# Fast Grants **Draft profile.** Emergency COVID-19 research-funding program launched in **April 2020** by **[[Tyler Cowen]]**, **[[Patrick Collison]]**, and **Patrick Hsu**, administered through the **[[Mercatus Center]]** at George Mason University. Designed as a deliberate experiment in **fast, low-friction science funding** — applications completed in under 30 minutes, decisions delivered within 48 hours, money out the door within days. Deployed roughly **$50M** in grants during the pandemic. **The proof-of-concept that became the institutional template for Progress Studies metascience experiments**, directly leading to the founding of **[[Arc Institute]]** in December 2021. ## Why It Existed In early 2020, COVID-19 was killing thousands of people per week while the standard NIH/NSF grant cycle took **months to years** to deploy research funding. Cowen and Collison argued that the speed of the funding bureaucracy was itself a public-health crisis — and that a privately-funded emergency program could prove faster, low-friction grantmaking actually worked. Fast Grants was designed as a **demonstration project** in metascience. The thesis: *if we can deploy $50M to good scientists in days rather than months, we will both (a) help fight the pandemic and (b) prove that the standard funding apparatus is needlessly slow.* ## How It Worked - **30-minute application.** Single-page form. Researchers wrote what they wanted to do and why it mattered. - **48-hour decisions.** A small reviewer panel (drawn from working scientists) committed to turning around yes/no decisions within two days. - **Days-to-disbursement.** Once approved, funds were wired immediately rather than waiting on multi-month NIH paperwork. - **Mercatus Center as fiscal sponsor.** Cowen's institutional home at GMU provided the 501(c)(3) infrastructure to receive donations and disburse grants. - **Open application.** Any U.S. academic researcher working on COVID-relevant questions could apply. ## Who Funded It The donor list is one of the more KB-relevant data points on Fast Grants — it is essentially a **who's-who of Silicon Valley capital with TESCREAL-adjacent inclinations**: - **[[Patrick Collison]]** and **[[John Collison]]** (Stripe co-founders) — personal donations - **[[Arnold Ventures]]** (Laura and John Arnold) - **The [[Audacious Project]]** (TED's mega-donation platform) - **Chan Zuckerberg Initiative** - **Crankstart Foundation** ([[Michael Moritz]]'s philanthropy) - **[[Jack Dorsey]]** - **Kim and Scott Farquhar** (Atlassian) - **Paul Graham** ([[Y Combinator]]) - **[[Reid Hoffman]]** - **[[Yuri Milner]]** and Julia Milner - **Tobias Lütke** (Shopify) - **Fiona McKean** (Lütke's spouse) Note the heavy overlap with the **[[California Forever]]** and **Progress Studies** funder networks — Moritz, Hoffman, Collison brothers all appear across both. ## What It Funded Roughly **260 grants** to scientists working on: - **Rapid diagnostics** — Saliva-based COVID testing (the SalivaDirect protocol that became a U.S. standard came partly out of Fast Grants funding to Yale) - **Therapeutics** — Drug repurposing, novel antiviral development - **Vaccines** — Adjuvant research, delivery mechanisms - **Epidemiology** — Modeling, contact tracing, wastewater surveillance - **Long COVID** — Some of the earliest funded work on what became a major chronic condition A subsequent **Nature** evaluation and an internal *Fast Grants* retrospective both reported high researcher satisfaction with the speed-and-flexibility model. ## Why It Matters in This KB ### 1. It is the founding proof-of-concept for Progress Studies metascience Everything **[[Institute for Progress]]** advocates for on R&D-funding reform, everything **[[Roots of Progress]]** writes about institutional design, and everything **[[Arc Institute]]** instantiates as a permanent biomedical research model — **all of it cites Fast Grants as the existence proof.** Fast Grants is the empirical anchor the movement points to when arguing that the standard funding apparatus is broken. ### 2. It launched the [[Arc Institute]] founding team The collaboration between **[[Patrick Collison]]**, **Patrick Hsu**, and (via subsequent introduction) **[[Silvana Konermann]]** during Fast Grants is what produced [[Arc Institute]] in December 2021. The personnel pipeline is direct: pandemic emergency → metascience proof-of-concept → permanent $650M biomedical research institution. ### 3. It is the cleanest data point on Silicon Valley metascience capital flow The donor list — Stripe-orbit, [[Y Combinator]]-orbit, [[Reid Hoffman]]/[[Founders Fund]]-orbit, [[Yuri Milner]]/[[DST Global]]-orbit, CZI — is **the financial signature of the Progress Studies movement made visible**. The same names recur on [[California Forever]], [[Arc Institute]], and adjacent metascience projects. ### 4. It is TESCREAL-adjacent without TESCREAL branding Like the broader [[Progress Studies]] movement, Fast Grants was framed in technocratic, apolitical, "let scientists work faster" language. The underlying politics — that private capital should route around public funding institutions, that the technocratic-elite donor class is better positioned than NIH bureaucrats to allocate research dollars — is the same Progress Studies / [[Extropianism]]-descended worldview the rest of this KB documents. ## Critiques - **The *Chronicle of Philanthropy* and other outlets** questioned whether tech-billionaire-directed science funding undermined peer-review legitimacy or simply complemented it. - **Not all scientists approved.** Some argued the fast-and-flexible model worked precisely because it was small and emergency-scoped — and would degrade if scaled or made permanent. - **Selection effects.** Fast Grants disproportionately funded researchers in the network of the donors and reviewers — defensible during an emergency, more concerning as a model. - **The "private capital fixes broken public institutions" framing** elides that much of the U.S. biomedical research apparatus is privately captured already (pharma, NIH grant politics, academic publishing). ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Pull the full grant list and KB-relevant grantees (saliva test, long COVID early work) - Add a Patrick Hsu [[Patrick Hsu]] - Document the specific Fast Grants → Arc Institute personnel pipeline - Detail the Nature evaluation findings and the *Future* (a16z publication) internal retrospective - Map donor overlap with [[California Forever]] / [[Arc Institute]] / [[Roots of Progress]] - Note whether Fast Grants infrastructure was reactivated for any subsequent emergency (mpox, H5N1, etc.) ## See Also - [[Tyler Cowen]] — Co-founder - [[Patrick Collison]] — Co-founder - [[Patrick Hsu]] — Co-founder - [[Mercatus Center]] — Fiscal sponsor / institutional home - [[Arc Institute]] — Direct institutional successor - [[Progress Studies]] — The movement Fast Grants proved out - [[Roots of Progress]] — Sister institution - [[Institute for Progress]] — Policy-advocacy successor - [[Reid Hoffman]] — Donor - [[John Collison]] — Donor - [[Yuri Milner]] — Donor - [[Chan Zuckerberg Initiative]] — Donor - [[Open Philanthropy]] — Adjacent metascience funder - [[TESCREAL]] — Adjacent ideological bundle