"Some things I noticed while LARPing as a grantmaker" by Zach Stein-Perlman

Written to a new grantmaker.

• Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating between opportunities around your bar. If you find/create a new opportunity to donate $1M at 10x your bar (and cause it to get $1M, which would otherwise be donated to a 1x thing), you generate $9M of value (at your bar).[1] If you cause a $1M at 1.5x opportunity to get funded or a $1M at 0.5x opportunity to not get funded, you generate $500K of value. The former is 18 times as good.
• • You should probably be like I do research to figure out what projects should exist, then make them exist rather than I evaluate the applications that come to me. That said, most great ideas come from your network, not from your personal brainstorming.
  • In some buckets, the low-hanging fruit will be plucked. In others, nobody's on the ball and amazing opportunities get dropped. If you're working in a high-value bucket where nobody's on the ball, tons of alpha is on the table. (Assuming enough donors or grantmakers will listen to you to fund your best stuff.)
  • I talk about "10x opportunities" and "1x opportunities" for simplicity here. It [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 23rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CzoiqGzpShprcv2Jd/some-things-i-noticed-while-larping-as-a-grantmaker

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.