This is fantastic, tons of things I agree with strongly.
That said, my big undressed question is about scale; obviously it’s easier to fund one $1m project than 5 $200k projects, but the smaller projects are often higher leverage. And that goes for smaller things too.
So taking this much further, in my experience lots of really great early stage opportunities are $5k or $10k grants (help someone write a paper, or fund a small experiment to check if a new idea works,) which can have as much expected impact as a marginal $200k on different opportunities; how do you manage these, both in terms of filtering and finding them, and managing the relatively very high overhead costs for them? (Or do you not find that this is true, or do you have a minimum?)
Good point; I agree small opportunities can be great.
how do you manage these, both in terms of filtering and finding them, and managing the relatively very high overhead costs for them?
This post is more like I have a priori observations than I know what processes work well in practice. I don’t claim the latter. But since you asked:
I don’t do a good job of finding small opportunities. When small opportunities come to my attention, my process is something like:
(If it’s out-of-scope of my expertise, drop it, unless an advisor is strongly vouching for it or it seems truly amazing or something.)
Do I have a great sense of how good it is, in particular because it’s just a small version of something I’ve investigated in the past? If so, use that.
Otherwise, is there someone else who should decide? If so, get them to decide.
Otherwise, are there positive second-order effects to actually investigating (e.g. maybe noticing or being able to evaluate many more opportunities like this)? If so, do that.
Otherwise, try to make a decision quickly. If downside risk is low and upside is maybe-great, then make the grant.
Er, that’s conflating “small grant” with “low-stakes.” Sometimes the amount of money is small but the opportunity is high-stakes — sometimes the upside is high; sometimes there are costs or downside risks much greater than the cost of the money. It’s the low-stakes opportunities that you want to decide quickly on.
An abbreviated heuristic is: if it’s in-scope and it seems great and it’s hard to imagine regretting it substantially more than if you lit the money on fire, just fund all such small opportunities. Funding lots of small opportunities is better than funding few.
Note that being exploitable has downsides beyond wasting money. (Internet people reading this, please don’t ask me for money because you read this; I’m very unlikely to give you money even for good things because my expertise is limited to a small fraction of good things.)
Probably in my domain relative to yours, (1) there’s way fewer small one-off opportunities and (2) a greater fraction of them have substantial downside risk.
This is fantastic, tons of things I agree with strongly.
That said, my big undressed question is about scale; obviously it’s easier to fund one $1m project than 5 $200k projects, but the smaller projects are often higher leverage. And that goes for smaller things too.
So taking this much further, in my experience lots of really great early stage opportunities are $5k or $10k grants (help someone write a paper, or fund a small experiment to check if a new idea works,) which can have as much expected impact as a marginal $200k on different opportunities; how do you manage these, both in terms of filtering and finding them, and managing the relatively very high overhead costs for them? (Or do you not find that this is true, or do you have a minimum?)
Good point; I agree small opportunities can be great.
This post is more like I have a priori observations than I know what processes work well in practice. I don’t claim the latter. But since you asked:
I don’t do a good job of finding small opportunities. When small opportunities come to my attention, my process is something like:
(If it’s out-of-scope of my expertise, drop it, unless an advisor is strongly vouching for it or it seems truly amazing or something.)
Do I have a great sense of how good it is, in particular because it’s just a small version of something I’ve investigated in the past? If so, use that.
Otherwise, is there someone else who should decide? If so, get them to decide.
Otherwise, are there positive second-order effects to actually investigating (e.g. maybe noticing or being able to evaluate many more opportunities like this)? If so, do that.
Otherwise, try to make a decision quickly. If downside risk is low and upside is maybe-great, then make the grant.
Er, that’s conflating “small grant” with “low-stakes.” Sometimes the amount of money is small but the opportunity is high-stakes — sometimes the upside is high; sometimes there are costs or downside risks much greater than the cost of the money. It’s the low-stakes opportunities that you want to decide quickly on.
An abbreviated heuristic is: if it’s in-scope and it seems great and it’s hard to imagine regretting it substantially more than if you lit the money on fire, just fund all such small opportunities. Funding lots of small opportunities is better than funding few.
Note that being exploitable has downsides beyond wasting money. (Internet people reading this, please don’t ask me for money because you read this; I’m very unlikely to give you money even for good things because my expertise is limited to a small fraction of good things.)
Probably in my domain relative to yours, (1) there’s way fewer small one-off opportunities and (2) a greater fraction of them have substantial downside risk.