I currently lead Google’s Flood Forecasting Initiative alongside several other humanitarian and climate-related efforts, I’m the co-founder and head of research at Probably Good, the founder and head of the board of Effective Altruism Israel, teach Applied Ethics and Information Security at Tel Aviv University, am a venture partner at the VC firm Firstime which invests in climate startups, and am on the advisory board of ALLFED.
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Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization
Hi Lincoln and Ben, thanks for doing this! I would love to hear your perspective on the following topic:
Nonprofit entrepreneurship is a dominant career path within EA, with many people excited about the impact that it can achieve. Impact-focused for-profit entrepreneurship is rarely discussed or recommended by EA organizations, with a 2016 article about your startup being one of the only materials on this topic. I have also heard multiple people argue that for-profit entrepreneurship is an inherently less promising path than nonprofit entrepreneurship for various reasons.
What is your view on the value of for-profit entrepreneurship from an EA perspective? Do you believe this career path is undervalued by the EA community and its organizations today? If so, what do you believe people interested in for-profit entrepreneurship should do to found highly impactful organizations? Are there any specific opportunities you think are particularly interesting or exciting in this space?
Thanks in advance!
Hi Brian, thanks for the kind words and the insightful feedback!
Here are my thoughts on the points you raise (not necessarily coordinated or representative of EA Israel in general):
1. I totally agree with your point about having separate metrics for proficiency with EA vs. engagement with EA Israel. In practice, our contributors and participants groups are actually some mix between these two metrics. For example, EAs professionally working in high-priority paths were often included in them (if they were interested) even if they were not actively engaging with EA Israel. All of this is to say—I don’t think we’re neglecting people who are proficient or involved in EA in practice, but this only strengthens the case for referencing these metrics explicitly.
2. I agree there is room for some more longterm planning. To be honest, it has been very long since it was unclear whether EA Israel would survive months, let alone years. It was only fairly recently, when Gidi started working part time (and received CEA’s community building grant which allowed him to do so), that we’ve been able to more meaningfully organize and plan. We’ve started with defining this strategy, which focuses mostly on the upcoming year, and have not yet done meaningful longer term planning (and will probably only do so after our new mode of operation settles a bit). Regarding many of your specific questions, such as the number of sub-groups, and how those would be divided—I genuinely don’t know, and prefer an experimental/empirical approach rather than trying to dictate our end goal from first principles.
3. I think the comment about student groups is a great point, and wanted to share a few thoughts on this. Students are actually our top-priority audience group, and a majority of our outreach efforts are focused on students (including a new academic course, a new fellowship, thesis consulting with effective thesis and more). In fact, reading this comment I re-read the strategy doc and was surprised to find out students are not mentioned even once given how much we prioritize and discuss outreach to students internally. I think we should definitely update this fact as part of our strategy. The other when referring to student groups is the specific framework, for which student groups are one possibility. I am generally in favor of this, though less certain as to whether this is the right way for us to try and get students involved. Formal student groups are less common and popular in Israel than in many other countries (see David’s comment about some reasons why), so we’re still thinking about how to onboard and organize students. We’re going to try fellowships this year, there are also “cells” which are groups of students organizing to take action on a specific topic (e.g. sustainability, or various political groups). Long story short, engaging students is one of our top priorities, though we’re still not willing to commit to a specific framework for doing so.
4. I would roughly estimate that about 80% of our time is dedicated to community building & outreach, while only about 20% of time is dedicated to direct work projects. In terms of the optimal ratio, this is a bit challenging to phrase in a way that isn’t misleading. As we mention in the strategy doc, a main driver of our involvement in direct work projects is new members’ interest in doing them, and the fact that we think it’s a good way to get people more involved. Since one of our top priorities is to grow the pipeline of people becoming deeply involved, and (given our strategy) this would have the effect of having more people working on direct-work projects (at least in the early stages of their involvement), then I would love to see the percentages of direct work projects go up. However, I would not want people working on community building & outreach to switch to working on direct-work projects.
Thanks again, and please keep the questions and feedback coming!
Thank you both for your thoughtful answers.
To clarify, I don’t have a strong opinion on this comparison myself, and would love to hear more points of view on this. Sadly I’m not aware of any reading materials on this topic, but have heard the following arguments made in one on one conversations:
For-profit entrepreneurship has built-in incentives that already cause many entrepreneurs to try and implement any promising opportunities. As a result, we’d expect it to be drastically less neglected, or at least drastically less neglected relative to nonprofit opportunities that are similar in how promising they are. This can affect both our estimate of how much we’d expect to find good opportunities still lying around, and also how we’d estimate our counterfactual impact (as if we hadn’t implemented a profitable intervention, there’s higher likelihood someone else would).
The specific cause areas that the EA movement currently sees as the most promising—including global poverty and health, animal welfare, and the longterm future—all serve recipients who (to different degrees) are incapable of significantly funding such work. This could be seen as directly related to the first point, but even if the first point is false, one could still argue that it just happens to be the case that the most promising cause areas are not a good fit for for-profit entrepreneurship. I think the case here applies more strongly to animals and future people (who clearly can’t pay for services), but to a lesser extent can also apply to the extremely poor who can pay only very little.
For-profit organizations may produce incentives that make it unlikely to make the decisions that will end up producing enormous impact (in the EA sense of that term). One variation of this argument is that the revenue/growth needs tend to always come first (I can’t do any good if I don’t exist), which means there ends up being little freedom to optimize for impact. Another variation argues that even if one could optimize for impact, these incentives alongside the environment can cause significant value drift, and many people following this path will end up not doing so.
Finally, I’ve also heard from several people the claim that today EA has an immense amount of funding, and if you’re a competent person founding a charity that works according to EA principles it is incredibly easy to get non-trivial amounts of funding. This is not necessarily an argument for nonprofits, but this potentially somewhat mitigates what is perhaps the strongest argument against nonprofits—access to capital. Somewhat like point 2, this is a more circumstantial argument than an inherent.
Finally, the fact that I listed arguments in favor of nonprofit entrepreneurship over for-profit entrepreneurship may give the impression that this is my opinion, so I want to clarify again that it is not and I am highly uncertain about this topic.