Vincent van der Holst

Karma: 483

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 23 Mar 2022 17:09 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Peter S. Park’s comment on: Peter S. Park’s Shortform
I did my bachelor thesis on a company that was acquired by elsevier for 100million USD. Elsevier (now called Relx) has a market cap of 60 billion USD. Getting a majority voting position would require dozens of billions probably. Counterfactual impact from allocating a couple dozen billion is much larger. So I think it’s not feasible nor recommendable.

Vincent van der Holst 23 Mar 2022 17:30 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform
I’m the person Yonatan is referring to. His feedback and your general feedback are very helpful, so thank you for that! I have been a lurker within EA for years and will write more content on the EA forum, including requesting feedback on the idea (soon). Hopefully that will help, although I don’t know because I didn’t get feedback.

Before I move into why I think grant makers should provide short feedback I want to be clear: I’m completely comfortable with being rejected and I completely understand that grant makers are very busy.

Having said that, I think grant makers should feedback the applications they reject. It doesn’t have to be more than 1-2 lines and one minute to write. I have applied to EA 6 months ago and got rejected and applied again last month and got rejected again. I had a lot of encouraging talks with EA’s (although criticism as well) and was more convinced this was going to get funding. I have no idea if they hated the idea and they think it will never work, or if they think it doesn’t fit them, they are not able to evaluate properly, etc. The potential impact of knowing why is very large. It might help me improve the idea, maximize the impact or pursue other paths that are more impactful and effective. I think that one minute feedback has a high expected value. Knowing why will also help me decide whether to reapply or not, either saving the grant makers future time if I don’t or improving the idea so it has more impact if I do. Feedback might help EA get less reapplications of higher quality, increasing overall impact and reducing the time to review. Win-win?

EA startup—non-profit sustainable marketplace

Vincent van der Holst24 Mar 2022 13:35 UTC

27 points

2 comments2 min readEA link

Vincent van der Holst 5 Apr 2022 10:28 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MathiasKB’s comment on: EA startup—non-profit sustainable marketplace
Hi Mathias,
Sorry for missing this (have turned email notifications on my post on now).
I agree that the EA community is not suited to evaluate the idea. VC’s are, but they seek an ROI so they might like the idea so won’t fund it. Based on the talks we had so far I’m pretty sure this idea would receive seed funding if it could provide ROI.
Over generalizing here, but the EA community or wealthy EA’s can fund it, but not evaluate it. VC’s can evaluate it, but can’t fund it. Is it a thought to see if we can combine the two somehow? EA works with investors that can evaluate profit for non-profit ideas and if they think they have potential EA can fund it?
I have researched counterfactual (spoke to 80K and Charity Entrepeneurship) and I do not believe it’s much higher (or higher at all) for me. The odds of success of this endeavor are low, but the potential profits we can donate to effective charities are huge.
P.S. great that you like the blog post and sharing will help us!

Vincent van der Holst 11 Apr 2022 9:46 UTC
3 points
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on: Snowball Fund—A Low-Cost, Low-Risk, and High-Upside Experiment
I think this is a fantastic idea because it partly solves a real problem I have, which is mentioned in the article: “Anecdotally, many entrepreneurs bounce off the EA community, which has been described as overly risk-averse, too academic and theoretical, and ‘biased against action’’.
That has been my impression since becoming more active as a EA entrepreneur. The amount of help from EA’s is fantastic, but there seems to be a gap to help early stage EA entrepreneurs move forward with funding. This is anecdotal, but it seems if you can’t show a low-risk, high EV opportunity your odds of funding are low. I have a business that’s high-risk/high EV (although some disagree) that VC seems to like but EA just recommends me to earn to give. What if the VC’s are right and the EA’s are wrong?
I share most concerns, mostly that it might become low-tier. You’re mentioning that other VC’s do a lot of DD and you want to avoid that (e.g. 30 minute call for EA alignment and intro), but isn’t the DD a large part of why VC’s are succesfull? Another part of the success is the value added in addition to the money. EA has been extremely helpful for me, and that would be a large factor in my decision to work with the snowball fund. EA could leverage it’s intelligence and network of investors (many of whom are philanthropists and ROI investors) to achieve above average returns.
I believe in the snowball effect this might have through word of mouth and founders pledge. I talk to other entrepreneurs about how they can give more (effectively) and if we have more EA aligned founders that might create a viral effect where it will be increasingly normal for entrepreneurs to be EA’s. The success of this fund might be a catalyst for FP and future Bankmans’ and Moskovitch’s.

Vincent van der Holst 6 Jun 2022 15:20 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker
Not giving feedback on proposals is sometimes seen as insulting as well. We got rejected about 4 times by EA grants without feedback and we probably spent 50 hours writing and honing the proposals. Getting a “No” is harder to swallow than “No, because...”. I wasn’t insulted because I get all of the reasons for no feedback, but it doesn’t leave you feeling happy about all the work that went into it.
I also agree with various comments here that the ROI of very short feedback is likely very high, and I don’t think it’s a big time burden to phrase it in a non-insulting way. I’m going to reapply again in the upcoming months and it’s likely we get rejected again. If I knew the reason why I might not reapply or reapply better, both of which would save the grant maker considerable time (perhaps X more than writing one minute feedback).

Vincent van der Holst 7 Jun 2022 9:51 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Charles He’s comment on: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker
Hi Charles,
Thanks for responding and I’m sure people like you, at least I do for being ruthless, that honestly helps a lot so thank you!
I should start by clarifying that the EA forum post is not the proposal that we put many hours in, that was probably written in about 30 minutes and checked by one EA, and it’s not meant to be a full pitch but just an intro to what we do. We did get feedback on that (and I got a lot more later at EAG, even from some of the grantmakers that rejected us) but when I refer to getting no feedback I mean the rejections from grants with no feedback.
About your remix/take on the EA forum, I agree that EA shouldn’t fund average startups and/or for-profits (I don’t consider our venture a for-profit though). I can’t be an unbiased judge on whether we’re average or below/above average, but I can send you the pitch deck and answer any questions/concerns you might have and then you can be the judge. You also mention previous experience, advisor reviews, hypotheses and unfair advantages, and those are all in the pitch. I’m now thinking it might have been a mistake to do a quick write up for feedback and thoughts, maybe a thorough one would have been better because I think I can address most of the concerns that you and others have but wanted to avoid a 10 page post outlining all of the questions and criticisms and how we’re addressing them.
Can I send you the deck and relay your questions in a quick call? I learn the most from the harshest critics and you seem to be one.

Vincent van der Holst 10 Jun 2022 15:28 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Markus Amalthea Magnuson’s comment on: Guided Consumption: Funding Charities by Leveraging Consumer Sentiment in the Broader Economy
Thanks for mentioning us Markus! I’ll need some time to properly read and digest this, but will reply in full after!

Vincent van der Holst 15 Jun 2022 12:32 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Vincent van der Holst’s comment on: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker
I think it’s worth mentioning the recent paper that Brad West wrote on this subject. It explains very well why we exist and what we’re trying to do, much better than my quick and dirty writeup. Happy to hear any feedback on that!

Vincent van der Holst 15 Jun 2022 12:44 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Tomer_Goloboy’s comment on: Guided Consumption: Funding Charities by Leveraging Consumer Sentiment in the Broader Economy
Luxury goods might be a good avenue, but in the long run we’re hoping that many businesses are replaced by guiding producers, and the companies generating most profits mostly aren’t luxury companies (perhaps with the exception of Apple). I think both can be successful in guided consumption.
I had/have the idea to sell extremely high priced items that were unique. My idea was to create the world’s most expensive t-shirt (was thinking like 1 or 10 million USD) with a popular artist and donate 99% of that to charity. Seemed like that kind of thing would generate a lot of PR with the right artist and buyer. I still think this might be worth pursuing, but if you want to move the broader public towards guided consumption I believe there’s more to be gained in commodotized businesses that sell goods/services to millions. That’s why we ended up trying to be a guided producer as a sustainable marketplace. I think I have an almost delusional faith that guided consumption (I call it profit for non-profit usually) will work and I’ve quit my job, bootstrapped a business and sunk quite a lot of my net worth and all of my time into pursuing it. I have a lot of skin in the game and certainly not going to give up any time soon.
The books you mention are ones that I’ve got recommended a lot and I’m trying to read them in the upcoming months, thanks for elaborating on some important concepts in the books!

Vincent van der Holst 15 Jun 2022 12:48 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: ColdButtonIssues’s comment on: Guided Consumption: Funding Charities by Leveraging Consumer Sentiment in the Broader Economy
Amazon is in many ways a dropshipper with a strong brand an high loyalty(although they’ve gotten big also because of their warehousing). I do completely agree that people mostly care about price reviews and delivery speed. That needs to be matched, and then people might consider guided consumption. The good thing is that I believe guided producers can match the competition and then have that unique selling point of giving profits away.

Our researchers spoke to Newman’s Own and I’m soon speaking to TOMS as well, and brands like these are looking at sales channels that align with their mission, and guided producers might be uniquely suited to serve their needs.

Vincent van der Holst 15 Jun 2022 12:51 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Brad West’s comment on: Guided Consumption: Funding Charities by Leveraging Consumer Sentiment in the Broader Economy
The key is indeed getting to a situation where you’re matching the offering (prices, product, delivery speed, UX/UI) of the competition and that might take a very long time and cost large sums of money, so that’s easier said than done. Only then does it become a no-brainer for the general public.
I agree that Paul Newman made the mistake to not publicly voice how much good they were doing. That’s humble and noble, but if they were more vocal about it they might have been even more successful. Do note that they donated more than 500 million USD so they were by no means small.

Vincent van der Holst 15 Jun 2022 13:10 UTC
3 points
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on: Guided Consumption: Funding Charities by Leveraging Consumer Sentiment in the Broader Economy
I might be suited to reply to this because we’ve been trying to be a guiding producer (boas.co) for almost a year. I don’t have a lot of time to reply so this is rather quick and dirty but it’s a result of more than a 1000 hours of work. I’ve also studied economics so I can answer your call for an economist about the economic feasibility but am not going in depth in it now. We even have a research intern who is researching the economic feasibility of our project/guiding producers (research is probably ready in 3 weeks and I’ll share). I’ll try to reply to everything and feel free to DM or email me (vin@boas.co) if anyone wants to discuss further or in person.
The red team and positive points below are either my personal experience, from data we have or they are the experiences or opinions (those that I heard a lot) from others I talked to. I have probably talked to hundreds of people about this subject and this is what I hear and experience the most. Our company is in the process of validating whether this paper has merit and most results so far are positive, but there’s a lot more validation to be done (most importantly how guided consumption translates to purchase intent).
Some, if not most, of these points are addressed at least in part in this paper. I’m merely emphasizing or adding to some based on my experience. I’m talking to Brad West tomorrow and wanted to put my unbiased points here before that conversation.
Red Team Points
1. Maybe the best founders want to start companies that make them rich, not donate to charities.
2. Maybe the best “investors” want to make themselves rich, not donate their part of the profits to charities.
3. The most successful companies usually don’t turn a profit for many years, and require millions to billions in funding. How do guiding companies secure that funding if bullet 1 and 2 are true (successful companies usually have the best founders and investors)?
4. It’s hard to match the features of the most successful companies if you don’t have bullet 1,2 and 3. Profit destination might only be a deciding factor for purchase decisions if your company at least matches the competition and enables guided consumption as a differentiating factor/USP.
5. Profits that are donated to charities can’t be reinvested for marketing and R&D. You might reinvest all profits for a long time and donate nothing, but will customers “allow” that or do they demand charitable contributions from the start?
6. People might object to market or above market rates for employees. There have been many cases where reputations of non-profits have been harmed because executives made 200K USD per year, which is far less than they would make in for-profit organisations. This might also be true for guided producers.
7. Companies need financial buffers for unforeseen circumstances and crises. We have talked to companies that nearly bankrupted themselves because of their giving.
8. Guiding companies might have an uphill battle because they can’t secure the best founders and investors. The entire investor infrastructure around guiding companies still has to be built.
9. The paper assumes people might (start to) care about profit destination, which might not be true. That will make it harder to start guided companies because of the bullets above.
10. There is a lot of distrust in the world so the authenticating systems you mention are important. Guiding companies should have far more transparency than conventional companies.
11. If companies donate “some” of their profit and that’s a low percentage of their profit they shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves guiding companies imo as it might be seen as green washing/ethics washing and hurt the overall furthering of guided consumption.
12. Were incorporated in the Netherlands and some structures exist (e.g. steward ownership) but we can’t be a charity (even though we are like a non-profit) and if we donate more than a couple hundred K we actually need to pay tax on our donations. There is work to be done for guiding companies in terms of tax benefits and the organization structures that currently exist.
13. How do you balance maximizing profit for designated charities and making that profit in a moral and ethical way. Is it ok to make your money in ways that might harm people and the planet if you give the profits away? How and where do you draw the line? Do you pay your warehouse workers minimum wage (not enough to normally live of off in the US for example) so you can donate more to charities? Do you squeeze suppliers for more profits so you can donate where it’s needed more? The morals and ethics of this need to be developed and there are many opinions.
14. In my experience people care far more about ineffective charities than effective ones.
15. So far, EA /Philanthropists and Investors have been skeptical of this idea. Exacerbated by the fact that their returns are probably lower when investing in this kind of thing.
16. I would be interested in further brainstorming why this idea hasn’t taken off so far. It genuinely surprises me how little karma and interaction this post/idea is getting, even if it’s laid out so clearly in this paper. Are we severely overestimating how much people care? If even EA’s don’t seem to care so much, does the regular consumer?
Positive things, in my experience, about guided consumption
1. Some of the best people want to work for guided companies because they donate profits. Some of these people are wealthy and only want to work for companies that improve the world and guiding companies are uniquely suited to do so.
2. Some of the biggest “investors” are philanthropic, if you can convince them of your idea, they could find millions or even billions to take it to the moon.
3. Being a guiding company can be a competitive advantage in hiring, at least for non-founders. Some of the best people only want to work for “positive” companies. Companies are a product of their people so this might be a huge factor in why guiding companies might win.
4. Guiding companies get discounts on marketing, software, recruitment, consultancy etc. because they serve the world, not shareholders. This lowers all sorts of costs and could even help guiding companies offer lower prices and secure another competitive advantage.
5. Guiding companies might pay lower tax amounts. This could help guiding companies offer lower prices and secure another competitive advantage.
6. Guiding companies might start talking about the producer surplus of their competitors, creating awareness among the general public that it’s better to buy from guiding companies if they exist.
7. We compete in the sustainable marketplace sector because it has many competitors and they don’t have clear differentiation, our giving is used as a differentiating factor already and early results indicate that it’s indeed a reason companies partner with us, but we’re not sure about purchase intent on the consumer side, yet.
8. “Newmans Own” has been discussed in the comments already but I want to mention it too. You make it sound like they weren’t terribly successful, but they donated 500 million USD so far and there’s no reason they won’t go to more than a billion. This is the strongest case in guided consumption we’ve seen so far and I believe our researcher has talked to them so we’ll have some insights from them soon. We have more case studies from companies who are successful in guided consumption (indicating that they are succesful because they give their profits away), but it’s just a few so they might still be outliers.
9. NCOO’s are only necessary when guiding consumption is still the exception. When it becomes the rule it might no longer be necessary. This is likely to take decades if it ever happens at all.
10. Guiding companies might benefit from a independent label (similar to B Corp for example) that distinguishes them from normal business and identifies them as true guiding companies.
11. Our default giving option is to let us decide, which means we donate to the most effective charities (e.g. Maximum impact fund). Consumers can also choose cause areas they like (climate, poverty, animal rights) which are also effective. If they want even more granularity, they can opt for an individual charity. This structure ensures most of the giving is effective (and easy for the consumer) while still enabling choice for the consumer.
12. We haven’t found that being a guiding producer is costly. The most important thing we did is to just open up our books and having books is a requirement every company has anyways. The cost of opening our books has been close to zero. Creating automated and open infrastructure might be costly but can be shared among the guiding producers and could even be white labeled for additional revenue.
13. The largest for-profit companies, almost without exception, face expensive litigation because of anti trust and illegal and unethical behavior. These have large direct and indirect (reputational) costs that are likely to be lower for guiding producers.
14. We believe crypto could be an interesting avenue for raising funds and establishing a community
What links here?
- Compilation of Profit for Good Redteaming and Responses by Brad West (19 Sep 2023 13:33 UTC; 32 points)
- Compilation of Profit for Good Redteaming and Responses by Brad West (LessWrong; 19 Sep 2023 13:34 UTC; 1 point)

Vincent van der Holst 20 Jun 2022 9:13 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Tomer_Goloboy’s comment on: Misercordia Launch!!!
It’s very normal to pay up to 2% for a transaction (even at scale), so I wouldn’t worry about that. We’re paying 1.8% on average on our Shopify and at massive scale that number will still be around 1%.

Looking forward to our talk today!

Vincent van der Holst 20 Jun 2022 9:15 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tomer_Goloboy’s comment on: Misercordia Launch!!!
You might want to look into setting up a EU version of the website that’s linked to a EU based print on demand supplier. This will save shipping costs and delivery times substantially, 2 factors that are very important for consumers.

Vincent van der Holst 20 Jun 2022 9:20 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Misercordia Launch!!!
Love this concept based on Brad West’s paper. Maybe it’s an idea for CEA to do their shirts for events with Misercordia? You could ask them. (Perhaps the most important advice I would give to a young social entrepreneur is to ask, ask, ask).

Vincent van der Holst 23 Jun 2022 16:01 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Are too many young, highly-engaged longtermist EAs doing movement-building?
I agree with Vilhelm that the counterfactual is very important. Are there community builders who would otherwise have more impact in things like high risk entrepreneurship or AI research? Community building is important, but it might not have the high upside potential that research or entrepreneurship has (unless you recruit the next best researcher or entrepreneur through community building).

Another concern that I sometimes think about is the degree of funding going to community building. I might be wrong but a lot of funding seems to be going to community building projects, which is good, but I do see some other projects not receiving funding. That’s counterfactual again: are there projects that aren’t being funded because those funds go to community building? Or are those projects not being funded because the grant makers think they are bad ideas?

Vincent van der Holst 30 Jun 2022 13:41 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Making Trillions for Effective Charities through the Consumer Economy
Please note that I helped edit this piece and gave my feedback, and that I have left my red team points in the previous longer paper. Also note that I’m building a Guiding Company, so I’m biased.
“But even if Guiding Companies engage in activities that consumers take issue with regarding traditional firms, such as competitive (i.e., princely) compensation for CEOs, it is not clear why this would cause a consumer to choose a company that enriches shareholder over a company that helps fight global poverty.”
I think consumers would actually oppose high CEO pay and other activities they deem immoral from Guiding Companies. There’s many examples from NGO’s that got berated for activities that would be normal for traditional companies, like high CEO pay, and I’m not convinced it would be different for guiding companies.
Furthermore, we agree that consumers would choose a company that donates profits to charities over a traditional company when all things are equal, but I suspect that situation is hard to create and will take a long time. Consumers, investors and philanthropists are still wary of this idea, so (for now) it’s harder to attract the capital needed to acquire or build guiding companies that can compete with investor backed companies. And if you get to the no-brainer level, you still need to be able to market it to the public effectively. There seems to me to be no obvious reason why this wouldn’t work, but creating this movement, persuading stakeholders and building these companies will require a lot of time, money and talent and should not be underestimated. But the size of the opportunity is potentially all the profits in the world, so it’s definitely worth exploring.
What links here?
- Compilation of Profit for Good Redteaming and Responses by Brad West (19 Sep 2023 13:33 UTC; 32 points)
- Compilation of Profit for Good Redteaming and Responses by Brad West (LessWrong; 19 Sep 2023 13:34 UTC; 1 point)

Vincent van der Holst 30 Jun 2022 13:54 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jasper Driessens’s comment on: Making Trillions for Effective Charities through the Consumer Economy
Humanitix is a great example, turning something super annoying into good! I will try and reach out to the founders to learn from their lessons.

And don’t get me started on GIC, what a concept! I have subscribed to your newsletter and will follow it closely. Great to see more people interested in this model. I might reach out to you as well to learn from what you’ve learned!

Vincent van der Holst 30 Jun 2022 16:22 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Seth Ariel Green’s comment on: Making Trillions for Effective Charities through the Consumer Economy
Thanks for raising these points Seth. I agree that the burden of proof is higher than what we currently have. This paper and the companies that some of us are building are just the start of proving that this might someday happen.
I think it’s critical to note that guiding companies are basically for-profits. There’s nothing distinguishing them from for-profits except that the profits go to charities and that the investors are philanthropists buying out companies or funding new guiding company initiatives.
The good news is that there’s one large successful case with Newman’s Own, who have donated about 570 million USD to charities and give away all of their profits. There’s more smaller projects that are successful and donated millions, but nothing that I know of that’s close to Newman’s . I see one big difference between Newman’s Own and the other initiatives that are less successful: money.
I hired a research intern to validate that and he’s now drafting up his thesis on the economic sustainability of this business model (I can share it here once it’s done), and the main conclusion is that the issue with this is money. If you have someone like Paul Newman funding your guiding company there’s no reason it can’t be big, and that turns out to be true, because Newman’s Own is a multi-billion dollar company in a very competitive space. If the wealthiest philanthropists put their weight behind this and “invest” in the next best guiding companies, I don’t see why these companies cannot be the biggest in the world. With the money you can hire the best team, and the best teams build the biggest companies. Currently, the infrastructure (venture capital, stock markets, etc.) are lacking for guiding companies, but these can be built. This will take a long time.
To answer your other questions, I have no evidence that any Fortune 500 company tried this, but I don’t think that kind of initiative would be public. You could argue that Warren Buffet, who intends to give away almost all of his wealth, is buying and investing into companies to generate more profits that he can give away to charities. But that’s indirect. Why hasn’t he bought a company and turned it into a guiding company? Twitter and EM are an interesting example as well. Maybe EM would use Twitter to fund his next EA endeavor (e.g. backing up humanity to another galaxy). Would Twitter be a guiding company in that case?

Vincent van der Holst

EA startup—non-profit sus­tain­able marketplace

EA startup—non-profit sustainable marketplace