AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
As AIM’s Director of Recruitment, I’m running an AMA to answer any questions you may have about applying for our programs, as well as any questions that may be of interest from my other experience (such as co-founding Maternal Health Initiative).
Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) currently has applications open until September 15th for two of our programs.
You can read more about both programs in this earlier EA Forum post. Please consider applying!
Why a personal AMA?
Answers to questions can often be subjective. I do not want to claim to speak for every member of AIM’s team. As such, I want to make clear that I will be answering in a personal capacity. I think this has a couple of notable benefits:
My answers can be a little more candid since I don’t have to worry (as much) that I’ll say something others may significantly disagree with
Application season is busy for us! This saves coordination time in getting agreement on how to respond to any tricky questions
It also means that people can ask me questions through this AMA that go beyond AIM’s recruitment process and application round...
A little about me
I’ve been working at AIM since April 2024. Before that, I co-founded the Maternal Health Initiative with Sarah Eustis-Guthrie. We piloted a training program with the Ghana Health Service to improve the quality of postpartum family planning counseling in the country.
In March, we made the decision to shut down the organisation as we do not believe that postpartum family planning is likely to be as cost-effective as other family planning or global health interventions. You can read more about that decision in a recent piece for Asterisk magazine, as well as an earlier EA Forum post.
I started Maternal Health Initiative through the 2022 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. I spent the year prior to this founding and running Effective Self-Help, a project researching the best interventions for individuals to increase their wellbeing and productivity.
My job history before that is far more potted and less relevant—from waiting tables and selling hiking shoes to teaching kids survival skills and planting vineyards.
Things you could ask me
Any questions you may have about what AIM looks for in candidates for our programs and how we select people
Questions about getting into entrepreneurship—why to pursue it; how to test fit; paths to upskilling; lessons I’ve learned from my own (mis)adventures
Questions about Maternal Health Initisomething in my experience ative—what we did; lessons I learned; how it feels to shut down
More general questions about building a career in impactful work if something in my experience suggests I might be a good person to ask!
Thanks for doing this, Ben!
Regarding the Founding to Give program:
Did you get many applicants?
What are their backgrounds?
What percentage of the selected candidates are technical?
What kind of profiles would you have liked to see more of?
I’ll leave out the specific data on this but we were pleased with the number and quality of applicants for this from our first recruitment round earlier this year. I’d say in general we’ve got a mix of more ‘CEO’ and ‘CTO’ type candidates—ones with significant experience in building startups and fundraising, and those with significant technical experience and skill. Possibly a bit of a skew to the former so we’re especially excited for applicants from a more technical side this time around.
Regarding recruitment at AIM, are there any common misconceptions applicants have about what it takes to succeed in impact-driven entrepreneurship? Did you have any doubts about yourself when you first applied to the program?
I certainly had doubts when I first applied to the program! I was rejected in 2021 and then accepted in 2022: I got further in the process than I expected to in 2021 so in that sense the rejection was actually a source of confidence that this might be a realistic avenue for me in future.
I think applicants tend to believe that they need more prior experience than they do (we’ve had multiple excellent participants in their very early 20s), and perhaps underestimate the value of flexibility, particularly in your organisation’s first 12 months. Several of our organisations have made significant early pivots from what the preliminary research report suggested might be the best path, and people’s preference for which charity idea they’d like to found often changes during the program.
Hi Ben! Thanks for doing this.
No worries if you can’t speak to this question, but I’d love to know a bit more about the rationale of running the founding to give program. From an external perspective, I noted that I was quite surprised/ I couldn’t instantly see a link between charity entrepreneurship expertise, and the expertise required to start a for-profit business. What am I missing here? (I’m sure, a lot).
Hey Toby, yeah I’m not best-placed to answer this but a few quick thoughts:
- I think the skills to build and run an excellent organisation transfer quite strongly across, though the day-to-day nature of the work and ‘product’ might differ substantially
- This is a bit of an experiment! We think there could be incredible value to a program like this if we can make it work, but we’re not claiming 100% confidence that this will work as well as hoped
- For a variety of reasons, the number of charities we can found a year currently has a clear cap: the founding to give program offers both an opportunity to scale AIM’s impact, and potentially to help reduce the cap on top charities we can incubate through additional mid-stage funding availability
Hi Ben! I found your account of the MHI shut down in Asterisk Magazine very inspiring.
I’m curious how, in your opinion, a charity culture could be foster in which this kind of courageous decision (shuting down projects that fail to meet the bar) is made more often and more easily, despite all the powerful incentives not to follow the evidence that you mention in the article.
I find that publicly sharing the shut down process plays a role in setting an example and fostering accountability on this matter (I also really liked the post about the Center for Effective Aid Policy shut down). Can you think of other ideas?
Thank you! This is something we’re thinking about at AIM in terms of fostering an openness to shutting down amongst our charities where this makes sense. Strong public examples certainly helps. I think providing evaluation and research support to charities so that they can draw conclusions on impact they’re confident enough in to make shut down decisions makes a differnce.
I also think fostering a culture that places less emphasis on founders as the ultimate driver of success or failure would help. Organisations succeed for a combination of several key reasons—one of which is the talent and skill of the founders—and highlighting some of these other factors more (the idea; the timing; luck!) makes it easier for founders to close an organisation without feeling like it’s a huge personal failure
What do you think about candidates who might not be ‘culturally EA’ or come from an EA background (i.e. know what EA is, have previous affiliation, consume EA content), but who would otherwise be good at running a cost-effective charity? (ex. How important is it to have them? How upset would you be if you got a cohort of 100% culturally EA people? Do you worry if the recruitment process selects against them?)
A good question—we try and make our application effectively ‘EA-neutral’ but in practice I expect that our recruitment process is a little skewed in favour of people from an EA background. My guess is that’s down to a greater familiarity with the types of questions or tasks we ask for (e.g. making a weighted factor model), and it being easier to pick up on key things we care about—like a commitment to cost-effectiveness—when people communicate this in an EA way.
Ultimately, we care about finding people who have the base traits we care about—we’re equally open to a 0% or 100% culturally EA cohort if we feel like that’s the best group of people who applied.
Hey Ben, thanks for doing this AMA! What do you consider the most valuable skills you developed while co-founding MHI, and how do you plan to apply them to your current and future career endeavors?
Excellent question! Running an organisation really stretched my strategic thinking and ability to choose a coherent path through a lot of uncertainty. Your time, and the time of everyone who works for you, could be used on seemingly 100 different highly valuable things. Often you don’t have robust information to differentiate between these and decide which to prioritise, making it easy to try and do too many things simultaneously. I think one of the biggest lessons I learnt from MHI is being ruthless in prioritisation—choosing a very small number of things and doing these as well as possible. It’s easy to choose to 80⁄20 a whole lot of stuff instead that all seems necessary but in hindsight you could have, and should have, scrapped maybe 75% of it.
I’d like to think this is a skill I got a lot better at with time, and that this sort of strategic thinking and prioritisation applies to almost any kind of role—e.g. it’s a big emphasis for me at the moment in thinking about the many different ways AIM can look to recruit and selecting a few key avenues to execute.
Thanks so much for doing this Ben!
I’ve found AIM’s Applicant Resources page to be really useful, and I’ve especially enjoyed reading Atomic Habits and Failing Forward. Are there any resources on (or not on) that page that you’ve found especially helpful, or which you think are important for people to see before applying to AIM programs?
I’m glad you found this useful! It’s something we’ve tried to highlight more this cycle. A purely personal recommendation would be a grounding in Stoicism—e.g. reading some of Ryan Holiday’s books. Founding requires a lot of grit and perseverance, and some of the principles of stoicism and exercises for practicing these are the most practical guidance of finding on how to cultivate these traits.
Do you ever direct applicants towards applying to work at incubated charities instead of founding them?
Is that something you’d recommend for someone who is considering founding but is unsure?
We definitely have done this and we look to recommend late-stage applicants for consideration for potential job opportunities at AIM-incubated organisations where this is a good fit. I think exposure to a startup organisation—whether non- or for-profit—is a great way of getting a better sense of personal fit for founding yourself