Trust

§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints

What are the specific tactics for PARPA fundraising?

Bottlenecks Workshop June 2021

Astera Lab Meeting Notes

Small grants are different animals from big grants

Precise why nows seem important for making people feel like they can intervene

Nobody is running interference for new institutions

Philanthropists want things to become sustainable

Comparing VC firms and funding institutions and programs is a useful intuition pump

Week of 21 Jun 2021

Adam Marblestone conversation 23 Jun 2021

Nadia Eghbal conversation 7 Jul 2021

The dynamics of funding are not the same as dating

Operating partners often want to remain secret

Dinner 16 Jun 2021

I am not sold on the exact implementation/person but am sold on the goal

# §Misalignment between funders and nonprofits in research
- [[Comparing VC firms and funding institutions and programs is a useful intuition pump]]
- [[Trust is a core driver of the funding mismatch]]
- [[Pitching is a competition-driven equilibrium in precommercial scitech]]
- [[Precommercial scitech funding is taste based]]
- [[Funders want to follow other funders]] (probably because of the trust thing)
- [[It is hard for precommercial scitech projects to differentiate themselves]]
	- This suggests that the goal for initial funding is not to show promising results but to show *differentiating* results
- [[Philanthropists want things to become sustainable]]
- ::needs work:: [[I am not sold on the exact implementation\/person but am sold on the goal]]
- ::needs work::[[Nobody is running interference for new institutions]]
- ::needs work::[[Precommercial scitech funding falls on spectrums of uncertainty around producing money and amount of control a funder has]]
- [[Philanthropists want to be the catalytic dollar]]
- ::needs work::[[More applications mean less time per application and less technical which biases towards snappy things]]
- Funders want to see their dollars used efficiently, but [[Efficiency biases systems towards false negatives]]
- ::needs work::[[Catalytic funding needs to launch into an existing ecosystem to be effective]]

- Funders feel comfortable making small bets on weird things but small bets are much less useful without tranches 
	- Something about double down problem
	-  Small bets don’t address [[Shadows of the Future]] which creates a chicken-and-egg problem
- How are private funders different than the government? [[Intuition pump]]
	- Unlike the government, private funders do not *have* to fund, which leads to a *high opportunity cost* 
- [[People want to be loved and be lovely]] — no matter how much we convince ourselves that we care about abstract concepts or the future, there are very few 
- [[People have different and unknown caring money thresholds]]
- Feelings of ownership/control can stand at odds to letting people explore the weird
- Many of the sorts of funders who are interested in science and technology bottlenecks are also very metrics driven either from a background in tech and KPIs or from a utilitarian standpoint. A strong focus on metrics *in that sense* stands at odds to a lot of research. 
- We don’t celebrate funders! See the derisive attitude of “rich person’s toys” 
	- [[We do not give enough credit to good philanthropic funders]]
- “Hope” mismatch/ people don’t like funding wicked problems
	- 	People want to se a “clever” solution /[[Precise why nows seem important for making people feel like they can intervene]]
	- But then this incentivizes people to make over optimistic estimates
	-  Funders need to see paths to success — or maybe that’s not right but they need to see some expected value 
	- This thing is vague and hard doesn’t cut it
		- Perception vs reality bottlenecks [[Bottlenecks]]
	- People were excited about geothermal because it *didn’t* seem bottlenecked. Or at least seemed tractably bottlenecked
	- Nobody wants to put money into something that’s hopeless — this is the tension
	-  By contrast, People tend to be excited to intervene in areas where there is a clear intervention — maybe this is the right instinct. 
- Something weird in incentive misalignment where people go “if only we had an answer” and then I and other people are like HERE IS AN ANSWER but then they’re like “oh if only there was an answer”
- Not very much coordination between wealthy individuals
	- Need a coordinator like the [[Sloan Foundation]]
	- Problem is that everybody wants the credit
- Timescale mismatches
- People don’t see science/technology funding as charity
	- Ambiguity over whether a project will be a public good or not
- Almost by definition people trying to create new institutional structures are not creditable; people who have built things before generally get stuck in a different institutional mindset. 
- [[Pay-it-forward tithing is underrated]] — the attitude of “I should do this” instead of “I want to get something out of this” 
- Funders don’t actually use any of their *power* to help
- [[Funding is a zero sum game]]
- [[Funding for new institutions isn’t about the money]]

### Anecdotes
- WorldCoin + [[Sam Altman]] 
	- https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1409858188971757573?s=20
- There is the anecdotal story of <unnammed billionaire> being willing to put in $100k only if another <unnamed billionaire> puts in $200k. This seems utterly ridiculous, but representative. 
	- From [[Funders want to follow other funders]]
- [[Dynamicland]]!??

### Related 
- [[People aren’t super excited about funding one off science projects]]
- [[Funding unlocked might be a good way to measure the ROI on addressing bottlenecks]]
- [[People like funding winners]]
	- [[Nobody will admit that a field is stuck]]

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Top of mind

Weekly Planning Week of April 26

Week of 26 July 2020

Training Plan

# Week of 14 Jun 2021
Winning this week looks like 
- Following up from workshop
	- ~~Getting things to Juan~~
	- Follow up on people
- Following up on telerobotics things
	- Need to find the serious context of use people
		- Maybe woman from home care? 
- Setting up time in CA for next week maximally
- Finishing [[What are the specific tactics for PARPA fundraising?]]
	- Finishing money spreadsheet and assumptions 

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Week of 28 Jun 2021

# Week of 21 Jun 2021
### This week
- Synthesize [[§Misalignment between funders and nonprofits in research]] and send to Geoff
- Write a higher level funding strategy thing and send to Ilan
- Actually follow up on Telerobotics things and Jonathan Blow — Set workshop date in late July?
- Followup with workshop people

### Last week
 [[Week of 14 Jun 2021]] was less productive than hoped (surprise!) but I did get the two big funding things done. A lot of it was because there was a lot to process from [[Bottlenecks Workshop June 2021]]

A bunch was people related — supporting Marissa, Luke blowing mind, etc which I think is well worth it. 

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Week of 5 Jul 2021

# Week of 28 Jun 2021
- Finish [[Bottlenecks Telerobotics Talk 2021 - Prose]] and send out to people/publish online
- Push hard on Telerobotics 1 pager for Jed Tuesday
	- Reach out to telerobotics people
	- Set date for workshop?
	- Understand funding constraints 
- Push hard on reaching out to potential APM PM people
- Finish PARPA dissemination
- Finish followups from Bottlenecks workshop
- Finish PARPA budget estimates
- Reach out to potential board of advisor people
- Focus
	- Comms
	- Eating
	- Establishing network in NYC and Princeton

### Previous Week
 [[Week of 21 Jun 2021]] was actually quite successful  useful because Adam helped me figure out [[PARPA can bootstrap reputation by focusing on two-pagers for program managers and programs]] which really firms up the plan. Extremely stressful because of working on [[Getting the ball rolling on precommercial scitech funding]] (w/out much reenforcement from Geoff afterwards) and the whole “month in NJ” thing. Super successful [[Dinner 23 Jun 2021]] actually. 

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