding opportunities we've recommended that they've been willing to tackle.
An example of a new potential focus area that OP staff had been interested in exploring that Good Ventures is not planning to fund is research on the potential moral patienthood of digital minds. If any readers are interested in funding opportunities in that space, please
reach out.
Good Ventures has told us they don't plan to exit any overall focus areas in the near term. But this update is an important reminder that such a high degree of reliance on one funder (especially on the
GCR side) represents a structural risk. I think it's important to diversify funding in many of the fields Good Ventures currently funds, and that doing so could make the funding base more stable both directly (by diversifying funding sources) and indirectly (by lowering the time and energy costs to Good Ventures from being such a disproportionately large funder).
Another implication of these changes is that going forward, OP will have a higher bar for recommending grants that could draw on limited Good Ventures bandwidth, and so our program staff will face more constraints in terms of what they're able to fund. We always knew we weren't funding every worthy thing out there, but that will be even more true going forward. Accordingly, we expect marginal opportunities for other funders to look stronger going forward.
Historically, OP has been focused on finding enough outstanding giving opportunities to hit Good Ventures' spending targets, with a long-term vision that once we had hit those targets, we'd expand our work to support other donors seeking to maximize their impact. We'd already gotten a lot closer to GV's spending targets over the last couple of years, but this update has accelerated our timeline for investing more in partnerships and advising other philanthropists.
If you're interested, please consider
applying or
referring candidates to lead our new partnerships function. And if you happen to be a philanthropist looking for advice on how to invest >$1M/year in new cause areas, please
get in touch.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
I wanted to share
this update from Good Ventures (Cari and Dustin's philanthropy), which seems relevant to the EA community.
Tl;dr: "while we generally plan to continue increasing our grantmaking in our existing focus areas via our partner Open Philanthropy, we have decided to exit a handful of sub-causes (amounting to less than 5% of our annual grantmaking), and we are no longer planning to expand into new causes in the near term by default."
A few follow-ups on this from an Open Phil perspective:
I want to apologize to directly affected grantees (who've already been notified) for the negative surprise here, and for our part in not better anticipating it.
While this represents a real update, we remain deeply aligned with Good Ventures (they're expecting to continue to increase giving via OP over time), and grateful for how many of the diverse funding opportunities we've recommended that they've been willing to tackle.
An example of a new potential focus area that OP staff had been interested in exploring that Good Ventures is not planning to fund is research on the potential moral patienthood of digital minds. If any readers are interested in funding opportunities in that space, please
reach out.
Good Ventures has told us they don't plan to exit any overall focus areas in the near term. But this update is an important reminder that such a high degree of reliance on one funder (especially on the
GCR side) represents a structural risk. I think it's important to diversify funding in many of the fields Good Ventures currently funds, and that doing so could make the funding base more stable both directly (by diversifying funding sources) and indirectly (by lowering the time and energy costs to Good Ventures from being such a disproportionately large funder).
Another implication of these changes is that going forward, OP will have a higher bar for recommending grants that could draw on limited Good Ventures bandwidth, and so our program staff will face more constraints in terms of what they're able to fund. We always knew we weren't funding every worthy thing out there, but that will be even more true going forward. Accordingly, we expect marginal opportunities for other funders to look stronger going forward.
Historically, OP has been focused on finding enough outstanding giving opportunities to hit Good Ventures' spending targets, with a long-term vision that once we had hit those targets, we'd expand our work to support other donors seeking to maximize their impact. We'd already gotten a lot closer to GV's spending targets over the last couple of years, but this update has accelerated our timeline for investing more in partnerships and advising other philanthropists.
If you're interested, please consider
applying or
referring candidates to lead our new partnerships function. And if you happen to be a philanthropist looking for advice on how to invest >$1M/year in new cause areas, please
get in touch.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org