As for the idea: Iām glad you wrote this up! The story of B-corporations is interesting (and not the sort of thing Iād have thought was likely before it actually happened), and there may be something we can learn from it. (Itās easier to change corporate law than we thought? There are a lot of founders with strong ethical beliefs?)
But on the other hand, āEA-corporationsā seems to be a much more demanding standard (10% of profit!), for little reward.
Yes, thereās a bit more access to talent, but the number of people applying for EA-type jobs isnāt that high. The largest number Iāve 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 theyād been GiveWell applicantsāand this was for a non-technical position at an organization with a long history. (Iād also guess that many of those 800 werenāt 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 (thatās the number of people whoāve 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 arenāt interested enough in EA to make purchasing decisions based on a companyās 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 donāt 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 aboutākudos 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. Iām 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. Itās also not like ONLY EAs would be marketed to.
Youāve got a leftover HTML tag in your post:
As for the idea: Iām glad you wrote this up! The story of B-corporations is interesting (and not the sort of thing Iād have thought was likely before it actually happened), and there may be something we can learn from it. (Itās easier to change corporate law than we thought? There are a lot of founders with strong ethical beliefs?)
But on the other hand, āEA-corporationsā seems to be a much more demanding standard (10% of profit!), for little reward.
Yes, thereās a bit more access to talent, but the number of people applying for EA-type jobs isnāt that high. The largest number Iāve 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 theyād been GiveWell applicantsāand this was for a non-technical position at an organization with a long history. (Iād also guess that many of those 800 werenāt 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 (thatās the number of people whoāve 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 arenāt interested enough in EA to make purchasing decisions based on a companyās 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 donāt 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 aboutākudos 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. Iām 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. Itās also not like ONLY EAs would be marketed to.