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I agree that the examples we’ve provided aren’t sufficient - on their own - to show that hits-based giving has a high overall expected value. I think the key question, as you say, is how many failures we should expect for each success along those lines, and that’s something we don’t have a good way of figuring out at this point.

A few considerations that I think point in favor of trying hits-based giving, though:

• A “hits-based” approach works for many for-profit investors, whose overall returns are more knowable. To the extent that nonprofit work is different from for-profit world, many of the differences would seem to suggest a higher expected value for nonprofit “hits-based giving” since there is less overall available capital, less “competition” between funders and between projects, and less need to monetize/internalize the benefits of a project.
• My overall sense, from what I know about the history of philanthropy so far (previous blog post; I hope we will have an update this year), is that “hits” are rare but not overwhelmingly rare, and that the hits-based approach looks competitive with a more risk-averse approach.
• If we try the “hits-based approach,” we can look back on it in the future - say, in 20 years - and have a much better basis for saying how promising it looks; this could inform our future work and that of other funders.