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Applications to AIM’s first animal welfare-focused incubation round close this Sunday, 13 September. If you are on the fence, this is my final nudge.
Apply nowI only did because someone from the Ambitious Impact team nudged me six years ago. So at the risk of being annoying, I'll say it once more: the best way to find out if this is the right path for you is to apply. The selection process is built to help both of us work out whether you’re a match.
You don’t have to identify as an animal person, an activist, or a vegan. You can be, and plenty of excellent founders are, but it isn’t the bar. I’ve been in and out of veganism since 2017, and I run this program. The bar is taking seriously that factory farming is one of the biggest problems of our time, and being willing to follow the evidence on how to fix it. Animal people are just as welcome, and the best cohort will have a real mix of backgrounds.
We think the animal welfare movement is at a genuinely exciting moment. Cage-free campaigns took animals a long way, and the pipeline for what comes next looks thin. Funding is scaling up. There’s low-hanging fruit going unpicked because barely anyone is in the orchard. There’s a lot of opportunity here for entrepreneurial people who are eager to help animals at scale. We also don’t know whether we’ll ever run an animal-only round again.
If you doubt whether you’re the perfect fit, it's good to know we mostly think about co-founder pairs. We’re not looking for one perfect co-founder with every quality and all the relevant experience. That person doesn’t exist.
We think about impact across the whole cohort, which means we think in combinations: which two people, put together, have the skills and the capacity to do this. So if your read of yourself is “I’m probably missing some of that”, you’re right. So is everyone. I certainly was in 2021, and same for my co-founder Andrés, but together we made a great team.
Founding a charity is exciting, and it’s hard. That’s why our program exists. We help you find the right idea. We connect you to funding. We teach you everything we know about launching a high-impact charity. Your job is to spend all of that on animals.
My dream is that this round launches charities that change what we think is possible for animal welfare, the way corporate campaigns did, and then go further. That only happens if the people who should be in this cohort apply by Sunday.
Apply now
