Congratulations, excited to see how this plays out!
I'm super confused about the relationship between Lightspeed Grants and the Survival and Flourishing Fund:
Lightspeed Grants is definitely meaningfully modeled as being a kind of spinoff of the SFF, and also as a way to create more competition between different funding distribution mechanisms for Jaan and other funders.
This means for this round there are a lot of similarities on the backend, though I do expect the applicant experience to already be quite different. And then I expect much more heavy divergence in future rounds as we have more end-to-end ownership over the product, which allows us to make more changes (I've already made a lot of changes to ...
For what it's worth I actually don't buy at all that "colocation is desirable for people & teams that are 'actually trying'." I've worked with dozens of organizations as a strategy consultant over the past decade, during which time I've gotten to see a number of different office configurations ranging from 100% place-based to fully virtual and many gradations in between. While this is anecdata, I personally haven't noticed any correlation whatsoever between the office setup and the effectiveness of the team. I think there are plenty of people who don't...
Fans of the TV show The Wire might want to check out David Simon's earlier work The Corner. It's not as artfully done as The Wire, but it is a direct retelling of a real family's story from Simon's days reporting for the Baltimore Sun, so it is as close to being a documentary as you can get without it actually being a documentary. I found both The Wire and The Corner to be quite useful for getting a visceral sense of what it's like to grow up poor and Black in America's inner cities.
I've also learned a lot about America's racial history from reading Robert...
I mostly think you are asking good and appropriate questions, but wanted to add some important context that is missing from the writeup here. In March, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, on which the Gates Foundation serves, announced an $8 billion fundraising effort for a range of priorities including vaccine manufacturing capacity. After committing $250 million of its own, Gates shortly afterwards co-launched the COVID-Zero campaign with Wellcome Trust which was intended to be the private-sector fundraising component for this effort. While a speci...
I don't dispute that the phenomenon you're describing is real, but purely as a data point I'd offer that in the majority of my recent experiences working with organizations as a consultant, managers have not explicitly sought to use meetings this way, and in a few cases they have proactively pushed for input from others. It's certainly possible that the sample of organizations I'm working with is biased both because a) they are mostly nonprofits and foundations, and b) if they are working with me it's a signal that they're unusually attentive to their decision-making process. But I don't want people reading this thread to be under the impression that all managers are this cynical.
That's a great point, and I don't think the takeaway here is that meetings have no purpose. Instead it's that there are better ways to make decisions in a meeting or meeting-like context than most organizations use. People could adopt some of the techniques mentioned by the book authors to change the meeting structure, and still get the benefit of buy-in from having a meeting at all.
That's a good idea, I'll have to figure out how to do that! :)
This mostly made sense to me, but what is the surprising information that caused you to update in favor of Trump being reelected? Presumably some piece of economic news? Or did I misunderstand your last sentence?
Yes, I agree that choice of distribution is often very important to modeling outcomes. If you're not sure which is most appropriate, you can experiment with different ones as you just did to see whether and how they affect the results. By the way, Guesstimate supports more distributions than the three you mentioned, but the others involve a little more work to incorporate into the model. You can even define your own distributions from sample data that you upload.
Whoops! It is not. Here's the correct one, and I'll make the change in the post as well. Thanks for the correction and the kind words!
Thank you for the explanation!