I just discovered this thread, but figured I’d back up some data points! I’ve been in the EA community since 2016-ish and done entrepreneurship and longtermist work for about 2 years. I won’t lean too much into my experience, I’ll generally say things other entrepreneurs and impact-minded people would agree with.
Re: Founder pool
The talent pool size is much smaller (only 100s of potential longtermist entrepreneurs in total vs tens of thousands of entrepreneurs).
It is helpful to think of “longtermism” and “entrepreneurship” as two entirely distinct, and very uncommon skillsets/mental frameworks. Currently, way less than 1% of the world would identify as longtermist, and less than 1% would identify as entrepreneurs. While these traits are slightly correlated, the vast majority of lontermists are not entrepreneurs, and the vast majority of entrepreneurs are not longtermist.
That’s totally fine, but makes things difficult for a longtermist incubator. I mean, if Y Combinator started prioritising longtermist involvement, I’m pretty sure they’d have similar challenges.
Re: Project pool
We found almost no longtermist ideas for traditional startup-minded people to pursue (product-based with quick path to scale, feedback loops), and don’t expect this will be the majority of promising longtermist startups.
Again, overlap is hard. One thing Y Combinator constantly emphasises is that most startups never achieve product-market fit. I.e. it’s really, really hard to build something people want to pay for. So the reliable solution is to try and iterate a lot with fairly little information. A 10% success rate is really good if you try a dozen times a month.
So just building anything successful is hard. Then you have to try and make something impactful, which is another, completely separate hard thing to do. Most successful, lucrative companies are not “effective” or “impactful” in the longtermist sense. I’ve tried this thought exercise myself, sometimes I would think of/test like 9 potential lucrative startup ideas before I find one that’s lucrative and also possibly impactful.
Anyway, point is: This is a difficult thing to do, essentially trying to find a very narrow eligible pool and get them to work on a very small set of possible ideas. I really appreciate that this was tried!
I just discovered this thread, but figured I’d back up some data points! I’ve been in the EA community since 2016-ish and done entrepreneurship and longtermist work for about 2 years. I won’t lean too much into my experience, I’ll generally say things other entrepreneurs and impact-minded people would agree with.
Re: Founder pool
It is helpful to think of “longtermism” and “entrepreneurship” as two entirely distinct, and very uncommon skillsets/mental frameworks. Currently, way less than 1% of the world would identify as longtermist, and less than 1% would identify as entrepreneurs. While these traits are slightly correlated, the vast majority of lontermists are not entrepreneurs, and the vast majority of entrepreneurs are not longtermist.
That’s totally fine, but makes things difficult for a longtermist incubator. I mean, if Y Combinator started prioritising longtermist involvement, I’m pretty sure they’d have similar challenges.
Re: Project pool
Again, overlap is hard. One thing Y Combinator constantly emphasises is that most startups never achieve product-market fit. I.e. it’s really, really hard to build something people want to pay for. So the reliable solution is to try and iterate a lot with fairly little information. A 10% success rate is really good if you try a dozen times a month.
So just building anything successful is hard. Then you have to try and make something impactful, which is another, completely separate hard thing to do. Most successful, lucrative companies are not “effective” or “impactful” in the longtermist sense. I’ve tried this thought exercise myself, sometimes I would think of/test like 9 potential lucrative startup ideas before I find one that’s lucrative and also possibly impactful.
Anyway, point is: This is a difficult thing to do, essentially trying to find a very narrow eligible pool and get them to work on a very small set of possible ideas. I really appreciate that this was tried!