Written to a new grantmaker. The first three points are the most important. Focus on opportunities many times your bar. 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 of opportunities, 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…