Congratulations, excited to see how this plays out!
I’m super confused about the relationship between Lightspeed Grants and the Survival and Flourishing Fund:
The primary funder of both funds is Jaan Tallinn (although FLI is also participating in the current SFF round).
The process of determining the funding basically sounds like the S-Process (~5 evaluators using an app that Lightcone Infrastructure developed that negotiates allocations among the participants).
The venture grants are, it sounds like, funded by the SFF speculation grantors using balances from their speculation grant funds.
As far as I can tell the main difference is the turnaround time, in that you’re looking to get decisions out in 60 days max. Are there other important differences to be aware of? And perhaps most relevantly, can/should organizations who are applying to SFF submit a separate application to Lightspeed?
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 the app and evaluation process, though those are less visible to applicants).
The evaluation process is completely separate (i.e. none of the evaluators participating in Lightspeed Grants are the same as the ones participating in either the last or the next SFF round), so I think applying to both makes a pretty large difference.
We are also planning to have our own fully separate venture grantor program, but it seemed quicker to get started by leveraging the existing SFF speculation grantor program this round, and then we will spin out more properly next round.
Congratulations, excited to see how this plays out!
I’m super confused about the relationship between Lightspeed Grants and the Survival and Flourishing Fund:
The primary funder of both funds is Jaan Tallinn (although FLI is also participating in the current SFF round).
The process of determining the funding basically sounds like the S-Process (~5 evaluators using an app that Lightcone Infrastructure developed that negotiates allocations among the participants).
The venture grants are, it sounds like, funded by the SFF speculation grantors using balances from their speculation grant funds.
As far as I can tell the main difference is the turnaround time, in that you’re looking to get decisions out in 60 days max. Are there other important differences to be aware of? And perhaps most relevantly, can/should organizations who are applying to SFF submit a separate application to Lightspeed?
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 the app and evaluation process, though those are less visible to applicants).
The evaluation process is completely separate (i.e. none of the evaluators participating in Lightspeed Grants are the same as the ones participating in either the last or the next SFF round), so I think applying to both makes a pretty large difference.
We are also planning to have our own fully separate venture grantor program, but it seemed quicker to get started by leveraging the existing SFF speculation grantor program this round, and then we will spin out more properly next round.
Thank you for the explanation!