Incubators usually take founders and ideas together, whereas I like the Charity Entrepreneurship approach of splitting up those tasks, and that it would fit the EA community well.
I think there are opportunities for lots of high expected value startups, when taking the approach that the goal is to do as much good as possible, for instance:
1. Proving a market for things that are good for the world, like Tesla’s strategy.
2. Identifying startups that could have high negative value if externalities are ignored, and trying to have an EA aligned startup be a winner in that space.
3. Finding opportunities that may be small or medium in terms of profitability, but have high positive externalities.
The difference between this and any other incubator is that this would not be measuring just profitability as its’ main measure, but also working to measure the externalities of the company’s, and aim to create a portfolio that does the highest good for the world.
My current guess is that there’s not actually that much room for high-impact startups. It’s really, really hard to successfully create a C-corp, let alone optimizing for strategy at the same time. Now that there is significant money available for nonprofit ventures, it seems much less of a draw than it used to.
There are almost no ideas I have for what very useful startups would look like, at least things that I wouldn’t expect could be more effective as nonprofits (at least for the first few years).
Happy to be proven wrong of course! Also happy to provide feedback on specific ideas if people are interested.
I have the reverse intuition here. I think that in general while optimizing profit doesn’t make sense, creating sustainable business models that fund their own growth provides many opportunities for impact that simply taking other peoples money doesn’t.
I don’t know if this is what you are envisioning, but check out Blue Ridge Labs—they do a fellowship where they get techies to apply to an ‘incubation period’ focused on solving a social issue and teams form during the initial discovery phase. Many startups get major funding and are profitable.
Would this basically be an incubator? Would it be for EAs only? (If not, what would distinguish it from other business incubators?)
Incubators usually take founders and ideas together, whereas I like the Charity Entrepreneurship approach of splitting up those tasks, and that it would fit the EA community well.
I think there are opportunities for lots of high expected value startups, when taking the approach that the goal is to do as much good as possible, for instance:
1. Proving a market for things that are good for the world, like Tesla’s strategy.
2. Identifying startups that could have high negative value if externalities are ignored, and trying to have an EA aligned startup be a winner in that space.
3. Finding opportunities that may be small or medium in terms of profitability, but have high positive externalities.
The difference between this and any other incubator is that this would not be measuring just profitability as its’ main measure, but also working to measure the externalities of the company’s, and aim to create a portfolio that does the highest good for the world.
My current guess is that there’s not actually that much room for high-impact startups. It’s really, really hard to successfully create a C-corp, let alone optimizing for strategy at the same time. Now that there is significant money available for nonprofit ventures, it seems much less of a draw than it used to.
There are almost no ideas I have for what very useful startups would look like, at least things that I wouldn’t expect could be more effective as nonprofits (at least for the first few years).
Happy to be proven wrong of course! Also happy to provide feedback on specific ideas if people are interested.
I have the reverse intuition here. I think that in general while optimizing profit doesn’t make sense, creating sustainable business models that fund their own growth provides many opportunities for impact that simply taking other peoples money doesn’t.
I don’t know if this is what you are envisioning, but check out Blue Ridge Labs—they do a fellowship where they get techies to apply to an ‘incubation period’ focused on solving a social issue and teams form during the initial discovery phase. Many startups get major funding and are profitable.
Could be a good format to follow.