In the startup world, it’s common to pivot your business model because it’s difficult to be on the right path on the first try. The author of Running Lean suggests spending the initial phase of your startup attempting to disqualify your idea so that you can iterate into a better one. Many of the world’s largest companies today started as different products. For example, Youtube started as a dating site, and Twitter started as a podcasting site.
Let’s say you’re a charity founder that realizes what you initially fundraised for isn’t going to work. What do you do? You could return the funds, which could be the right yet painful thing to do. On the other hand, you could keep the funds and use them for some other high-impact opportunity. Depending on the type and stage of the grant, some funders would not be okay with this. So, charities could be incentivized not to search for info that disqualifies their mission and end up working on lower EV opportunities than if they were encouraged to experiment and invalidate ideas.
So, which EA organizations originally had different missions than they do now? Which pivots failed while others were successful?
Ought has pivoted ~twice: from pure research on factored cognition to forecasting tools to an AI research assistant.
I don’t know if you’d count this as a “pivot,” but: Why Anima International suspended the campaign to end live fish sales in Poland
I’m just flagging that I’ve found the opposite to be true of the EA funders I have worked with—I’ve been explicitly told by funders that they hope we do find places to pivot, or at least adapt to what we find. And most projects I’ve worked on have done so, to a greater or lesser degree.
Interesting, that updates me! I’ve added more qualifiers to that point.
In an update on Sage introducing quantifiedintuitions.org, we described a pivot we made after a few months: