Great post! Thank you. I love that you are providing coaching for EAs who are aspiring for-profit, social enterprise and charity entrepreneurs.
We recently launched EA Angels to focus on EA entrepreneurs building for-profit startups who are ready to pitch to angel investment groups for funding.
Thank you for writing this! I really like the idea—working on things with other people is messy and difficult and fun, but also a great way to build useful skills. The skill of understanding what skills you possess and what complementary skills others you work closely with possess seems valuable to develop
Thank you! Great analysis and synthesis of the Randomista and Systemista perspectives.
I hope you take a look at Lant Pritchett’s new paper, Development Happened, Did Aid Help? If you find it intriguing, I encourage you to write an EA Forum post about it; your writing is concise and interesting.
Thank you for posting this! I’ve mentioned your post to people on the EA Supply Chain and Logistics Slack Group
Thank you for writing this! Someone recently shared with me the concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). I wonder if people with high ACEs scores find solace in EA
Thank you for posting these great explanations! I realized when explaining EA Angels to someone today that the main benefit of a successful for-profit startup is not always financial capital. After reading this, I think it might be the network and structural capital
Great article! I’m amazed there weren’t any references to:
Tinder Swindler
Bad Vegan
Inventing Anna
Maybe that’s a “know your audience” thing for the EA Forum, but I assume the same concepts apply...
I’m glad to hear you are passionate about the role of for-profit entrepreneurs in EA; the EA Entrepreneurs Slack Group might be of interest to you.
Regarding crop sustainability, Our World In Data’s recent post digs into this: Increasing agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems this century
Congratulations! I find the Snowball Fund structure a little confusing, but I’m looking forward to sharing dealflow between the Snowball Fund and EA Angels. We’ve seen a couple of pitches so far from EA Entrepreneurs at EA Angels:
-EdTech (Europe) - no funding commitments
-FinTech (UK) − 2 funding commitments in discussion
And we have a couple more pitches in the pipeline to see in Apr/May:
-FinTech (Europe)
-RealWorldTech (USA)
My assumption is that there is probably room for several EA-themed funds, syndicates and Angel Investment Groups. At this point, the bottleneck seems to be EA Entrepreneurs actively building for-profit startups. For me and other members of EA Angels, our counterfactual is helping non-EA founders succeed with their for-profit startups; we’d prefer to help EA founders!
Update: I’ve met with two people so far thanks to Inflection Point and they were both awesome!
I received the email about potential 1-on-1s today. Thank you!
I forgot 1) you were doing this and 2) I’d signed up. Seems like a really great idea so far; I’m excited to see what happens
Yes! Connecting university researchers with Charity Entrepreneurship charities and other EA orgs could also be extremely valuable. I’ve helped informally connect the University of Toronto BioZone to a couple of different EA orgs. I don’t think this is exactly what you are proposing, but supporting EA-aligned researchers to maximize their impact seems worthwhile.
Thank you for writing this! I appreciate the specific details and clarity. Although I’m not a Developer nor an employer of Developers, I do interact with a lot of Developers. Based on my experience, I think good Developers have a low tolerance for ambiguity—the code can’t “sort of” work and “maybe meet some” requirements. The code needs to work for specific use cases.
Likewise, honesty, transparency and clarity on behalf of potential employers is probably really helpful to Developers in understanding fit (or lack thereof).
Perhaps I’m completely wrong. I’m curious what Developers themselves think. Are there wildly chaotic, high tolerance for ambiguity Developers? Do they thrive in opaque surroundings?
Thank you for posting! Is the above based only on EA-aligned charities? Some cause areas (e.g. Mental Health) may lend themselves to for-profit or social enterprise models. I’m not sure how you’d include those
Interesting article! Thank you!! For me, the best social network is LinkedIn, since it is a work and business focused network.
When creating an account for your network above, would I be able to pull in my LinkedIn Profile? If so, that would make your network slightly easier to start using.
I’m looking forward to the event!
A couple of related EA Forum articles:
Great post! Very informative. When I read,
About ⅖ of the charities each year exceed the cost-effectiveness of the strongest charities in their fields and have been supported by multiple independent funding bodies (Open Philanthropy, GiveWell, EA funds, etc.).
My initial reaction was, “a 40% success rate is too high!” I love that you are expanding and taking more risks.
My understanding from informal conversations is many CE charities would benefit from simple CRMs and a few from simple ERPs:
CRM = Customer Relationship Management—tracks interactions (outreach, etc)
ERP = Enterprise Resource Management—tracks transactions (cash, physical goods, purchase orders, etc)
Other EA orgs might have similar needs; a needs assessment might be a valuable project to undertake—perhaps this has already been done?
Great post! I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.
One person’s Value Drift is another person’s Bayesian Updating