Today we’re launching Effective Altruism Ventures, a project of CEA’s Effective Altruism Outreach initiative. The goal of Effective Altruism Ventures is to test the theory that we can stimulate the creation of new high impact organizations by simply signaling that funding is available.
GiveWell has argued in multiple blog posts that interesting projects often do not appear until a major funder signals an interest in funding a project. This aligns with my experience running the Technology and Innovation department at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and with YCombinator’s recently announced Requests for Startups. We designed Effective Altruism Ventures to provide this signal for EA-aligned projects.
For Projects
New projects can apply and go through a systematic evaluation process (the details of which are available here). We will introduce projects that pass the evaluation to our network of individual and institutional funders and help find new funders if needed. We also provide strategic guidance, recruiting help and more. We are both cause-neutral and neutral on organization type (e.g. nonprofit, for-profit, benefit corporation etc.) Applications are rolling, but we devote more time to evaluations at set intervals throughout the year. The next evaluation sprint will be May 1, so interested projects should apply by then.
To get a better sense of our evaluation process and of Effective Altruism Ventures itself, we completed an evaluation of ourselves using the EA Ventures evaluation framework. You can read the evaluation here. The results of our evaluation indicate that there is insufficient evidence to recommend making donations directly to Effective Altruism Ventures at this time. This is consistent with our current plan of running the project on a volunteer basis for 3-6 months before fundraising to support operational costs.
For Funders
For funders Effective Altruism Ventures is a risk-free way of gaining access to higher quality projects. We will learn about your funding priorities and then introduce you to vetted projects that meet your priorities. If you don’t like a project you are free to decline to fund it. We simply ask that you provide us with your reasons so we can improve our evaluation procedure.
We also help improve funder coordination for new projects. This helps funders get a clearer sense of whether their funding is fungible with that of other EA funders.
Want to get involved?
If you’re interested in getting involved in Effective Altruism Ventures, we’re looking for the following:
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Projects, especially those that are working in areas that are important, tractable and uncrowded.
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Funders who are ideologically aligned with EA and are interested in seeing our deal flow.
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Experts in fields of interest that are willing to help us evaluate projects.
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Entrepreneurs without their own project, but who are interested in working on one of the projects we recommend.
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Partners who have strong networks and want to work closely with us to evaluation projects, find funders and source new projects.
If you fall into one of the above groups and would like to chat more about Effective Altruism Ventures, feel free to schedule time to chat here or email me at kerry@eaventures.org.
Our threshold for funding is set at GiveWell-recommended charities. Namely, if we don't think a project is plausibly better than e.g. AMF we plan to not recommend the project.
This is because a pernicious failure mode for the project is that we move money away from good proven projects and towards bad, unproved projects. By only recommending projects that could (in expectation) be better than AMF, we can mitigate the pernicious failure mode.
In terms of funding level, we ask how much money the projects need and what they plan to do with it in the application. We also plan to ask about this in the future. The goal is to ensure that the projects have room for more funding. We don't plan to recommend specific funding levels, but I can see us doing this if donors would find it valuable.
Also, to clarify on the crowdedness of the project, I could see our uncrowdedness ranking improving as we learn more about the funding space. It's certainly plausible that the project will turn out to be uncrowded.
Thanks. To be sure I'm reading that right: you mean projects that you think are better in expectation than AMF, or that you think someone might reasonably think is better in expectation than AMF?
I expect that if most/all of your recommendations get funded, it would be useful to have recommendations for the amount of funding until they are in expectation worse than AMF at the margin. If not all your recommendations get funded, it would be useful to have extra ranking between them. It may be that donors are happy making these judgements, but just as you are... (read more)