I find this post interesting, and probably largely agree with many of your points, but they don’t fully align with my experience or intuitions as a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I broadly agree with the Scalability and Capital Counterfactuals sections, though I think some of your concerns can be mitigated by the reality of planning and running a non-profit. Many funders at scale are not necessarily value-aligned (to EAs), and many non-profit founders (at least when going through the CE incubation program) start out with a clear view of possible endgames and payers at scale—these don´t assume that growing the organisation´s budget and staff as much as possible is the goal, and they don´t always assume that the charity will bear all costs for the entirety of the program forever.
I found the Learning Potential section so vague that my initial (defensive, sure) gut reaction was that it felt like motivated reasoning. While I don´t actually believe this was your intent, in my experience this applies to founding a non profit to a very large extent:
People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connections, and gaining legible experience, which opens up interesting opportunities to do high-impact work.
I don´t have any way to evaluate which side is
less fast-paced and interesting.
Lastly, I find it hard to disentangle what the average for-profit and what the average non-profit is. For example, while the Standards argument might apply to a majority of all non-profits, in my (biased) opinion it is not representative of the average CE-incubated charity. Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
There are strong reasons to believe that profitable companies are producing goods or services that people want (which is not to say they are morally worthwhile). In most cases, the end user will simply not pay if the service they provide is bad. This just isn’t true in non-profits. I don’t think being an EA changes the calculus very much on the for-profit side, but importantly for profits have a strong kill function.
I find this post interesting, and probably largely agree with many of your points, but they don’t fully align with my experience or intuitions as a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I broadly agree with the Scalability and Capital Counterfactuals sections, though I think some of your concerns can be mitigated by the reality of planning and running a non-profit. Many funders at scale are not necessarily value-aligned (to EAs), and many non-profit founders (at least when going through the CE incubation program) start out with a clear view of possible endgames and payers at scale—these don´t assume that growing the organisation´s budget and staff as much as possible is the goal, and they don´t always assume that the charity will bear all costs for the entirety of the program forever.
I found the Learning Potential section so vague that my initial (defensive, sure) gut reaction was that it felt like motivated reasoning. While I don´t actually believe this was your intent, in my experience this applies to founding a non profit to a very large extent:
I don´t have any way to evaluate which side is
Lastly, I find it hard to disentangle what the average for-profit and what the average non-profit is. For example, while the Standards argument might apply to a majority of all non-profits, in my (biased) opinion it is not representative of the average CE-incubated charity. Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
There are strong reasons to believe that profitable companies are producing goods or services that people want (which is not to say they are morally worthwhile). In most cases, the end user will simply not pay if the service they provide is bad. This just isn’t true in non-profits. I don’t think being an EA changes the calculus very much on the for-profit side, but importantly for profits have a strong kill function.