As for the idea: I’m glad you wrote this up! The story of B-corporations is interesting (and not the sort of thing I’d have thought was likely before it actually happened), and there may be something we can learn from it. (It’s easier to change corporate law than we thought? There are a lot of founders with strong ethical beliefs?)
But on the other hand, “EA-corporations” seems to be a much more demanding standard (10% of profit!), for little reward.
Yes, there’s a bit more access to talent, but the number of people applying for EA-type jobs isn’t that high. The largest number I’ve ever heard was ~800 for an Open Phil research round, and they achieved this in part by reaching out individually to hundreds of people, including many they knew about because they’d been GiveWell applicants—and this was for a non-technical position at an organization with a long history. (I’d also guess that many of those 800 weren’t involved with the EA community, and just happened to find the job posting somewhere.)
As for point (4): The EA community has about 20,000 people, optimistically (that’s the number of people who’ve liked the EA Global page, and a bit less than the number who have ever opened even one edition of the EA newsletter). Those people are scattered across the globe, and many of them aren’t interested enough in EA to make purchasing decisions based on a company’s alignment. There are ways to make money by providing a useful service to a population this size (e.g. if you run something like a coaching business where you only need a few dozen clients), but for now, I don’t see how that would scale to anything like a real company.
Still, if we ever scale up to have hundreds of thousands of people, this is one direction that could be productive to think about—kudos for posting a proposal to see how people react.
The html tag was a stylistic choice borne out of not being able to immediately find the strike-through formatting haha.
I admit my proposals may not be that viable currently. I’m thinking more in terms of how do you close a feedback loop that can drive significant expansion of EA once a tipping point is reached.
However, there are several companies that have already been started by EAs or EA-adjacents. Wave is mentioned below, and another I believe is Mealsquares, so perhaps a tipping point is not that far away. It’s also not like ONLY EAs would be marketed to.
You’ve got a leftover HTML tag in your post:
As for the idea: I’m glad you wrote this up! The story of B-corporations is interesting (and not the sort of thing I’d have thought was likely before it actually happened), and there may be something we can learn from it. (It’s easier to change corporate law than we thought? There are a lot of founders with strong ethical beliefs?)
But on the other hand, “EA-corporations” seems to be a much more demanding standard (10% of profit!), for little reward.
Yes, there’s a bit more access to talent, but the number of people applying for EA-type jobs isn’t that high. The largest number I’ve ever heard was ~800 for an Open Phil research round, and they achieved this in part by reaching out individually to hundreds of people, including many they knew about because they’d been GiveWell applicants—and this was for a non-technical position at an organization with a long history. (I’d also guess that many of those 800 weren’t involved with the EA community, and just happened to find the job posting somewhere.)
As for point (4): The EA community has about 20,000 people, optimistically (that’s the number of people who’ve liked the EA Global page, and a bit less than the number who have ever opened even one edition of the EA newsletter). Those people are scattered across the globe, and many of them aren’t interested enough in EA to make purchasing decisions based on a company’s alignment. There are ways to make money by providing a useful service to a population this size (e.g. if you run something like a coaching business where you only need a few dozen clients), but for now, I don’t see how that would scale to anything like a real company.
Still, if we ever scale up to have hundreds of thousands of people, this is one direction that could be productive to think about—kudos for posting a proposal to see how people react.
The html tag was a stylistic choice borne out of not being able to immediately find the strike-through formatting haha.
I admit my proposals may not be that viable currently. I’m thinking more in terms of how do you close a feedback loop that can drive significant expansion of EA once a tipping point is reached.
However, there are several companies that have already been started by EAs or EA-adjacents. Wave is mentioned below, and another I believe is Mealsquares, so perhaps a tipping point is not that far away. It’s also not like ONLY EAs would be marketed to.