Ask Charity Entrepreneurship Anything

Depends what you mean by median core EA, but defining it as “someone we could bump into at EAG multiple years in a row”, I would say:

• We think there are limitations to what desktop research can uncover, especially in more neglected areas where evidence is more scarce. Therefore, we are time-capping stages of our research process and putting a lot of attention into making it more and more efficient over time (e.g., experimenting on and evaluating the research process itself and iteratively improving it). We think that some parts of research & strategy work will have to be done after a charity gets started as they will be in a better position to gain more information, design quick experiments with  fast feedback loops, and iterate. In general, we are making sure our research can be used to start a high-impact charity in the span of months and sometimes deliberately do not provide answers to all questions.  As a result, we tend to take more risks. 
• We are less focused on longtermism, and prioritize global well-being (global health and development, animal welfare ect.) based on epistemics the team shares.
• I think there is a cluster of beliefs related to: taking moral uncertainty seriously, the team being interested in greater cause diversity and in actively exploring candidates for Cause X. 

This in many ways is the default path for how many NGOs grow. I think there are quite a few reasons why CE overperforms relative to this. Decentralization broadens the risk profile that each charity is able to take, and smaller organizations move far, far quicker. I suspect the biggest factor though, is not structural but social. The level of founders we get applying are really strong relative to an organization like CE hiring program directors. Due to the psychology of ownership they work far more effectively for their project than they would as an employee of a larger organization. 

• We suspect that a huge number of EAs don’t apply who would be excellent candidates, thinking themselves not good enough.
• This is a shame. Historically, about half of those who have made it all the way through the program and achieved funding didn’t even think they’d be accepted. 
• Doctors think they lack the commercial skills, business students think they lack the research skills and researchers think they lack the interpersonal skills. The truth is that nobody comes onto the program ready. That’s what the program is for. Moreover, year one of running the charity is where you pilot, test, learn and become an expert; skillful and capable.  Almost nobody actually hits the ground running. We know this too. We are looking for people who have the potential to BECOME great founders, in time. 
• Furthermore, very few people have a good sense of what it actually takes. That’s because they’ve never done anything like this before. So they underrate themselves not knowing what it takes. We, on the other hand, having started a bunch of charities, do have a good sense of what it takes. So you’re probably best off applying and trusting our vetting process. 

• Specifically, we notice that people who are a bit newer to the community (two years) are often hesitant to apply, despite being potentially a very good fit… especially if they have been running an EA chapter, doing community-building activities, reading the EA forum regularly, and engaging with our content. 

• Another hurdle we find is that many people think that they should first get more experience before they apply.  Yes, some experience can be applicable, but almost nobody has started a charity before. Domain expertise can also be useful, but again, almost nobody has domain expertise in lead elimination, bait fish advocacy work, or how to run educational radio ads in Africa. 

• We also note that a founder that starts now and runs a charity for three years will outperform (at running a charity) someone who does two years work experience in a consultancy and then starts running a charity for a year. In short, start early and learn the most applicable things. Every year you delay is a year’s worth of impact removed from the world.  

• So we think that applying early should be a default option. Some of our most successful charities were started by graduates straight from university (e.g., Family Empowerment Media, Fish Welfare Initiative, Fortify Health ). We provide very intensive training and sometimes a part of it is unlearning ineffective work habits people have previously picked up in less impact-focused roles. 

• It’s also worth noting that we don’t vet on the basis of age, (we’ve had 19yr olds and 60+ yr olds),  gender, introversion vs extroversion, or location.  We build charities in historically marginalized and underserved regions and we favor local applicants. 33% of our program participants are from low or middle income countries (and increasing). Our own team is also diverse: 66% are female, nonbinary or from sexual orientation minorities.

• It’s also just worth applying. Round one involves 60 questions and uploading your CV. But you’ll get feedback on your answers, so at the very least it’ll be worth your while, even if you don’t progress this time. 

• Lastly, if you applied previously, we strongly encourage you to do so again. We’ve had numerous participants who didn’t get in on their first application. One tried four times before being successful! 

Yeah great question! There were some similarities and differences from our normal research process

Similarities

• We predominantly looked for ideas where there were good feedback loops to measure the impact of the charity and the good that it was doing
• Our research process  largely worked and could be adapted to biosecurity as a cause area
• We considered the potential of the negative impact of our ideas, and ideas where this was more likely were far less likely to pass through our research stages

Differences

•  We had to very seriously consider information hazards in our idea, which is not a consideration we had given much weight on or considered at all for other cause areas
• Had to rely a bit more on expert opinion and ‘lower’ quality forms of evidence like theoretic evidence, case studies
• We had a lot more uncertainty about our cost-effectiveness analyses, since estimates vary a lot depending on priors about likelihood of future pandemics and how bad they could be; to an extent, these uncertainties were multiplicative, which made quantification particularly challenging
• We had to coordinate and talk a lot more to EA biosecurity folk- the space is small and growing, and it was important to coordinate to make sure we were not duplicating something that was already happening in a way that might be harmful

We are happy to chat to anyone interested in biosecurity who might want to start a charity and wants to talk more about our research process and the ideas we are most excited about in this space

• Our mission is for more highly- impactful charities to exist in the world. In four years we’ve helped launch 23. We’ve proved our model works and we’re now getting ready to scale up. 
• Our research team has traditionally targeted ideas for charities that, in expectation, will be at least 5 X AMF. 
• We’ve grown in confidence, scope and capability. We’re now targeting even more ambitious  ideas and, we hope, we’re demonstrating  what’s possible. 
• We’ve grown a very tight- knit community of charity entrepreneurs, funders, researchers, and advisors. 
• Three  SAMPLE wins are… 
• 1) Fortify Health who are on the pathway to become one of the GiveWell top recommended charities. They recently received an $8.2 million incubation grant to scale their efforts in India.
• 2) Lead Exposure Elimination Project is a charity that drives effective policies to eliminate lead poisoning across the globe. In their first year they managed to convince the government of Malawi to take lead paint off the shelves. This may mean ~215,000 fewer children in Malawi getting lead poisoning . LEEP is now working on similar projects in nine other countries.  
• 3) Fish Welfare Initiative has improved the lives of well over 1.6 million aquatic farmed animals and are making progress in one of the most important, neglected and hard to work places - India, which is the second largest producer of fish globally. 

Choosing cause areas

In general, CE looks at cause areas where we can have a significant, legible and measurable impact.

Traditionally, this has meant focusing on cause areas that within EA are commonly considered near-termist, such as animal welfare, global health and wellbeing, family planning and mental health.

However, we think that there are cause areas that fall outside of this remit, and potentially that are traditionally within the long-termist space, where we could potentially find interventions that may have a significant impact and where there are concrete feedback loops. In fact, this is what prompted our research team to look into health security as a cause area.

During out intervention prioritisation research

Within health security, there are probably some differences in the way we have defined and operationalised this as a cause area and prioritised interventions compared to others in the community:

1. We have taken a broader focus than GCBRs (Global Catastrophic Biological Risks), and thought about things like antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic pandemics and other biothreats which are very unlikely to have GCBR potential but which may, in expectation, be quite high priority to work on.
2. We are probably less likely to be excited by ideas that might be more tailored solely towards tail-risk GCBR threats. This might include something like civilizational refuges, which we imagine is only useful for extinction risks. The reason that we are less excited about these ideas is not necessarily because we think that the risk of such events is low, but firstly because we think that there are unlikely to be strong ways to measure the impact that work on this area would have in the short to medium term, and secondly because this has less impact in the case of lower than extinction level risks.
3. To operationalise our research and the cost-effectiveness estimates that we have made, we looked at the impact of our interventions using a time frame of the next 50 years. We do not think this is a perfect operationalisation, but think it is fairly useful. We are very sceptical of our ability to know what the biggest risks to the world would be after 50 years.
    

Credit note: This answer Initially drafted by former CE staff Akhil Bansal.

(This first bit is copied from below)

We provide a whole range of supports, from on-going weekly coaching/mentoring, advisors, retreats, sharing resources, workshops, giving administrative, logistical, and legal support. We do whatever we can to help. It's not perfect and we'd like to be able to give even more, but on the whole we are always there if a charity asks for help.

We help find new hires, we help access funding, we've even set up a yearly "insurance" system where our charities can opt to place a small % of their donations as a "rainy day fund" for a charity in the pool that has a timing issue securing funding.

—- then to address your question more specifically…

We help with visa applications, endorsements etc, and if you’re moving to London we can provide shared office space at our HQ.

We also provide stipends to cover living costs for a month or so after the program if needed.

For those who start a charity, the specific costs of relocation can be added to their funding proposal and spent down as the founders see fit. We provide access to the network of funders. But it’s up to the founders to pay themselves what they need to do the work. It’s their choice. We don’t stipulate salaries. So if you need to relocate then we’d encourage you to include this in your proposal.

Currently: Currently we have a backend CEA that evaluates the possible scenarios and impact outcomes for each of the charities. It starts out with pretty wide confidence intervals but tends to narrow as the charities get older (e.g., 2nd or 3rd year). We also write up more narrative reviews that go to a set of external advisors. 

Long term plan: Longer term we want to hire an external evaluation organization to evaluate every charity we found two years after founding, and use those numbers instead of internal ones. 

Our policy regarding salaries has not changed as much as other meta charities; leanness tends to attract a different sort of applicant. We have a range ($40-$60k) but would consider applications from candidates who need higher than that range. In practice, we have often found the most talented candidates are less concerned with salary and more concerned about other factors (impact of the role, culture, flexibility, etc.). We are a bit skeptical about the perception that talent increases from offering higher salaries (instead of attracting new talent, we typically see the same EA people getting job roles but just for a higher cost). 

Yes, signing up to be a mentor is a great way to get involved! 

I know of ~3 people who've applied or are applying, and expect there to be more I don't know of :) 

I want to add to Steve's answer: 
We did extensive user research when we were starting out, both among prospective candidates and among actual successful charity founders, to find out what the barriers are and design the program to address them. Since then we haven’t done systematic research of this sort, but are constantly updating based on hundreds of conversations we have every year with people who could be a good fit, and partly based on that, modify the support we offer to address their concerns. 

Coommon barriers for applying to the program: 
1) One of them can be that someone does not have enough information about the program. We decided to address that by participating in multiple EAGx conferences this year, having talks, career booths, and meeting people in one-on-one settings. As you know, we have also visited EA Israel  and gave a talk addressed to local entrepreneurs. :)
2) The second barrier is that people are sometimes choosing between multiple career options, e.g., getting more education or experience before considering starting a project. We have addressed this by offering coaching calls that people could apply for twice in the last year. 
3) The third barrier ( and we have written more about this in another answer on this forum) is when someone has some misconceptions about personality traits, credentials, or expertise needed. That is why we have modified our talks and workshops to explain better who awe are looking for and what traits, in our opinion, make the best nonprofit entrepreneurs. 

We have noticed that we are most successful in encouraging people to apply when a team member, or a person who started a charity through our program, can talk to them. Just sharing their experience or more information about the program and the support after the program, can make a big difference. We also want people to consider the application process itself as the best test to check their fit for this career path, that is why we invite them to apply as a form of career development - to see if this is the right path for them. 

We have limited capacity, but if you know anyone you think would be a great fit for starting one of our top ideas (https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/research)  this year, feel free to connect with us at [email protected]

Here’s a video of a presentation: it’s purpose is to help people really consider if this path is for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpZgc0e1aaQ

If you email me [email protected] I’m happy to talk about how you might run a group session, and share some resources.

I think something talking about the concept of cause X , or an area we think is a top contender that many EAs have not yet considered deeply (e.g., family planning). Even with the recent challenge prize on this, I think EA is way over-indexed on exploit vs. explore when it comes to cause areas.  

We would love to see some kind of integration between what used to be the EA Hub, Swapcard, and EA Forum. It would be amazing if the EA movement could basically have its own ecosystem that combined the functionalities of LinkedIn (all people having professional, accessible work profiles in one space/database) and the forum (the profile is connected to our EA forum posts), with the additional feature that would allow the user to quickly apply to any conference from the profile, and transfer the data to Swapcard (or another conference app).  So an all-in-one EA profile that could be researched by potential colleagues, employers, and co-founders. For CE this kind of access to the EA talent pool would be immensely beneficial because one of the bottlenecks for our scaling is reaching the talent pool that can start new charities faster.  

We provide a whole range of supports, from on-going weekly coaching/mentoring, advisors, retreats, sharing resources, workshops, giving administrative, logistical, and legal support. We do whatever we can to help. It's not perfect and we'd like to be able to give even more, but on the whole we are always there if a charity asks for help.  

We help find new hires, we help access funding, we've even set up a yearly "insurance" system where our charities can opt to place a small % of their donations as a "rainy day fund" for a charity in the pool that has a timing issue securing funding. 

We certainly don't vet on the basis of age. We've had 19 yr olds and 60+ yr olds. I was 43 on the program. Yes it's true that most of the applicants are younger and that youth is a reasonably good proxy for higher energy and career / location flexibility, but we do value life experience and do seek older applicants. One can imagine a particularly good founding team being made up of a younger person with their strengths and an older person with their experience. 

We have published a post on our scaling plans here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EL3dKu5XcfjYhdjFX/ce-is-scaling-our-3-year-plan-and-current-hiring-round and they are now in progress, with the goal of doubling the quality and quantity of our charities in the next three years. Both, regional branches and cause area branches were part of the discussion when we were making the plan and our next evaluation point is coming this November, so we can’t exclude them completely. Some ideas included: India branch of CE, and only animal-focused CE, and these are still under our consideration. However, the three-year plan published on the EA forum is the closest to our near-term plans.  We are typically limited by senior staff who could lead a scaling project like this. 

Great suggestion, changed that! 

We have the ideas, (and can find more) we have the program, (and can train more). What we need are more applicants. More leaders to pick up the ideas and make them a reality.

Our goal is to find two-three very good ideas each research cycle. So that would mean approximately four-six top ideas per calendar year. In our near-term scale-up plan, we could increase our capacity to maybe eight top ideas per calendar year (we are just talking about ideas we want to see launched through our Incubation Program). 

Hi Larks! A lot to unpack here but in general, we only decided to start a family planning organization after we concluded that it also has a positive near-term effect on human well-being, and when it comes to long-term, very uncertain flow-through effects, we don’t strongly take them into account for any of the interventions we evaluate because they are too uncertain, but we gladly will when more evidence is available. I will address your specific points below. 

In 2018 you published a report (now deleted from the internet) that advocated for reducing human populations in the third world in order to reduce meat consumption.

[...]

I see you have continued to do work on charities that would reduce human populations, though without making as explicit that the original motivation was not so much to help people directly but rather to reduce their number. 

First of all, just a clarification here, we are not focusing on reducing human populations to start with, but on reducing suffering and increasing well-being. Also, we did not assume that it would be an advocacy for reducing human populations in the third world specifically. As the summary at the top says: “The intervention ended up looking surprisingly impactful for animals, particularly if conducted in countries with a high need for contraceptives and high fish and poultry consumption.” We took into account all possible countries and applied those criteria. Usually, countries that have lower GDPs also have higher unmet needs, including for contraceptives, so they scored high on our priority country research, but some high-income countries were also at the top, for example Israel, so we did not have any agenda targeted at developing countries. 

When the CE team writes about family planning, it does includes all the effects, including animal welfare. For example, in the post you linked, in the table of effects, you can see the impact on animals. Welfare Points are the unit we use to evaluate animal welfare organizations. So I don't know where the concern about hiding that reason is coming from. 

In 2018 you published a report (now deleted from the internet) 
 

Yes, this report just focused on animal welfare effects. We were aware of previous work analysing family planning for its human health effects, but none that analysed the animal effects, so we decided to start our analysis from that perspective. Note that we did not start any family planning charities until we looked into these effects deeper and focused on, the near-term effects on humans as well. The timeline was:

• 2018 - We analysed the animal effects of family planning interventions
• 2019 - mid No family planning charities were incubated. 
• Later 2019/ early 2020 - we decided to look deeper into family planning, focusing on the effects that it had on human health, education, income etc. We published this post explaining why we are researching family planning and outlining those effects. After looking into those positive effects on people’s well-being, we were convinced to do a round of research on family planning interventions.
• Mid/end 2020 - We incubated our first family planning charity. 

So we only started a family planning organization after looking into the near-term human well-being effects and concluded that they are positive. 

Additionally, as Charles mentioned, we have incubated many other charities that directly aim at improving people’s health (e.g., LEEP, Fortify Health) and well as those that save people’s life (e.g., Suvita) in low-middle income countries. 

Some subsequent reports do not mention the impact on animals at all, even though this initially seemed to be the primary motivation. Perhaps this is because you planned to obscure this fact

Note that this post is not written or published by the CE team. It was written by Sarah and Ben who are co-founding a post-partum family planning organization. This post was written by them to outline their motivations and the effects that they are counting.

This was criticised by several people, both for ignoring flow-through effects (like existential risks, wild animal suffering, or long run growth, or population ethics) and for seeming dishonest about your true motivations / resembling eugenics.
[...]

• Honesty:
  • Promoting a intervention based on analysis X (e.g. neonatal health) when the actual reason you believe in it is Y (animal welfare), and being intentionally misleading about this fact.

[...]

in a contrived, remote way, these could lead to people slipping in implausible, extremely negative associations

It's not a crux for me so I don't want to go to deeply into this point, but I don't think it is that implausible that normal people might connect 'we want to reduce populations in the third world' with 'eugenics'.

Those two points you are making are contradictory to each other, and we see that trade-off as well, that’s why we previously said that we "prefer to discuss it in conversation rather than in writing” because that enables more open and honest discussion without having to worry about potential PR risks to the EA movement.

But in balancing those two, I don’t see evidence that the CE team has been intentionally misleading about it. Our first post was explicit that is was an analysis of the animal welfare effects of family planning. We took it down from the EA forum and the website because we have been advised that it may be potentially a PR risk for the EA movement. We agreed and took that post down, however, we continued to express that those effects are also taken into account when analysing the promise of the intervention, as you can see in the post you linked and the above screenshot, to be honest about the effects we take into account, even though it was recommended as an organization after we looked into nearterm human wellbeing effects as well. 

• Flow-through:
  • Analyzing in depth one positive flow-through effect (animal welfare) but not other flow through effects that plausibly are very large and negative (e.g. existential risk, wild animal welfare, growth, population ethics). (Unless there is unpublished research on this subject, hence my asking).

I think the question of how to treat flow-through effects is really hard, and people have different perspectives on it (Graves, St Jules, Wildeford). In general:

• For the effects that we have evidence for, such as human health, animal welfare, and income effects on the household, we model them explicitly. 
• When it comes to population ethics, this is particularly tricky. We started to work on a project that would take it into account more explicitly using a moral weights framework. 
  Some inputs we were thinking about including were pretty standard: “Averting the death of an individual under-5 is equivalent to doubling consumption for one individual for how many years?” or “Averting the death of an individual under-5 is equivalent to how many DALYs?”
  Other inputs were more unusual: “Preventing an individual from being born who would live in a population scoring 3/10 on life satisfaction is equivalent to how many deaths of an individual under-5 averted?”, “Preventing an individual from being born who would live in a population scoring 4/10 on life satisfaction is equivalent to how many deaths of an individual under-5 averted?” or “Averting the death of an individual under-5 is worth preventing how many factory farmed chickens from being born?” 
  But we decided that it is too complicated and that we are not going to “solve population ethics.”  We also learned that Rethink Priorities is undertaking research into moral weights and tradeoffs against humans and animals, and as an org solely focused on research, they will be in a better spot to address those sorts of questions and we have been tracking the progress of that work. 
  Given that population ethics seems to be one of the least tractable problems in practical ethics and that smart aligned people widely disagree about it, we are leaning more toward a “balanced portfolio” approach (that has been described by Michael St Jules). For example, we can aim to balance life-saving interventions (example of CE charity - Suvita) with family planning interventions (example of CE charity - Family Empowerment Media) and aim at minimizing total externalities on population size in our charity portfolio. And even though it is hard to do it precisely, we are aiming at that balance. In the future, as more progress will be made on moral weights and how to include population effects in evaluations of interventions, we will be updating our approach, as long as it will be consistent with how we in general want to treat uncertain effects. 
• On wild animals- I would like to include those effects. Unfortunately, there is currently very little evidence on it. I’m not aware of anyone who evaluates global health interventions that would include wild animal effects, or any nuclear security interventions that take into account farmed or wild animal welfare effects. The reason is that it is hard and the effects are uncertain to the level that sign of the effect can flip very quickly. So until more research is available on that, we are not able to include those effects in our evaluations. I’m excited about any efforts that go into that, and in the future, as more evidence comes out, we will gladly include that in our analysis as well. 

Until all of those effects are studied, we plan to approach it from a worldview diversification approach and aim at balancing the portfolio. This is similar to how it is being treated in EA more broadly e.g., GiveWell doesn’t model long-term populations effects, AI safety work rarely, if at all, takes into account effects on farmed animals (Peter Singer& Yip Fai Tse, 2022), farmed animal evaluations don’t take into account effects on wild animals, and nuclear risk analysis doesn’t take into account potential positive effects in the reduction in the number of factory farmed animals, etc. Ideally, we all would do it, but for now, it is too impractical to do. 

All in all, I recognize this is a tricky issue and that in our communication, we have to balance being transparent about what effects we take into account (human health, animal welfare etc.) whilst also managing potential PR risks for the EA community, and in our approach to flow-through effects we have to take into account the amount of evidence that is available for those effects and at the same time not completely neglect uncertain effects. 

Umm, there is a lot going on here.

advocated for reducing human populations in the third world in order to reduce meat consumption. This was criticised by several people, both for ignoring flow-through effects (like existential risks, wild animal suffering, or long run growth, or population ethics) and for seeming dishonest about your true motivations / resembling eugenics

Is this view that this "resembles eugenics" your personal view? Because I can’t find this claim in your linked comments besides Ben Millwood’s feelings that this could produce negative reactions.

Millwood’s concerns are fine and welcome, but your comment seems much much stronger. Do we want to encourage a norm that stops discussions/projects, because in a contrived, remote way, these could lead to people slipping in implausible, extremely negative associations (often to the disadvantage of conservative viewpoints, since the coastal left is heavily over represented in EA?)

now deleted from the internet...seeming dishonest about your true motivations...neglecting these concerns

You say the initial presentation of the idea is “dishonest”, but it’s not clear why? You state their agenda is the mission of reducing animal suffering, and then you state that this ignores flow through effects. That is not dishonesty.

I see you have continued to do work on charities that would reduce human populations, though without making as explicit that the original motivation was not so much to help people directly but rather to reduce their number.

Charity Entrepreneurship has developed literal standout EA charities including LEEP, which is actively promoted Will MacAskill, and Fortify Health, which is funded by GiveWell. Both of these improve the welfare, almost solely, of people in developing countries.

This takes vast amounts of effort and dedication. Both Karolina and Joey, and many members of the team, have worked and developed deep competencies in developing countries. 

It seems like family planning would be more along these lines of CE's work, instead of some covert eugenics program?

was criticised by several people, both for ignoring flow-through effects (like existential risks, wild animal suffering, or long run growth, or population ethics)

...

neglecting these concerns, even though they had caused others to reach the opposite conclusion, because of time limitations

...

You suggested that you "prefer to discuss it in conversation rather than in writing"; have you published such a report on population ethics and other flow-through effects since?

Do anyone here think that a full analysis of (checks notes) "existential risks, wild animal suffering, or long run growth, or population ethics", especially to the degree that it would satisfy EA  forum discussion norms, is a going to be practical use of time, when they could create more charities? 
 

I my opinion to say "continued to do work on charities that would reduce human populations" is very unfair referring to a proposal on family planning.

We would be excited about people creating another CE. We think that creating a more effective organization is extremely impactful and would be happy to see more organizations working on it. In those few efforts that have been tried by the EA community, we were happy to advise and share our knowledge, and we will be happy to do it for others.  

To my knowledge, there is no EA-aligned nonprofit incubator that provides comprehensive support similar to CE. The closest was Longtermist Entrepreneurship (LE) Project, but they discontinued after a year of scoping. They wrote a fantastic post about their learning. A couple of other organizations that offer some support: 

• FTX offers funding for new organizations, and EA Funds also often seed new projects, I suspect that both founders could also help with advice and connections to relevant people, 
• Sometimes they are efforts to incubate specific organizations, e.g. civilizational refuges (SHELTER weekend announcement and report from the retreat),
• Rethink Priorities and Effective Ventures are offering operational support for new projects.

Outside EA there is also Skoll which offers support for social enterprises and FastForward for tech nonprofits, but I have mixed views about them as they are clearly not EA-focuses and I don't know enough about the incubation part. In global health and development, there is D-Prize, but they mostly offer funding and not an incubation. 

There is also a for-profit & social enterprise route and here you will find tons of incubators, although usually outside of the EA sphere. I personally think that Entrepreneur First is great and we learned from them when we were just starting up. I also know of some EA folks scoping opportunities to start EA for-profit incubator.  

We once gave a talk titled: “Impactful opportunities around and adjacent to charity entrepreneurship” you can watch the recording here. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/drRsWTctSqNRveK56/what-is-the-expected-value-of-creating-a-givewell-top

Yes - the best way to figure out if you’re a good fit is to apply. 

It's low cost and we've developed a pretty good understanding on who will do well. It's not reasonable to expect to know yourself, if you'd be a good fit for doing something that you've never done. So I'd suggest you submit an application and see how far you get. 

I will add though, not getting through doesn't mean you're NOT a good fit, it just means we had some concerns or reservations given our particular approach. However if you do get in you can be confident you ARE a good fit. We are very careful about that. 
 

Also, as said elsewhere, almost nobody is a good fit when they first join the program. That’s what the program is for. We’re looking for potential, ambition, capacity to learn and overtime to become a leader.  

Yes - that's been done in the past. Case by case basis. There can be good reasons to defer. But it's best to apply early and then discuss those considerations with us if you progress to the final rounds of the application process. 

We start with ~3000 applications and only accept a small number. It may seem like the odds are low, however: 

• Lots of people apply via the initial form, but after that the odds become more reasonable and you would find yourself up against numbers closer to 300. The stats for EAs are also pretty high (about 5x more likely to be successful relative to non-EA applications).
• If you get to interview one, you may be among 50-100 other people
• At test task two, among 20-50.

We’ve tried to make the first two rounds valuable and worth the effort even if you don’t progress. Round one will give you feedback on your fit and strengths. Round two will enable you to compare and contrast your career options. 

The upside of applying (we believe) is high, and combined with the feedback you’ll get, there is good reason to put yourself forward. We try to be very careful not to waste anyone’s time. 

The process to arrive at a co-founder and charity idea is very much participant-driven. In the first five weeks, you will work on two charity-relevant projects per day, in pairs. Initially, you will get to know every participant. Each week, you submit your preference in terms of ideas and co-founders. This will influence project assignments for the coming week. Towards the end of the five weeks, each participant ends up with a few favorite co-founder/idea configurations. The CE team will make a recommendation on charity teams based on participants’ preferences and the highest impact potential. In the final three weeks of the program, you will work in your actual charity configuration - with an idea and co-founder you really like - and submit a project proposal. The proposal will be screened by CE and forwarded to CE’s funder network which issues seed grants.

Compared to other movements it seems pretty good; relative to the ideal, we of course could do better. In general, I think encouraging more critical thinking and debate is likely a step in the right direction.  Right now I think disagreements can be handled a bit indirectly (e.g., I would love to see even more open cause area debates instead of just funding of outreach in one area and not another).

When it comes to mentors during the program, multiple team members are available; it depends on the expertise needed for a given problem. Long-term mentorship is often decided based on the cause area in which a given mentor has more experience in, but it is not set in stone. As for external expertise, the same rule follows; we will have mentors in multiple areas available, e.g., fundraising, research, M&E etc. So the mentors/advisors are mostly based on needs and there is an opportunity to talk or work with multiple.

Yes, we have! In our very recent post on the EA forum we actually linked to our ideas list from the previous rounds:  “You can see the full initial list of about 275 ideas, along with a summary of our prioritization process here.”
We would like to include more information like this in the future. However, we always need to be mindful about how much people would update based on more shallow research and how much time would it take to communicate it well, e.g., polishing these earlier stages for publishing. In the past, sometimes people over-updated or formed an opinion based on shallow research and we would like to avoid that. We do share our notes with organizations that we collaborate with, or upon request if we think it would be useful for others. But yes, we are in the process of thinking how we can improve the information sharing even further within our time limits. 

We believe that it's very challenging to change  existing organizations.

I think there are a few things that fit into this category, how much deference is in the EA space would be one.  Another would be the relative importance of high-absorbency career paths. Some things we have not written about but also fit would be how EA deals with low evidence base/feedback loop spaces. Or how little skepticism is applied to EA meta charities.

It is definitely difficult to do research into these areas where there is so much suffering involved, and as you mentioned it is often the areas of suffering that you just had no idea about that are the worst - learning a new way that animals suffer. It’s also important, of course, to make sure that these emotions don't bias us towards interventions that are more horrific but less tractable etc.

For me the most difficult thing I have had to research is the use of glue traps for rodents as I just didn’t know glue traps existed before doing this research and the photos and descriptions of their use were particularly horrible, this was without a doubt the saddest I had felt whilst doing research. The way I console myself is that I know that I am doing this research because we are trying to help these animals, or the most animals we can, and that definitely feels worthwhile. 

I have just sent you a message about it (apologies for the late reply, we get a lot of contact emails at the moment). From the deadline (31st October) it should take us up to 6 weeks to process the applications. We are happy to accommodate circumstances like this during this period. 

I have an additional question about timing:

Is October 31st 2022 the application deadline for June-August or will you provide later a new deadline for the program June-August?

• Imagine Rob Mather hadn’t started the Against Malaria Foundation. That’s likely 200 million bednets, gone from the world. 
• Imagine Karolina and Joey hadn’t started CE, that’s 23 charities and perhaps all their future impact, gone from the world. 
• Imagine Will hadn’t started GWWC and CEA, that likely means no EAGs, no movement, no EA Forum…. all gone from the world.
• Leaders, founders, starters-  people who step up to the plate and launch something are incredibly contingent, irreplaceable, and important.  They can set in motion massive amounts of impact. Few opportunities have such upsides, few build more career capital. 
• We have thousands of EAs but not nearly enough organizations to absorb the current talent pool, let alone the future tsunami of people coming into EA. We need to create a pipeline of hundreds of organizations now, who will absorb and direct the world's most talented and committed altruists towards the world's most pressing problems. If we don't, so much good will be wasted. 

As we mentioned in another response: 
We start with ~3000 applications and only accept a small number. It may seem like the odds are low, however lots of people apply via the initial form, but after  that the odds become more reasonable and you would find yourself up against numbers closer to 300. The stats for EAs are also pretty high (about 5x more likely to be successful relative to non-EA applications). If you get to interview one, you may be among 50-100 other people. At test task two, among 20-50. We’ve tried to make the first two rounds valuable and worth the effort even if someone doesn’t progress. Round one will give you feedback on your fit and strengths. Round two will enable you to compare and contrast your career options. 

We also published a blog post on most common reasons people don’t get into the Incubation Program here.
For the majority of candidates they are:
- Own idea being weaker than top recommendations,
- Limited experience running independent projects,
- Weak test tasks,
- Low flexibility
For the strongest candidates they are:
- Lack of competitive advantage,
- Complicating factors,
- Riks of low co-founder compatibility,
- Charity entrepreneurship not being a top choice