It sounds based on your description that a fairly straightforward step would be for you to try to set up calls with 1) someone on the Charity Entrepreneurship leadership team, and 2) some of the founders of their incubated charities. This would help you to evaluate whether it would be a good idea for you to apply to the CE program at some point, as well as to refine your sense of which aspects of entrepreneurship you’re particularly suited to (so that if entrepreneurship doesn’t work out—maybe you discover other aspects of it that seem less appealing—you’ll be able to look for the bits you care for in positions with more established organizations). If you came out of those calls convinced that you might want to apply to Charity Entrepreneurship down the road, it seems to me that a logical next step would be to start reading up on potential causes and interventions that you might want your charity to pursue. You could also, I’m sure, do volunteer work for existing, newly launched CE charities, where given that most of them only have two staff, you’d probably be given a fair amount of responsibility and would be able to develop useful insights into the entrepreneurial process. For you, the value of information from doing that seems like it might be quite high.
I’m not convinced charity entrepreneurship is for me, partly because I’m unsure whether it’s the most impactful thing I could do, but I think it would be great to get a better understanding of what they are doing.
The idea of volunteering with a newly launched CE charity is a very good one and not something I had thought of. Thank you!
Happy to help! Another thing that strikes me is that in my experience (which is in the U.S.), running an academic research team at a university (i.e., being the principal investigator on the team’s grants) seems to have a lot in common with running a startup (you have a lot of autonomy/flexibility in how you spend your time; your efficacy is largely determined by how good you are at coordinating other people’s efforts and setting their priorities for them; you spend a lot of time coordinating with external stakeholders and pitching your value-add; you have authority over your organization’s general direction; etc.). This seems relevant because I think a lot of the top university economics research groups in the U.S. have a pretty substantial impact on policy (e.g., consider Opportunity Insights), and the same may well be true in the U.K. It seems to me that other avenues toward impacting policy (e.g., working in the government or for major, established advocacy organizations) are considerably less entrepreneurial in nature. Of course, you could also found your own advocacy organization to push for policy change, but 1) I think it’s generally easier to get funding for research than for work along these lines (especially as a newcomer), in part because the advocacy space is already so crowded, and 2) founding an advocacy organization seems like the kind of thing one might do through Charity Entrepreneurship, which you seem less excited about. If you’re mainly attracted to entrepreneurship by tight feedback loops, however, academia is probably the wrong way to go, as it definitely does not have those.
Thank you for this idea. I should definitely think more about leading a research team.
I really don’t mean to say that I’m unenthusiastic about Charity Entrepreneurship; I’m just currently unsure whether it’s the very best thing to do. There are a lot of things that would very much appeal to me about CE, so I want to be sure not to jump into it too fast. (I think a lot depends on one’s moral position about the importance and tractability of shaping the long-term future, and this is something that I’m planning to spend time reading and thinking about during my time out.)
That makes perfect sense! I agree that CE probably isn’t the best fit for people most interested in doing EA work to mitigate existential risks. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you’d ever like to talk any of this through at greater length, but otherwise, it seems to me like you’re approaching these decisions in a very sensible way.
It sounds based on your description that a fairly straightforward step would be for you to try to set up calls with 1) someone on the Charity Entrepreneurship leadership team, and 2) some of the founders of their incubated charities. This would help you to evaluate whether it would be a good idea for you to apply to the CE program at some point, as well as to refine your sense of which aspects of entrepreneurship you’re particularly suited to (so that if entrepreneurship doesn’t work out—maybe you discover other aspects of it that seem less appealing—you’ll be able to look for the bits you care for in positions with more established organizations). If you came out of those calls convinced that you might want to apply to Charity Entrepreneurship down the road, it seems to me that a logical next step would be to start reading up on potential causes and interventions that you might want your charity to pursue. You could also, I’m sure, do volunteer work for existing, newly launched CE charities, where given that most of them only have two staff, you’d probably be given a fair amount of responsibility and would be able to develop useful insights into the entrepreneurial process. For you, the value of information from doing that seems like it might be quite high.
Thank you very much for these suggestions.
I’m not convinced charity entrepreneurship is for me, partly because I’m unsure whether it’s the most impactful thing I could do, but I think it would be great to get a better understanding of what they are doing.
The idea of volunteering with a newly launched CE charity is a very good one and not something I had thought of. Thank you!
Happy to help! Another thing that strikes me is that in my experience (which is in the U.S.), running an academic research team at a university (i.e., being the principal investigator on the team’s grants) seems to have a lot in common with running a startup (you have a lot of autonomy/flexibility in how you spend your time; your efficacy is largely determined by how good you are at coordinating other people’s efforts and setting their priorities for them; you spend a lot of time coordinating with external stakeholders and pitching your value-add; you have authority over your organization’s general direction; etc.). This seems relevant because I think a lot of the top university economics research groups in the U.S. have a pretty substantial impact on policy (e.g., consider Opportunity Insights), and the same may well be true in the U.K. It seems to me that other avenues toward impacting policy (e.g., working in the government or for major, established advocacy organizations) are considerably less entrepreneurial in nature. Of course, you could also found your own advocacy organization to push for policy change, but 1) I think it’s generally easier to get funding for research than for work along these lines (especially as a newcomer), in part because the advocacy space is already so crowded, and 2) founding an advocacy organization seems like the kind of thing one might do through Charity Entrepreneurship, which you seem less excited about. If you’re mainly attracted to entrepreneurship by tight feedback loops, however, academia is probably the wrong way to go, as it definitely does not have those.
Thank you for this idea. I should definitely think more about leading a research team.
I really don’t mean to say that I’m unenthusiastic about Charity Entrepreneurship; I’m just currently unsure whether it’s the very best thing to do. There are a lot of things that would very much appeal to me about CE, so I want to be sure not to jump into it too fast. (I think a lot depends on one’s moral position about the importance and tractability of shaping the long-term future, and this is something that I’m planning to spend time reading and thinking about during my time out.)
That makes perfect sense! I agree that CE probably isn’t the best fit for people most interested in doing EA work to mitigate existential risks. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you’d ever like to talk any of this through at greater length, but otherwise, it seems to me like you’re approaching these decisions in a very sensible way.