Vincent van der Holst

Karma: 1,056

Founder of BOAS, a fast vintage fashion platform that donates 90% of profits to the most effective charities that save lives.

Our vision is to move as many of the world’s trillions in profits to effective organisations through Profit for Good businesses (where charities receive most profits instead of shareholders).

BOAS’ mission is save jeans and lives. Peter Singer is an investor in our business.

We’re fundraising, so if you can help, send me an email at vin at boas . co

We’re almost always looking for interns, so if you’re interested please reach out.

Thanks, Vin

Vincent van der Holst 15 Aug 2024 15:50 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Bella’s comment on: AMA about roles at 80,000 Hours
Thanks Bella,
I agree there are certainly benefits to on-site. In recruitment scoring I give additional points for proximity, so when I have equally scoring candidates the candidate in our city would win. Usually remote wins in our model, but the proximity scoring depends on the role (e.g. someone doing physical events would almost certainly have to be on-site).

Ultimately it depends a lot on the company and the role, but thanks for explaining and I think it’s good to have both remote and on-site open.

Vincent van der Holst 14 Aug 2024 16:48 UTC
4 points
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on: AMA about roles at 80,000 Hours
Why is on-site preferred? 58K GBP for a marketer with no prior experience could land you someone with absolutely amazing experience in a remote role. I’ve hired extensively both on-site and remote and in this particular scenario I would lean strongly to hiring remote to get someone with better prior work and assessments at half that budget, or get someone amazing who is not in London at that budget.

Vincent van der Holst 14 Aug 2024 16:41 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 2
on: Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?
I work in this space, but I would like to see some Profit for Good (companies that donate the vast majority of profits to (effective) charities) company executives. Most of these companies don’t donate in ways that EA’s would call effective but that makes it more interesting imo to invite them.

With billions in market value (Bosch, Patagonia, Carl Zeiss, Newman’s Own alone are worth around 10B I believe, all pledged to charity) in this space these are some of the biggest future donors and an interesting alternative to classic philanthropy. There’s a bunch of smaller PFG’s as well and Humanitix is a well known EA example who are quickly growing their donations and market value.

There’s some critics of PFG in EA as well and I would enjoy a panel with both sides too.

Vincent van der Holst 19 Jul 2024 14:14 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: AMA: Beast Philanthropy’s Darren Margolias
Sorry I missed that point: a 20 minute video might indeed be significantly higher CPV and because it’s not an ad might be favoured higher on that point too.
All in all it’s hard to say. I suppose GD will have some numbers on increased traffic and increased donations versus baseline, but this will be quite hard to measure correctly even with tracking in place.

Vincent van der Holst 18 Jul 2024 16:01 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: AMA: Beast Philanthropy’s Darren Margolias
I’m not going to do this because of time constraints, but if you really want to know you can run google ads on youtube on just Beast Philantropy videos and get a CPV and you’d know the worth of that video according to advertisers (who probably have a similar target audience to beast philanthropy watchers). Question is if givedirectly’s TA is the Beast Philanthropy TA. My best guess is that it’s not because most donors are older, going to spend less time watching youtube videos and would watch other content than this, so you’d have to discount the CPV with whatever you think is best. If I would do it I would probably discount it with 50-75% and value this at 1-2 cents per view for givedirectly, so 200-400K worth for givedirectly.

Vincent van der Holst 17 Jul 2024 13:20 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Sebastian Schwiecker’s comment on: AMA: Beast Philanthropy’s Darren Margolias
I just want to note that the vast majority of the money moved is likely to be of the ad revenues from the videos (on the channel they write that they’d donate 100% of ad revenue). Jimmy sometimes spends millions one a single video, and the ad revenues of his videos are dozens of million.

Vincent van der Holst 8 Jul 2024 10:18 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Vincent van der Holst’s Quick takes
BOAS is closing it’s public investment campaign soon.

Why you might consider this as a very effective use of your money is best captured in my TEDx talk about Profit for Good. Other reasons you might want to invest:
- We’ve already donated €16.432 donated to charity, which helped distribute 8.648 bed nets, protecting 17.297 people from malaria and preventing 2.783 malaria cases. This not only saves at least 3 lives, but also adds €197.184 to the local economy through reduced illness. We have a feasible path to do multiply tens to ten thousands of times
  - Since we are not profitable I should add that a lot of that money was generated from voluntary donations and my world record attempt for AMF
- With the first 100 investors we opened a store, signed partnerships with MUD Jeans (you can also invest in them on the same platform!) and United Repair Centre, and hired the core team. We’ve grown revenue with an average of 25% per month this year
- We have 300K investment from a large bank and foundation, which I cannot disclose yet, so we’re not only backed by ‘friends, family and fools’. This does not mean we are overfunded, we are actually heavily underfunded because our plans are ambitious (and have to be if you want to move millions to EC’s)
- Invest from €100, so becoming a co-owner of BOAS is feasible for most
- Up to 100% of your investment as a gift card (yes really!), and lifetime discounts for all investors, so you can always get vintage denim at the best prices in return for you helping us continue to grow fast
- A unique opportunity to invest in the profit for good system’s change. BOAS was featured by Elle, Parool, Peter Singer, Bangkok Post, Rutger Bregman, BNR, Algemeen Dagblad, BNN Vara/Dolf Janssen, Radio 538, Metro News and many others for our ability to save jeans and lives, if you think PR is an important indicator of whether this works or not
- More than 100 people, including Peter Singer and tennis pro Marcus Daniel have already invested in our mission to save jeans and lives
- We’ve already saved 7.000 jeans and 3 lives, saving 23 million liters of water saved (9 olympic swimming pools), 202.621KG of CO2 saved (2.006 flights from Amsterdam to Barcelona), 14 football fields saved from cotton farming and 488 trash bags of waste saved from being dumped or burned
  
  Why you should not invest?
- Our investment is not made to make you rich. 90% of returns are dedicated to effective charities like the Against Malaria Foundation. That’s the whole idea of Profit for Good
- This is an investment in a high risk high reward startup. We have a small shot of moving a lot of money to effective charities, but also significant odds of not generating much impact if we go bankrupt
- EAIF thinks we’re not a good fit for their fund and have rejected investment in BOAS multiple times, I have commented about that in the critical piece of EAIF
You can invest here.

Thanks,
Vin

Vincent van der Holst 12 Jun 2024 7:59 UTC
2 points
3 ∶ 0
on: On Estimates of how much Zakat there is
First of all, I love the idea of redirecting Zakat to the most effective charities, and regardless of the size of global Zakat, this seems neglected and a large opportunity. I do however think your estimates are off.

I refer to @Stan Pinsent for his great data, and that is basically my view on it too, but I wanted to add a couple of things to that.
Total yearly global philanthropy seems around 841 billion. 590 of which are remittances, which some don’t even see as philanthropy. More than 90% of philanthropy flows from wealthy countries that are either non-muslim or where a significant part of muslims are secular and/or don’t follow zakat rules.
I would put my confidence interval that Zakat is less than 350 billion USD at 90%. It seems incredibly unlikely that more than 30% of global philanthropy stems from Zakat for the reasons stated by Stan, and looking at global giving.
This is not hard data, but I’ve also run ad campaigns for large NGO’s, and they promote more during Zakat, and I know it was driving less than 10% of yearly donations for these charities (and one of these was a popular charity for muslims).

Vincent van der Holst 12 Jun 2024 7:40 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Imma🔸’s comment on: I doubled the world record cycling without hands for AMF
Hi Imma, thanks!
I was concerned about the wind, but between 6AM and 1PM the wind force was 3 where when we talked it was expected to be 4. I’m very stable with 3 and getting unstable, but not impossible, at 4. I already did 175KM before the wind picked up so that was great.
The course is a loop, but it’s basically two long sides with 2 relatively short sides. I had crosswind on the short sides, which is very good because crosswind is much more unstable than head or tail. One of the short sides was really well covered by trees and houses behind those trees so the wind was totally fine there. The other short side was more windy, but I proactively sped up for more balance on that side, which was doable because it was just a short bit.
Ultimately I got super lucky with the weather. It was dry, warm, not too much wind and from the right angles. The days after it was very windy and rainy here and I would not have gone so far or even managed to break the record.
I also slept relatively well before the event (where I was stressed and exhausted on thursday I was pretty good on friday) and had what cyclists call ‘good legs’, which you sometimes have and sometimes don’t, so I feel incredibly lucky that everything came together so well on the day itself.

Vincent van der Holst 12 Jun 2024 7:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: I doubled the world record cycling without hands for AMF
Thanks James, and also for the help sharing this so we could raise more money!

Vincent van der Holst 12 Jun 2024 7:33 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: I doubled the world record cycling without hands for AMF
Haha I value transparency. I was very worried about the balance when peeing but it went very well.

I doubled the world record cycling without hands for AMF

Vincent van der Holst11 Jun 2024 8:57 UTC

339 points

11 comments5 min readEA link

Vincent van der Holst 24 May 2024 16:27 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: Lies and disrespect from the EA Infrastructure Fund
Thanks for the reply Caleb. I’m not arguing it’s not a good fit here (although I disagree with that too, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t apply to EAIF). Ultimately you guys decide the fit. What I’m arguing is that I felt disrespected by our interactions, and it seems I’m not alone.
I stand by that your feedback contained multiple factual errors. An example is the feedback mentioning we don’t have transparent financials even though all of that was linked clearly (and was even publicly available at that time). Happy to go into other examples but I don’t think we’re going to agree on this.

FWIW I’m happy for you to share public details of our grant application, we’re transparent. I don’t think the public will disagree with you our project is not a fit, because other funders have also declined our Profit for Good ideas so far.

Vincent van der Holst 23 May 2024 8:13 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Ramiro’s comment on: I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF
Thank you so much!

Vincent van der Holst 23 May 2024 8:12 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: finm’s comment on: I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF
Hi finm,
Good question! It’s a closed loop where they normally hold bike races. It’s 2.5KM per loop and I will be doing as many loops as I can. It’s got one bridge that slows down my speed and that’s the most tricky part due to balance. When I’m cruising at 25kmh the bike is very stable, but I go down to about 15 when I ascend the small bridge so that’s where I need to stay focused!

It’s in The Netherlands so it’s otherwise completely flat, and because it’s closed there’s no other traffic or traffic lights. It’s just me, my butt and I.

Vincent van der Holst 21 May 2024 12:43 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF
Amazing! I’ll reach out to huff to see if they can cover it for more donations!

Vincent van der Holst 20 May 2024 15:44 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF
This really means a lot to me Brad, and I’m glad that I can be of help to you sometimes (and appreciate all the help you give me!).

Vincent van der Holst 20 May 2024 15:24 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Ruben Dieleman 🔸’s comment on: I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF
I will indeed be wearing a helmet! :)

I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF

Vincent van der Holst20 May 2024 15:05 UTC

156 points

11 comments3 min readEA link

Vincent van der Holst 20 May 2024 12:32 UTC
7 points
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on: A Linkpost to Vincent van der Holst’s TEDx Talk- How Profit for Good Businesses Can Transform Philanthropy and Save Lives –
Thanks for sharing it Brad, and I invite everyone to debate this in the comments.

Vincent van der Holst

I dou­bled the world record cy­cling with­out hands for AMF

I’m at­tempt­ing a world record to raise money for AMF

I doubled the world record cycling without hands for AMF

I’m attempting a world record to raise money for AMF