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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: Launching Lightspeed Grants (Apply by July 6th), published by habryka on June 7, 2023 on LessWrong.
Lightspeed Grants provides fast funding for projects that help humanity flourish among the stars. The application is minimal and grant requests of any size ($5k - $5M) are welcome. Budget is $5M for this grant round, and (probably) more in future rounds. Applications close in 30 days (July 6th). Opt into our venture grants program to get a response within 14 days (otherwise get a response in 30-60 days, around the start of August).
Apply here. The application should only take 1-2 hours!
If you want to join as a funder, send us an email at funds@lightspeedgrants.org.
Is the application really only 2 hours though?
Often, applicants get nervous about grant applications and spend a lot more time than they need to on them, or get overwhelmed and procrastinate on applying.
We really just want you to spell out some basic information about your project in a plain way and think this is doable in the 1-2 hour timeframe.
If you're worried about overthinking things, we'll have application co-working sessions and office hours every Thursday of July between noon and 2PM PT. If you think you might procrastinate on the application or get stuck in the weeds and spend a ton of unnecessary time on it, you can join one and fill out the application on the call, plus ask questions. Add the co-working to your calendar here!
Who runs Lightspeed Grants?
Lightspeed grants is run by Lightcone Infrastructure. Applications are evaluated by ~5 evaluators selected for their general reasoning ability and networks including applicants/references, and are chosen in collaboration with our funders. Our primary funder for this round is Jaan Tallinn.
Applications are open to individuals, nonprofits, and projects that don't have a charitable sponsor. When necessary, Hack Club Bank provides fiscal sponsorship for successful applications.
Why?
Improved grantee experience
I’ve been doing various forms of grantmaking for 5+ years, both on the Long Term Future Fund and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and I think it's possible to do better, both in grant quality and applicant-experience.
Applications tend to be unnecessarily complicated to fill out, and it can take months to get a response from existing grantmakers, often without any intermediate updates. Different donors also often end up playing donor-chicken where donors wait to fund an organization to see whether other donors will fund it first, delaying decisions further. This period of funding uncertainty can have large effects on organizational strategy, and also makes experimenting with smaller projects much more costly, since each grant application might be associated with weeks to months of funding uncertainty, meaning it takes months to go from an idea to execution, or to go from "the beta test turned out well" to moving forward with the project.
My goal is to have an application process that requires minimal additional work beyond "explain why your project is a good idea and you are a good fit for it" and where most responses happen within 2 weeks. This round, we're aiming for something somewhat less ambitious while we find our footing, and are planning to get back to people reliably in less than 60 days, with the ability to opt-into a 14-day response process.
Improved funder experience
Currently funders either have to find hyper-local grant opportunities among their friends and acquaintances and fund them directly, start something like their own foundation, or give up control over their funds and donate money to something like the Long Term Future Fund, which will then fund some portfolio of grants that the funder has relatively little insight into (especially with the decrease in grant writeups from the LTFF and EAIF).
The Lightspeed Grants proce...
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