Hi, this is a ruthless comment because you said you spent a lot of time on this.
Note that no one likes me and I am not in any EA org or anything.
Feedback
Note the feedback you got here:
“Startups are pretty competitive. For me to put money into a business venture, I’d want quite a bit of faith that the team is very strong. This would be pretty high bar. From looking at this, it’s not clear to me promising the team is at this point.” source here
I don’t think the EA community is uniquely suited to answer your question. Whether this is a great startup idea or not is difficult for me to figure out and I think speaking to people in the startup and venture-capital community will get you better answers. source here
Frankly, these people are being nice. My remix/take on the above is:
There’s a high bar for average startups trying to get money in the real world. We’re not sure if EAs should fund average startups (that don’t have some theory of change or direct externality), maybe even if they are lead by aligned EAs. In this case, what you’re presenting doesn’t indicate it meets the bar of an average startup.
EAs should definitely not fund below-average startups that are for-profit because this would just fund lemons and things would runaway with unaligned behavior.
Pitch isn’t good and suggests underlying business is unpromising
Your “pitch” is really bad, even for a for-profit. It literally consists of saying that if you’re very very successful, you will have lots of money to donate to EA.
This seems like an argument someone would say about any endeavor, profit or non-profit, so there’s no content.
It is a form of 1% fallacy, but even more extreme, literally , as you are going through 0.01% scenarios, in addition to relying on network effects (which are both hit and miss, and can rationalize almost any behavior).
This is bad because it suggests the absence of any advisor reviewing this, or experience presenting. Which while not substantive, frankly is a large part of a startup.
In my opinion, when pitching or under high incentives to demonstrate latent traits that you could just list off, “absence of evidence is also evidence of absence”. For example: if you had connections with previous online marketplaces, or even just a reasonable exit, or even reasonable online marketplace experience, you could have mentioned it.
Like, every business, non-profit or project, at least has one or more “hypotheses” or “angles” or “unfair advantages” they try to argue they have.
More:
There’s more subtle/ideological/opinionated points: of all the things that might be influenced by “motivated reasoning”, it seems like becoming a powerful CEO “for altruism”, is like the canonical pattern.
So someone coming in and asking to make them CEO of a powerful online business empire, without a strong past or maybe contract or limit on their profit, can make many people roll their eyes.
As a meta point, it’s unclear if this comment is the same reasoning as what EA funds believes (but maybe some of the above reasoning applies?). My guess is that a difference is that they focus on non-profit, directly (or meta directly) impactful projects. Making a for-profit is possible, but they have a tighter focus.
Thanks for responding and I’m sure people like you, at least I do for being ruthless, that honestly helps a lot so thank you!
I should start by clarifying that the EA forum post is not the proposal that we put many hours in, that was probably written in about 30 minutes and checked by one EA, and it’s not meant to be a full pitch but just an intro to what we do. We did get feedback on that (and I got a lot more later at EAG, even from some of the grantmakers that rejected us) but when I refer to getting no feedback I mean the rejections from grants with no feedback.
About your remix/take on the EA forum, I agree that EA shouldn’t fund average startups and/or for-profits (I don’t consider our venture a for-profit though). I can’t be an unbiased judge on whether we’re average or below/above average, but I can send you the pitch deck and answer any questions/concerns you might have and then you can be the judge. You also mention previous experience, advisor reviews, hypotheses and unfair advantages, and those are all in the pitch. I’m now thinking it might have been a mistake to do a quick write up for feedback and thoughts, maybe a thorough one would have been better because I think I can address most of the concerns that you and others have but wanted to avoid a 10 page post outlining all of the questions and criticisms and how we’re addressing them.
Can I send you the deck and relay your questions in a quick call? I learn the most from the harshest critics and you seem to be one.
I think it’s worth mentioning the recent paper that Brad West wrote on this subject. It explains very well why we exist and what we’re trying to do, much better than my quick and dirty writeup. Happy to hear any feedback on that!
Hi, this is a ruthless comment because you said you spent a lot of time on this.
Note that no one likes me and I am not in any EA org or anything.
Feedback
Note the feedback you got here:
“Startups are pretty competitive. For me to put money into a business venture, I’d want quite a bit of faith that the team is very strong. This would be pretty high bar. From looking at this, it’s not clear to me promising the team is at this point.” source here
I don’t think the EA community is uniquely suited to answer your question. Whether this is a great startup idea or not is difficult for me to figure out and I think speaking to people in the startup and venture-capital community will get you better answers. source here
Frankly, these people are being nice. My remix/take on the above is:
There’s a high bar for average startups trying to get money in the real world. We’re not sure if EAs should fund average startups (that don’t have some theory of change or direct externality), maybe even if they are lead by aligned EAs. In this case, what you’re presenting doesn’t indicate it meets the bar of an average startup.
EAs should definitely not fund below-average startups that are for-profit because this would just fund lemons and things would runaway with unaligned behavior.
Pitch isn’t good and suggests underlying business is unpromising
Your “pitch” is really bad, even for a for-profit. It literally consists of saying that if you’re very very successful, you will have lots of money to donate to EA.
This seems like an argument someone would say about any endeavor, profit or non-profit, so there’s no content.
It is a form of 1% fallacy, but even more extreme, literally , as you are going through 0.01% scenarios, in addition to relying on network effects (which are both hit and miss, and can rationalize almost any behavior).
This is bad because it suggests the absence of any advisor reviewing this, or experience presenting. Which while not substantive, frankly is a large part of a startup.
In my opinion, when pitching or under high incentives to demonstrate latent traits that you could just list off, “absence of evidence is also evidence of absence”. For example: if you had connections with previous online marketplaces, or even just a reasonable exit, or even reasonable online marketplace experience, you could have mentioned it.
Like, every business, non-profit or project, at least has one or more “hypotheses” or “angles” or “unfair advantages” they try to argue they have.
More:
There’s more subtle/ideological/opinionated points: of all the things that might be influenced by “motivated reasoning”, it seems like becoming a powerful CEO “for altruism”, is like the canonical pattern.
So someone coming in and asking to make them CEO of a powerful online business empire, without a strong past or maybe contract or limit on their profit, can make many people roll their eyes.
As a meta point, it’s unclear if this comment is the same reasoning as what EA funds believes (but maybe some of the above reasoning applies?). My guess is that a difference is that they focus on non-profit, directly (or meta directly) impactful projects. Making a for-profit is possible, but they have a tighter focus.
Hi Charles,
Thanks for responding and I’m sure people like you, at least I do for being ruthless, that honestly helps a lot so thank you!
I should start by clarifying that the EA forum post is not the proposal that we put many hours in, that was probably written in about 30 minutes and checked by one EA, and it’s not meant to be a full pitch but just an intro to what we do. We did get feedback on that (and I got a lot more later at EAG, even from some of the grantmakers that rejected us) but when I refer to getting no feedback I mean the rejections from grants with no feedback.
About your remix/take on the EA forum, I agree that EA shouldn’t fund average startups and/or for-profits (I don’t consider our venture a for-profit though). I can’t be an unbiased judge on whether we’re average or below/above average, but I can send you the pitch deck and answer any questions/concerns you might have and then you can be the judge. You also mention previous experience, advisor reviews, hypotheses and unfair advantages, and those are all in the pitch. I’m now thinking it might have been a mistake to do a quick write up for feedback and thoughts, maybe a thorough one would have been better because I think I can address most of the concerns that you and others have but wanted to avoid a 10 page post outlining all of the questions and criticisms and how we’re addressing them.
Can I send you the deck and relay your questions in a quick call? I learn the most from the harshest critics and you seem to be one.
I think it’s worth mentioning the recent paper that Brad West wrote on this subject. It explains very well why we exist and what we’re trying to do, much better than my quick and dirty writeup. Happy to hear any feedback on that!