I completely agree and have been thinking about many of the same things. Many of the properties that make for-profit startups such a source of innovation (razor focus, fast decision-making, competition, rapid iteration) could also apply to nonprofit startups aiming to become highly effective. Here’s a bit of a challenge that I see in this:
The EA community has high standards of evidence for effective interventions.
Interventions that now have the highly effective label probably had high R&D costs to begin with, but now their unit costs are low.
It’s going to be very hard to achieve the highly effective benchmark when you’re just getting started (building an intervention, piloting it, evaluating it).
Central to the startup approach is the idea that you continuously and rapidly improve your intervention—iterating towards becoming highly effective.
Therefore, funders need to accept a high level of initial risk and be prepared to fund for some time before the highly effective label can be achieved.
To extend your analogy to for-profit startups further, it seems there’s a need for a VC-like ecosystem, with multiple rounds of funding in escalating amounts and milestones based on progress towards highly cost-effective benchmarks.
Also agreed that Charity Entrepreneurship is leading in this space. :)
Therefore, funders need to accept a high level of initial risk and be prepared to fund for some time before the highly effective label can be achieved.
Yep, I agree that this is the rub. There’s been a lot of chat about megaprojects recently though (e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckcoSe3CS2n3BW3aT/), and building an ecosystem to fund high risk, high return projects of this sort could be a good candidate for that.
Thanks for the great post!
I completely agree and have been thinking about many of the same things. Many of the properties that make for-profit startups such a source of innovation (razor focus, fast decision-making, competition, rapid iteration) could also apply to nonprofit startups aiming to become highly effective. Here’s a bit of a challenge that I see in this:
The EA community has high standards of evidence for effective interventions.
Interventions that now have the highly effective label probably had high R&D costs to begin with, but now their unit costs are low.
It’s going to be very hard to achieve the highly effective benchmark when you’re just getting started (building an intervention, piloting it, evaluating it).
Central to the startup approach is the idea that you continuously and rapidly improve your intervention—iterating towards becoming highly effective.
Therefore, funders need to accept a high level of initial risk and be prepared to fund for some time before the highly effective label can be achieved.
To extend your analogy to for-profit startups further, it seems there’s a need for a VC-like ecosystem, with multiple rounds of funding in escalating amounts and milestones based on progress towards highly cost-effective benchmarks.
Also agreed that Charity Entrepreneurship is leading in this space. :)
Yep, I agree that this is the rub. There’s been a lot of chat about megaprojects recently though (e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckcoSe3CS2n3BW3aT/), and building an ecosystem to fund high risk, high return projects of this sort could be a good candidate for that.