The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Small Grants

A collection of life-changing stories.

I’m often asked a derivative of the same question: “But, really, what can you accomplish with a small grant?”

It comes with the territory. Our non-profit, the Experiment Foundation, uses a peer-discovery model to award small, fast grants for scientific research. We’re using “science scouts” to give out lots of grants. The efficacy question often comes from experienced program officers—folks who’ve been in philanthropy or science funding at the federal level—who are used to bigger budgets.

There’s another common response, too, which often comes from a scientist, inventor, or entrepreneur—they tell me a story.

When I explain our funding model to this audience, I’ve opened the door for them to tell me about the person who—at some critical junction in their life—made a bet on them with an early grant, investment, or job. They understand what we’re doing because they lived it. I lived it.

It turns out, the best way to respond to the skeptic is with stories—many of them, and ideally in one place. So I thought I’d start a list.

Below are a few of my favorite small grant stories. If you have one, please send it or leave it in the comments. Small is, of course, relative.

The goal is to end the skeptical response once and for all. Then we can move on to the important—and unresolved—question: how to effectively scale small grant programs?

I.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

The informal predecessor of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was the “suicide club”, consisting of California Institute of Technology (CalTech) graduate student Frank Molina as well as amateurs Jack Parsons and Ed Forman. They garnered the nickname for their explosive rocketry tests on and around the CalTech campus. 

Rocketry was fringe science at the time, in the 1930s. Robert Goddard was conducting early tests, and the German rocketeers were just getting going, but the field was not taken seriously. As Theodore Von Karman explained, “the literature of rocketry was more or less regarded as part of science fiction.”

Von Karman, a CalTech professor at the time, gave the suicide club a boost anyway. He admired the persistence and enthusiasm of the young group, but he was mostly intrigued by their unique combination of skills. Parsons and Foreman didn’t attend college, but each had developed a self-taught expertise and manual literacy that was critical for building rockets—Parsons the chemist and Forman the mechanic. Molina added an academic rigor to the whole operation. 

Von Karman gave them tacit approval by allowing the use of his laboratory in off hours but required they raise their own funds. And money became a constant problem for the nascent project. The group was forced to scavenge parts from junkyards and save up for anything critical. In The Wind and Beyond, Von Karman tells a story about their low-budget beginnings: 

Actually, the only funds the group received came one day in 1937 from an unexpected source. A student named Weld Arnold was so impressed with the possibilities of rocketeering that he offered to donate a thousand dollars if he would be allowed to act as photographer for the group. When Malina agreed he brought the first five hundred dollars in bills wrapped in a newspaper.

The laboratory privileges ended up being short-lived after explosions frustrated neighboring scientists. The group moved out to the desert—the Arroyo Seco, just outside Pasadena—to continue their testing far away from meddling administrators. By 1938, they had amassed a handful of results that seemed promising, like characterizing the thermodynamics of rocket motors. One of Malina’s papers was even accepted by the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences. However, industry and government still showed little interest in the group or the potential of rockets, except for one person.

The head of the Army Air Corp, Hap Arnold, was intrigued by the potential of using rockets to assist the takeoffs of large military aircraft on short runways, the type one might find in the South Pacific. He offered Von Karman and the team a $1,000 contract to start work investigating the problem. The second contract was for $10,000 and set up a consequential field trial for rocket-powered aircraft. 

In August 1941, Lieutenant Homer Boushey was strapped into one of Parson’s explosive airplanes. Everyone was nervous. Von Karman tells the story: 

Boushey revved up the motor and let off the brakes. As the plane rolled down the field and gathered momentum, he kicked the ignition switch. Smoke billowed out as the rockets ignited. The plane shot off the ground as if released from a slingshot. None of us had ever seen a plane climb at such a steep angle. Boushey leveled out, circled the field, and returned in a few minutes. When he stepped out of the plane, he was grinning broadly. And so were we.

That contract, as well as the ensuing tests, turned out to be foundational for both JPL and Aerojet, the commercial spinout. 

Malina, Parsons, and Von Karman would all take their place in the history books of technology, making their patrons—the aspiring photographer and the prescient Army chief—the unlikely benefactors of American rocketry.

Credit: NASA JPL

II.
The Submarine

The inventor of the submarine, John P. Holland, had a difficult time getting anyone to underwrite his underwater dreams. 

He tried to get funding from the United States Navy in 1875, but they didn’t think the design would work. Instead, he found an unlikely benefactor in an Irish revolutionary group, the Fenians. The expat group had formed in the United States with a mission to fight back against British rule in Ireland. Holland presented his plans and submarine designs—a far-out science fiction idea at the time—to the leadership. They gave him $4,000 to pursue it, paid out of the “skirmishing fund”  which was a collection of donations the Fenians had gathered from other Irish immigrants to help fight London. 

John P. Holland

III.
mRNA Vaccines

Katalin Karikó, the Nobel-winning hero of science who discovered the potential for mRNA vaccines, had a well-publicized hard time in academic science: denied tenure, demoted, and overlooked for grants. Her story has become a symbol of curiosity and perseverance.

In her autobiography, Breaking Through, she names names. She calls out the bureaucrats and colleagues who withheld opportunity and put up barriers. It doesn’t come across as bitter—just honest—because Karikó also highlights the people who did help. The obvious protagonist is her colleague Drew Weissman, who she describes as her “lock-and-key” scientific partner. Another was a colleague at Penn, David Langer. When shifting leadership winds threatened her position, Langer went to the head of the neurosurgery department and demanded Karikó stay employed with the team. Karikó explains:

“Hiring me, he insisted to Eugene Flamm, was exactly what the place needed to be great. David planned to partner with me on research. Shoulder to shoulder. Indefinitely. And we could do that only if I became a member of the neurosurgery department.”

The story is a good reminder that full-throttled belief can be as valuable as money. Delivered together, even the smallest grant can become a powerful force for forward momentum. Karikó again:

“What was unusual, though, was how deeply David believed in the work. Not only had he managed to secure a small grant—about $25,000, if I recall correctly—for our work, he’s also delivered a paper at a conference in Arizona: “Bypassing the Nucleus: mRNA as Gene Therapy.” I guess it’s fair to say that David wasn’t merely a believer in mRNA—he’d become an mRNA evangelist.”

IV.
Artificial Intelligence

The term “artificial intelligence” was coined on a grant proposal. 

The ideas and concepts around thinking machines were prevalent in the early 1950s, but a small group of practitioners and academics—including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon—forced the issue by proposing a summer of research study focused on the topic. They approached the Rockefeller Foundation with “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” which outlined their research agendas and requested funds for stipends and travel. Their all-in budget was $13,500.

The summer program became legendary—the conversations and discussions were lively and the visiting guests were frequent. 

The field of artificial intelligence was born over those eight weeks.

Photo Credit: Minsky Family

V.
Y Combinator*

The original Y Combinator investments were $20,000. It’s a relatively small number now, but it was a small number back then, too.  Paul Graham and his co-founders, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, had received a small bit of funding themselves. The number was a function of their experience of what early money plus good advice was worth. Graham explains: 

We modelled YC on the seed funding we ourselves had taken when we started Viaweb. We started Viaweb with $10k we got from our friend Julian Weber, the husband of Idelle Weber, whose painting class I took as a grad student at Harvard. Julian knew about business, but you would not describe him as a suit. Among other things he'd been president of the National Lampoon. He was also a lawyer, and got all our paperwork set up properly. In return for $10k, getting us set up as a company, teaching us what business was about, and remaining calm in times of crisis, Julian got 10% of Viaweb. I remember thinking once what a good deal Julian got. And then a second later I realized that without Julian, Viaweb would never have made it. So even though it was a good deal for him, it was a good deal for us too. That's why I knew there was room for something like Y Combinator.

*Not a grant obviously, but worth including for the lessons.

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Hopefully, this collection of stories sparks a memory or anecdote of your own. Again, please send it my way. I’d love to hear it.

I’ll add a Part II in a future post.