With this in mind, I generally think the person best-suited to found an organization is the person who feels such strong conviction that the organization ought to exist (and can succeed) that they can hardly imagine working on anything else. This is the kind of person who tends to have a really clear idea of what they’re trying to do and how to make the tradeoffs gestured at above, and who is willing and able to put in a lot of work without much reliable guidance.
So my general approach to entrepreneurship would be: if there’s no organization you have a burning desire to create (or at least, a strong vision for), it’s probably not time to be an entrepreneur. Instead it could make more sense to try for a job in which you’re learning more about parts of the world you’re interested in, becoming more aware of how organizations work, etc. - this could later lead to identifying some “gap in the market” that you’re excited to fill.
This sounds probably right to me, and also aligns with advice I’ve heard elsewhere. On the other hand, it seems to me that Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated charities have had more total success, and more consistently gone at least fairly well, than I might’ve expected or than this general advice would seem to predict.
So I currently feel fairly uncertain about this matter, and I’m fairly open to the hypothesis that that general advice just doesn’t apply if there’s a very well run incubation program (including good ideas for what to found, good vetting, good training, etc.) and a very strong pool of applicants to it, or something.
For roughly this reason, I’m also more optimistic about the Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowship than that general advice might suggest (which also seems in line with Claire Zabel’s view, given the grant that was provided to that project).
All that said, I haven’t looked super closely into any of this, so these are just tentative views.
This sounds probably right to me, and also aligns with advice I’ve heard elsewhere. On the other hand, it seems to me that Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated charities have had more total success, and more consistently gone at least fairly well, than I might’ve expected or than this general advice would seem to predict.
So I currently feel fairly uncertain about this matter, and I’m fairly open to the hypothesis that that general advice just doesn’t apply if there’s a very well run incubation program (including good ideas for what to found, good vetting, good training, etc.) and a very strong pool of applicants to it, or something.
For roughly this reason, I’m also more optimistic about the Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowship than that general advice might suggest (which also seems in line with Claire Zabel’s view, given the grant that was provided to that project).
All that said, I haven’t looked super closely into any of this, so these are just tentative views.