“Money, taste, dealflow, hustle, trust” by Austin

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of grant programs, from small microgrants to regranting to ambitious new platforms to galaxy-brained schemes for impact markets. Here are five components that I think any grant program needs to be good: 1. Money This one is obvious: a grant program needs money to give out. Historically in EA and AI safety, this started as individual small donations from earning-to-give, to Dustin Moskovitz's money via Good Ventures, to an ill-fated boom around the FTX Future Fund, and now everyone preparing for the frothy Anthropic and OpenAI dollars. 2. Taste This is also kind of obvious. Most people's image of “what makes a good grantmaker” is “excellent taste”, which is to say, the ability to discern between good or bad projects. Grant taste comes in a few forms: Taste in people: founders of projects, leaders of orgs Taste in ideas: whether a particular idea might succeed; whether it’d be good if it did Taste in fields: cause prio across technical AI safety vs policy vs fieldbuilding One problem with taste is that everyone invariably thinks that they have good taste. Also, there isn’t necessarily One True Taste, so it can [...] ---Outline:(00:26) 1. Money(00:50) 2. Taste(01:59) 3. Dealflow(03:07) 4. Hustle(04:19) 5. Trust(06:13) Breaking down some recent grant programs(06:18) ACX Grants(06:55) grantmaking.ai(07:30) Lightcone Commons(08:05) Coefficient Giving(08:41) Can money buy taste/dealflow/hustle/trust?(10:00) Appendix --- First published: July 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NFsWzsZSZEPdthCqf/money-taste-dealflow-hustle-trust --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.