This is really exciting, looking forward to these posts.
The Charity Entrepreneurship model is interesting to me because you’re trying to do something analogous to what we’re doing at the Good Technology Project—cause new high impact organisations to exist. Whereas we started meta (trying to get other entrepreneurs to work on important problems) you started at the object level (setting up a charity and only later trying to get other people to start other charities). Why did you go for this depth-first approach?
So this response could also be a whole post in of itself, but briefly, there were 3 big reasons:
1) We thought that it’s generally quite hard to start an extremely effective charity and also quite hard to influence pre-existing ones. Additionally it’s quite easy to start something ineffective. GiveWell only gives even us and New Incentives a 10-20% of successfully starting a charity, and I think these are relatively high rates compared to what I would expect to happen if we only attempted to inspire. (e.g. Our team already has experience founding an EA meta-charity for example).
2) We were in a pretty good position to start something. We had a strong team that worked well together and the timing seemed quite good for starting a direct charity in the poverty space and we thought this space was very high impact. 3) We figured once we had starting something we would be much stronger mentors and know the process a lot better. We have already found this to be very true as we are coaching other projects through this process.
In general, I could imagine switching to a strategy that is more hands off and tries to inspire folks in a very meta way (e.g. incubator or heavy mentoring). If we see a few people pick up our CE ideas and take a good shot at them our probabilities of doing something like this would go up a lot.
This is really exciting, looking forward to these posts.
The Charity Entrepreneurship model is interesting to me because you’re trying to do something analogous to what we’re doing at the Good Technology Project—cause new high impact organisations to exist. Whereas we started meta (trying to get other entrepreneurs to work on important problems) you started at the object level (setting up a charity and only later trying to get other people to start other charities). Why did you go for this depth-first approach?
So this response could also be a whole post in of itself, but briefly, there were 3 big reasons:
1) We thought that it’s generally quite hard to start an extremely effective charity and also quite hard to influence pre-existing ones. Additionally it’s quite easy to start something ineffective. GiveWell only gives even us and New Incentives a 10-20% of successfully starting a charity, and I think these are relatively high rates compared to what I would expect to happen if we only attempted to inspire. (e.g. Our team already has experience founding an EA meta-charity for example). 2) We were in a pretty good position to start something. We had a strong team that worked well together and the timing seemed quite good for starting a direct charity in the poverty space and we thought this space was very high impact.
3) We figured once we had starting something we would be much stronger mentors and know the process a lot better. We have already found this to be very true as we are coaching other projects through this process.
In general, I could imagine switching to a strategy that is more hands off and tries to inspire folks in a very meta way (e.g. incubator or heavy mentoring). If we see a few people pick up our CE ideas and take a good shot at them our probabilities of doing something like this would go up a lot.