Patrick McKenzie

We tried to see if we could help a team there or go there, etc.

But we don't see that there's a path to positively impacting the problem there in a way that there's manifestly a path to positive impact here.

And we lost that argument.

We didn't get the money.

The last $100,000 in was my daughter's college education fund.

So, you know, ultimately I'm the CEO, like responsibility for fundraising lies with me.

And so like I thought any number of things about how could I have done that better?

How could I have strategized that, you know,

I did not stop fundraising efforts, but I stopped lighting up new conversations for a number of weeks because I thought, okay, we've got the $2 million that we need to run this till the end of August.

And that's my sort of internal target for the point at which it doesn't quite stop being useful, but it starts like actually being, you know, a question on the margins where it's not a question until the end of August.

So could I have done better?

Probably.

Some of the folks in the broader effective altruist community, I'm not a member, but I've read a lot of stuff that they have written over the years, and I broadly consider them positive.

They are the but-for cause of VaccinateCA, but ask me about that in a moment.

Some EA funders talked to me after my piece about it had come out and said, this is physically painful to read.

We wrote bigger checks with less consideration to projects that had far less intensity of success.

Why didn't you just ask us for money?

And the answer there was twofold.

One, I thought I had high quality introductions and a high quality personal network to people who were likely already going to fund it.

And so I didn't light up additional funding sources.