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Last spring a neighbor of mine (researcher/professor) was talking about how one of his students stumbled upon one of these SBF foundations and that prompted the

Last spring a neighbor of mine (researcher/professor) was talking about how one of his students stumbled upon one of these SBF foundations and that prompted them to apply. The application process was a Google Form and within a few days they got a $1M grant. No questions or interactions outside the Google Form. The only restriction was something to the effect that the it had to be spent 100% on the research project and the university couldn’t take any of the money to cover its own expenses (or something to that effect). He was amazed at how swift and low-detail it was as he’s generally spending most of the year flying to conferences, visiting/speaking to foundations etc to pull the funding together.

savanaly 4y ago
This style of grant giving has caught on in the last few years (three other examples I can think of off the top of my head are Tyler Cowen's Fast Grants [0] and Emergent Ventures [1] and Scott Alexander's ACX Grants [2], inspired by the former). Despite the fact that SBF's foundations used the same style and collapsed, I don't think the style will go away. It's just so much more efficient than the normal grant application process, for small-scale interventions. [0] https://fastgrants.org/ https://fastgrants.org/ [1] https://www.mercatus.org/emergent-ventures https://www.mercatus.org/emergent-ventures [2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results