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[c] Compatible with a merger, but exciting nonetheless
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Ability to deal with ‘private’ grants
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It’d be a pretty big change for people to have their grant be public from the start. So options:
- Build excellent grantmaking infra together that helps people make better decisions, eg use LLMs to summarize why a certain decision is made, maybe provide quicker responses. Build an overall platform.
- Seems very exciting to Caleb (note: dropped the merger stuff a bit because Manifest/EAG but still excited)
- Caleb would also be personally excited to help out with the software engineering aspect
- Use EAF’s existing application form, then add things at the point when the grant is made, so don’t have to deal with privacy issues
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Two kinds of privacy:
- Making recs to Manifund instead of using the platform — would solve “application” privacy
- Interested in is there a solution to “private grants” that uses Manifund
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Technically, is it possible?
- [a] Probably technically fine; but increased operational burden
- [c] bigger deal: Public wiki, might be annoying to provide a guarantee that
- [c] In terms of upfront costs, probably fewer than 5 days of dev time [a] seems right
- [c] Curious how payout works
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[a] tldr we don’t have this functionality now, could plausibly implement it
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pay structure for these?
- for public grants
- historically has been 5% of grant size
- [AC] seems reasonable, wants to sync on typical grant size etc.
- for private grants
- [AC] might take larger overhead, might be a larger fixed cost (e.g. 30%)
- what goes into the 5%
- wants the grants to go up in size
- [c] 30% seems very high?
- If there was a public grant, where the name of the applicant was redacted? [a] Maybe this feels like 10%
- The cost of making 6 public grants is 1 private grant?
- [c] Hm, seems expensive, means it’s a lot less likely to want to use Manifund
- [a] fair enough — worth modeling the cost/ratio of public vs private grants on Manifund, then comparing to alternate fiscal sponsors and seeing what the price nets out to.
- E.g. if the average cost with Manifund is 15% vs average cost with another sponsor is 10%
- Could be convinced that 30% is too high.
- 32 private grants in the last year out of ~300, with average 40k
- 90% * 0.05 + 10% * 0.30 = 0.075
- [c] EA Funds also doesn’t want to do private grants
- Think there is a positive externality with eg medical expenses. Don’t want to encourage grantmakers to shout about this, eg if poor mental health
- A lot of the community value comes from
- [c] Need to think about how much this costs, think more
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Timeline for moving grants over to Manifund
- experiment 1: public grants
- can we test this out with one small simple grant, eg 1 or 2 $30k grants?
- tell manifund who the grantee is and give them a writeup, then Manifund can make the grant for us
- if EV can’t make a transfer to manifund: ask a donor to donate directly to manifund
- LTFF actually has a 10k balance on Manifund
- Plus an additional 15k-20k from Manifold Charity balance
- maybe takes two weeks from EA Funds initiating transfer for money to arrive in the grantees bank account
- [AC] seems hard for test 1 to fail
- experiment 2: making private grant
- experiment 3: scale, handling the full typical flow of grants
- 1 month of 1 fund (maybe AWF - ask Karolina)
- timeline estimates:
- 30 days from now starting exp3 seems reasonable if everything goes to plan (exp 1 and 2)
- Have some Memorandum of Understanding (contract) which puts us on the hook for
- Sometimes, easier for EA Funds to pay for services already rendered
- [a] Yeah, we could probably float like $300k, though would prefer not to
- [c] Maybe should work in reverse? If you took $3m and Manifund invested it
- [a] kind of down if you wanted to do weird treasury management
- [c] Cool for donors to give equity too
- [a] like OpenAI stock?
- [c] More like Google stock for tax advantage reasons [a] yeah easiest to give to a DAF
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getting a better sense of manifund’s due diligence for individual projects
- Ops: Guide to paying people
- [c] If we want to include our own lawyers in the process?
- Might slow things down? But on EA Funds
- Curious what happens as part of your existing due diligence process?
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Sidenote: Austin recommends EA Funds look into alternative fiscal sponsors
- [c] Will do
- [a] maybe Ashgro?
- [c] Might still be good to have a stopgap even if it’s temporary, just to spin out of EV