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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.
Super excited to see more interest in this space, and people starting things in general, kudos!
Have you talked with the people working on Mind Ease and/or Canopie? (As far as I understand, Canopie was originally a Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charity, then became a for-profit).
Also might be interesting to talk with the people that worked on hippo.
Did you consider applying to Charity Entrepreneurship career coaching?
Curious about what resource specifically you have in mind!
Yep, and I might still do that, but I suspect what I have in mind isn’t a good fit for the reasons mentioned in the post.
I think resources for family/best friends/employers of mentally ill folks is a neglected space. You have a group of people who are extremely incentivised to help (maybe employers less so), have the opportunity for a high marginal impact, but who in my experience usually have no idea what they’re doing.
I’m also attracted to potential knock-on benefits from something like this to how mental health is discussed more generally, which I’d currently characterize as at best well-intentioned but pretty poor (and far worse than that in some areas of the world).
Here’s something with a different focus (training a more general ‘first line of defence’ support network at a university), but that shares some features with what I have in mind: https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/welfare/peersupport .
Thanks for the concrete company recommendations!
The career coaching seems different from the incubation program, as far as I can tell your points apply mostly to the latter, right?
I had not noticed that those aren’t the same, thank you for correcting me! And I agree that applying to it makes a lot more sense than applying to the incubation program.
That sounds awesome!
Any thought about the process of coming up with intervention ideas?
I think there is a huge gap between the backed researched interventions to the fact there is a lack of solutions and a lot of suffering.
It seems to me that we need to invent and test new solutions. Coming up with them is challenging :)
I suspect getting more people with diverse experiences/ideas interested in helping is a good approach. Then just let them do their thing.
I wrote a short piece here basically trying to argue EA should do more to diversify its skillpool as others have ‘unseen data’ that could help tackle important problems: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MpYPCq9dW8wovYpRY/ea-undervalues-unseen-data .
tl;dr: I think more people == more data && more data == better ideas.