I want to make the biggest positive difference in the world that I can. My mission is to cause more effective charities to exist in the world by connecting talented individuals with high-impact intervention opportunities. This is why I co-founded the organisation Charity Entrepreneurship to achieve this through an extensive research process and incubation program.
Joeyđ¸
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I have slightly mixed views on this depending on the method. I in general think that competing in very typical fundraising methods, EA areas will typically underperform. Something like door-to-door or online adsâI expect EA areas (picked based on effectiveness vs appeal to donors) would pretty constantly lose to other NGOs who do a good job. On the other hand, I do think EA can have a pretty strong competitive advantage working on things that are closer to common goods that a single charity might not do itself but makes sense if you care about multiple charities/âcause areas. E.g. when I go to a philanthropy conference it tends to go better than a classic charity as I am pretty comfortable talking about 50 possible charities with other donors instead of 1 which NGOs themselves might focus on. That just gives you more surface area to connect. Similar things like charity evaluators or setting up philanthropic funds I think EA might have an advantage on relative to classic NGOs.
If anything I think charities might be a bit too advantaged by going through AIM. The success rate is about â in terms of CE charities becoming field leadingâthis is compared to something like 1â10 of charities founded by other founders in the movement/âvia other incubators. I think part of this is fairly earned (e.g. strong cofounders and ideas selected via more rigorous process) but part is reputationalâa bunch of funders I know are categorically more excited about AIM charities than identical charities that have not gone through the program. I think the same goes for hiring high talent staff. Why that happens concretely, I think cofounder pairing and idea pairing create a huge value add and the training, mentorship and community help new charities avoid some predictable mistakes.
I like meta and I like HNW broadly as areas partly due to there already being a solid number of country-level effective giving organizations. More specific ideas within other comment.
I am very optimistic about promising things being done in this area. I think being able to talk genuinely about multiple cause areas and being less directly pitchy on one worldview/âNGO is a huge advantage a lot of EAs have. We are running a round on improving philanthropy and I would guess ideas we recommend there will be UHNW leaning. I wrote about a couple to do with dessert events and dragons den. Other things that are high on my list right now include grantmaker and philanthropic advisor training (a bit like our grantmaking training program), funder networks (like FAF but for other cause areas), more cross-cutting quizzes/âtools (like GWWCâs how rich are you tool). We are putting pretty active research into this over the next 6 months so I think I will have a better answer then, but on net, I think itâs quite feasible there will be like 6 ideas we would be excited to see a full charity onâmaybe 3 on HNWs.
Definitely an entrepreneur with no research skills. Given that most folks pick an idea our research team already looked heavily into, research skills are a bonus but far from mandatory. Academics have categorically struggled in our program and entrepreneurs have categorically done really well.
Good question. I think talent vs fundingâmost people get this fully backwards, with NGOs worrying way more about funding than they should and way less about talent than they should. I also think a lot of charities worry about doing something that causes harm (pretty rare) vs just being really inefficient at accomplishing your goals and effectively wasting resources (very common). NGOs that focus on great talent and getting a lot done per $ end up going a pretty long way.
I am probably more excited about outreach than research when it comes to high absorbancy opportunities like vitamin A vs malaria nets. I am probably most excited about research on things like family planning or livelihoods that we have not as a movement dug as deeply into and I think there are reasonable ethical views that would prioritize the top of those areas over the top of classic direct delivery global health.
I think it starts at an earlier stage than something like CE generally operates. I sometimes think of CEA as like a PhD programâitâs best fit for someone who has been working on impact directly for a long time. I think what is missing in most LMICs is the early university and chapter infrastructure to build up networks and knowledge so that there is more ready-to-found/âbe-Sr-staff talent built up over time. I generally wish more people spent time living in LMICs as I think it does give you a practical edge that is hard to get otherwise.
I donât think size is the best determiner. I think the seed network or mid-stage funding is probably higher EV at the cost of higher risk and more time to assess. I think if a donor finds getting into the weeds and speaking to the charities more fun I think they should go earlier stage. If they are time poor and want a reliable index fund I think itâs hard to beat GW/âACE recs.
The most clear one is cofounders. Out of the selected ideas and selected cofounders and most other factors we can track, cofounders are easily the most predictive of later charity outcomes. To be more specific, cofounders that are good at problem solving, gritty and really impact driven.
Tons of things. A big category of stuff that comes to mind is underrating certain traits (e.g. hard work) and overvaluing others (e.g. domain experience). A more unique answer (as I often say the above one during talks etc) would be focusing too much on the EA movement and not building strong enough relationships outside of EA (both for AIM directly but also for our charities).
Hey, indeed I have a bit of a unique perspective on this relative to other EAs. I would say it really depends if we are talking about a model of EV (which I think in practice is typically what we have) or the real EV. I would not trade off âtrueâ EV but in practice I am pretty skeptical about models of EV really getting at truth, particularly when they diverge from other forms of evidence. Another way to frame it is I am comfortable with risk but discount EV models based on uncertainty as I think in practice uncertainty tends to lead to less dramatic outcomes (closer to no effect) as we gain more evidence/âcertainty.
Few different perspectives here:
Diversification is good and itâs really hard to cover an entire space (even if you do not get bottlenecked by funding). I think competition creates useful positive incentives.
GFI is great but also does tons of things and itâs pretty hard to restrict donations to a sub-area of a charity so if you thought some activities were higher impact than others and this was one of the higher impact things to do, it could make sense to support a charity that focuses directly on that.
AIM charities tend to run smaller and more cost-effectively than the comparable incumbentsâitâs pretty typical for our charities to do things at about half the price of larger organizations so insofar as a person is willing to trade cost-effectiveness for risk, small orgs tend to overperform.
Yes but after founding to give or EF type programs.
Hey, love to see events like this happening and really clear transparency. I think size is a factor for these events, but I think itâs also a lot of small choices. For reference, our AIM Connect event was ~180 people, ~ÂŁ45 a person (only one meal and one evening though). Would love to see more low-cost events happening in EA.
I think I buy the premises here that being sick/âgetting sick is high cost and happens a lot at conferences, but I also think the cost of wearing masks is pretty non-trivial. I wonder if there are some 80â20 approaches to masking that can cover a lot of ground with lower costs. E.g., wearing a mask on transit on the way, as people also get sick/âpick up bugs from planes/âtransit. Similarly, norms of not shaking hands, using air purifiers, or having more walking meetings all seem pretty cheap/âeasy to implement.
Not part of Founderâs Pledge, but AIM did consider quite a few models like this when doing our founding-to-give program. Our pledge is higher, with 50% above $1M being the minimum. Right now, both ours and Founderâs Pledge connect to individual giving (aka the profit the cofounder would take home personally) instead of, e.g., committing the company itself to donate. They are also both pretty âcleanâ models as they do not require a heavy administrative burden to take stocks, investments, deal with dilutions, etc.
Net, I think both models slightly benefit the companies with almost no impairment to them, which I think would not be the case with heavier models (e.g., directly taking stock, requiring company donated profits, etc.). Our reason for going this way was:
Our sense was that typical investors are far less excited about companies that would have to donate/âtake ethics into account and somewhat less excited about those who have given away any sort of equity
Our sense was the founders typically are founders due to wanting control, so the more control we asked for/ârestrictions we put in place, the fewer high-talent founders would be keen
The admin cost for this is pretty intense, especially for an NGO, so we would have to think that it would have a major upside vs e.g., someone taking a 50% pledge and donating via their own DAF or foundation.
Hey Jamie, sorry my post made you feel bad. Indeed there are more nuances and it would be interesting to compile a more advanced pros and cons list on the topic of targeting younger folks. When AIM/âme have thought about the pros and cons in deeper depth we tend to come out negative on itâspecifically I do indeed think both value drift and flow through ecosystem effects to other parts of the movement are on average under-valubed by EAs. I wanted to call some attention to these two cons.
I like this idea, the clear metrics, and the MVP style of execution. I wish more people would attempt projects on a small scale like this to see if they gain traction before, for example, fundraising $100k and launching a full organization.
I think it starts becoming unclear in the $200k-$500k a year of donations range