I understand where you are coming from. Our general belief is that an evidence-based idea coupled with a strong and value-aligned founder is a recipe for success. We would rather have a smart inexperienced person who believes in the methods of science and cost-effectiveness than a domain expert who thinks less in these terms. In this sense, being an impact-focused effective altruist is a “unique capability”.
We do, however, acknowledge that expertise and experience can add a lot of value. Our recruitment targets experts from subfields of our cause areas as well, e.g. young global mental health professionals. In the program, we try to pair generalists with domain experts, whenever possible. In addition, many founders recruit domain experts as their first hires.
Interesting question! Our current bottleneck is seed funding for new charities. We consider donations to our charities to be a high-impact opportunity for institutional and individual donors. Researching a sufficient number of ideas has been a bottleneck in the past, but we have been able to address it by expanding our research team. In terms of promising applicants, there is no shortage at the scale of 20-30 participants per year but it could become an issue as we scale as well.
If we go with an online program this year, this will provide an interesting learning ground in terms of scaling up our course platform, similar to what Y Combinator is doing with Startup School.