I mostly agree with this. I wasn’t really aiming to give a balanced take here on whether people should start for-profit instead of nonprofit—I just meant to list a few (imo) underrated by EAs features of for-profits.
I’m more confused about the poor personal fit point. I suspect that many EAs are also a bad fit (at least initially) for starting nonprofits, but the EA ecosystem makes it somewhat easier for nonprofits to survive (which imo is probably a good thing overall).
The version of your claim I most agree with is: * An EAs comparative advantage is identifying the most overlooked and big deal moral considerations, and access to minimal viable nonprofit capital * This selects for highly neglected things where you might be able to have an impact at a small scale, with not particularly high standards * So even if EAs aren’t sufficiently competent to build high-growth companies, they can still have an outsized impact via founding nonprofits
I think this is true, but also having a successful for profit that achieves some of the goals you set out is an inherently narrower set of skills because you need to do market research, product market fit, customer relations, p/l, find ways to scale teams and products, etc. These are skills that need to be learned whereas for nonprofit work you can just do your research or whatever. Some of them involve a bunch of soft skills and types of scale/customer mindset I don’t commonly see in EA.
I mostly agree with this. I wasn’t really aiming to give a balanced take here on whether people should start for-profit instead of nonprofit—I just meant to list a few (imo) underrated by EAs features of for-profits.
I’m more confused about the poor personal fit point. I suspect that many EAs are also a bad fit (at least initially) for starting nonprofits, but the EA ecosystem makes it somewhat easier for nonprofits to survive (which imo is probably a good thing overall).
The version of your claim I most agree with is:
* An EAs comparative advantage is identifying the most overlooked and big deal moral considerations, and access to minimal viable nonprofit capital
* This selects for highly neglected things where you might be able to have an impact at a small scale, with not particularly high standards
* So even if EAs aren’t sufficiently competent to build high-growth companies, they can still have an outsized impact via founding nonprofits
I think this is true, but also having a successful for profit that achieves some of the goals you set out is an inherently narrower set of skills because you need to do market research, product market fit, customer relations, p/l, find ways to scale teams and products, etc. These are skills that need to be learned whereas for nonprofit work you can just do your research or whatever. Some of them involve a bunch of soft skills and types of scale/customer mindset I don’t commonly see in EA.
Yeah, I think starting research nonprofits is an especially different skillset. Good point.