Momentum (formerly Sparrow) is a venture-backed, EA startup that aims to increase effective giving. We build donation pages that emphasize creative, recurring donations tied to moments in your life (e.g. offset your carbon footprint when you buy gas, or give to AI alignment every time you scroll Facebook) and we use behavioral science to nudge new donors to support EA charities.

Our goal is to direct $1B per month to EA causes by 2030, growing EA funding by over an order of magnitude and becoming EA’s largest funding source. We believe that relying exclusively on a few mega-funders is not a robust long-term strategy for EA. Yet effective giving is quite small - there are 7.4K active EAs, and 85K people have ever donated to GiveWell. In contrast, each year, 240M Americans donate and 11M people visit Charity Navigator alone. We intend to reach a large number of people who have not yet heard of EA but are open to making highly-effective donations.

82% of VC-backed startups fail, and Momentum may be no exception. However, the potential upside of creating a sustainable funding source for EA is so great that the expected value appears high. And there’s evidence that we're on the right track.

Momentum has moved over $10M with our software from 40,000 donors. In our mobile app, 87% of donations went to our recommended charities (including several longtermist ones). We have $4M in funding from both EA funders (e.g. Jaan Tallinn, Spencer Greenberg, Luke Ding) and venture investors (e.g. Mark Cuban, Eric Ries, On Deck), making us one of a handful of VC-backed EA startups. Our campaigns have received widespread attention from celebrities (Peter Singer, John Legend, MLK III) and the press (e.g. NYT, BBC, and Quartz).

Our team recently grew from 3 to 9, and we have 6 more openings in product, growth, engineering, etc. For the right person, this could be very high impact and a great place to work. We’d love to hear from you - email ari@givemomentum.com or apply here.

A huge thank you to Jade Leung, Ozzie Gooen, Aaron Gertler, Rebecca Kagan, George Rosenfeld, and Bill Zito for feedback. All opinions and mistakes are our own.

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The product

To increase the number of EA donors, we need to reach people outside of EA and encourage effective giving. We reach new donors by providing donation pages to a wide range of...

Momentum

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