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this is: What we learned from a year incubating longtermist entrepreneurship, published by Rebecca Kagan, Jade Leung, imben on the effective altruism forum.
This post is a retrospective on the Longtermist Entrepreneurship (LE) Project, which ran for a year and explored ways to incubate new longtermist entrepreneurship. If you’re in a hurry, we recommend reading key lessons learned, what we’d be excited about, and what it takes to work in this space.
Thanks to Markus Anderljung, Aaron Gertler, Sam Hilton, Josh Jacobson and Jonas Vollmer for reviewing, as well as many others who reviewed an earlier draft of the document. All opinions and mistakes are our own.
Intro
The Longtermist Entrepreneurship (LE) Project ran from April 2020 through May 2021, with the aim of testing ways to support the creation of new longtermist nonprofits, companies, and projects. During that time, we did market sizing, user interviews, and ran three pilot programs on how to support longtermism entrepreneurship, including a fellowship. The LE Project was run by Jade Leung, Ben Clifford, and Rebecca Kagan, and funded by Open Philanthropy. The project shut down after a year because of staffing reasons, but also because of some uncertainty about the project’s direction and value.
We never had a public internet presence, so this may be the first time that many people on the EA Forum are hearing about our work. This post describes the history of the project, our pilot programs, and our lessons learned. It also describes what we’d support seeing in the future, and what our concerns are about this space, and ways to learn more.
Overall, we think that supporting longtermist entrepreneurship is important and promising work, and we expect people will continue to work in this space in the coming years. However, we aren't publishing this post because we want to encourage lots of people to start longtermist incubators. We think doing longtermist startup incubation is incredibly difficult, and requires specific backgrounds. We wanted to share what we’ve transparently and widely to help people learn from our successes and mistakes, and to think carefully about what future efforts should be made in this direction.
If you’re considering starting an LE incubator[1], we’d love to hear about it so we can offer advice and coordination with others interested in working in this space. Please fill out this google form if you’re interested in founding programs in LE incubation.
Key lessons learned:
Overall, it’s likely that one or multiple organizations should be doing LE incubation. We need more longtermist organizations, and the current ecosystem doesn’t seem poised to fix this problem. Our fellowship and matchmaking pilots were promising, suggesting that there’s more we can do to start new organizations.
There’s interest in LE programs, but a limited talent pool that has strong backgrounds in both longtermism and entrepreneurship. Talent is likely to be a significant bottleneck. Hundreds of people expressed interest in doing LE, but a very small number of these (1-3 dozen) had backgrounds in both longtermism and entrepreneurship. There were few people that we thought could pull off very ambitious projects.
The idea pool is more limited and less developed than we expected. There are existing lists of ideas, but almost no ideas are fleshed out and have broad support. There are no clear “highest priority ideas'' that are obviously good to pursue and have been carefully vetted. Instead, most people we spoke to thought that the most promising ideas depended on the available talent. We found almost no longtermist ideas for traditional startup-minded people to pursue.
Funders are worried about downside risks of some new projects, but often more open to funding short-runway projects with frequent checkpoints. Funders do want to see m...
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