Ben Williamson

Karma: 2,300

Currently Director of Recruitment for Ambitious Impact (AIM), working to find exceptionally talented and dedicated new founders for our programs, including our flagship Charity Entreprenurship Incubation Program. We offer training, mentorship, and funding for multiple high-impact career paths, launching organisations such as LEEP, FEM and the Shrimp Welfare Initiative.

Previously, I was Director of Partnerships and Field Operations for the Maternal Health Initiative (https://maternalhealthinitiative.org), a global health charity training healthcare workers in lower-income contexts on family planning counseling. I co-founded MHI in September 2022 with Sarah Eustis-Guthrie out of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Programme.

Prior to that, I founded Effective Self-Help (https://effectiveselfhelp.org) a research organisation studying the most effective ways people can improve their wellbeing and productivity. I’ve also worked about 20 jobs before all this mostly much less relevant to impactful work, from music festivals and call centers to vineyards and youth counseling.

Introducing four brand-new charities! Here’s the fall cohort of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program.

CE8 Nov 2024 13:33 UTC

102 points

11 comments7 min readEA link

Thinking About Decisions as a Weighted Factor Model

Joey 🔸30 Oct 2024 15:29 UTC

58 points

5 comments5 min readEA link

Ben Williamson 25 Oct 2024 15:35 UTC
4 points
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on: AIM is hiring for 4 roles
The initial application deadline for these roles has been extended until November 3rd (next Sunday). If you’re interested in any of the positions and on the fence about applying, please reach out. I’d love to understand why and answer any questions you may have.

AIM is hiring for 4 roles

Ben Williamson2 Oct 2024 8:23 UTC

52 points

1 comment2 min readEA link

(www.ambitiousimpact.com)

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:31 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Chris Rouse’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:28 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: NBjork’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:24 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tori’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:17 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: AxellePB 🔹’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:05 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: defun 🔸’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 11:02 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tori’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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.

Ben Williamson 2 Sep 2024 10:49 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: huw’s comment on: AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson
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.

AMA with AIM’s Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson

Ben Williamson19 Aug 2024 7:03 UTC

51 points

16 comments2 min readEA link

Ben Williamson 14 Aug 2024 8:24 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Presenting five new effective giving initiatives
Cause area focus will be determined by the initiatives themselves so I’ll leave it to any of the founders to comment on this further should they wish to!

Ben Williamson 14 Aug 2024 8:23 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Presenting five new effective giving initiatives
An interesting idea! ~~To my knowledge this is not something we have any plans for~~ (see Luke’s comment below). I can see a world in future where something like this would be useful though as the number of effective giving orgs grows and the levels of success between orgs becomes more apparent

Presenting five new effective giving initiatives

CE13 Aug 2024 16:37 UTC

189 points

12 comments8 min readEA link

Our Recommended Charity Ideas for February 2025

CE7 Aug 2024 11:59 UTC

83 points

8 comments4 min readEA link

(www.charityentrepreneurship.com)

Applications Now Open for AIM’s 2025 Programs

CE25 Jul 2024 13:16 UTC

92 points

1 comment6 min readEA link

Talent identification as an underappreciated career option

CE27 May 2024 14:09 UTC

50 points

1 comment4 min readEA link

Ben Williamson 21 May 2024 12:41 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
on: Introducing MSI Reproductive Choices
An excellent writeup—thank you to the MSI team for taking the time as a large existing global health/development org to share this. I’m particularly excited to see the potential cost-effectiveness of last mile programming where the benefits to reproductive autonomy are likely to be particularly strong.