Hey Trevor, great work! I have wanted a graphic like this in the past and will almost certainly use it in the near future!

(Technically not working at AIM anymore, but I was the CEO until recently.)

So I think the broad question is that AIM, and others, should aim to create value from people who get close, not just those who get in. “You get into AIM = huge win vs you just miss and get nothing” is not ideal. This is a solid idea, and I think AIM (and anyone with strong application pools) should probably spend more time on this.

Re: Matching people / helping them found outside of AIM
We did try this a couple of times, but it did not result in especially strong charities. For a charity to become top tier (which is where almost all our modeled EV comes from), many things have to go right simultaneously. Even if two near-misses connect, it is harder for them without cohort benefits, seed funders, and time to test matching deeply before committing. In general, a 50% version of AIM does not yield 50% of the EV, more like 5%.

Re: Closed vs open rounds
If we did closed rounds including people from prior cohorts, we would likely lose ~50% of our talent pool but save ~90% of team time on vetting and comms. However, this is not a good trade-off. Smaller cohorts mean worse matching and fewer charities. I am strongly in favor of open application rounds and think this is still underused in the EA movement.

Re: What could work for near-miss folks
What we have seen work are training programs for people going early into adjacent career paths (AIM has run some of these; HIP and Impactful Policy are strong current examples). Another approach is placing people in high-impact charities (often older AIM charities), as Huw mentions. We could be more systematic about both. More broadly, organizations with strong applicant pools should think carefully about how to create value from strong but non-selected candidates.

I think it starts becoming unclear in the $200k-$500k a year of donations range

I have slightly mixed views on this depending on the method. I in general think that competing in very typical fundraising methods, EA areas will typically underperform. Something like door-to-door or online ads - I expect EA areas (picked based on effectiveness vs appeal to donors) would pretty constantly lose to other NGOs who do a good job. On the other hand, I do think EA can have a pretty strong competitive advantage working on things that are closer to common goods that a single charity might not do itself but makes sense if you care about multiple charities/cause areas. E.g. when I go to a philanthropy conference it tends to go better than a classic charity as I am pretty comfortable talking about 50 possible charities with other donors instead of 1 which NGOs themselves might focus on. That just gives you more surface area to connect. Similar things like charity evaluators or setting up philanthropic funds I think EA might have an advantage on relative to classic NGOs.

If anything I think charities might be a bit too advantaged by going through AIM. The success rate is about ⅓ in terms of CE charities becoming field leading - this is compared to something like 1/10 of charities founded by other founders in the movement/via other incubators. I think part of this is fairly earned (e.g. strong cofounders and ideas selected via more rigorous process) but part is reputational - a bunch of funders I know are categorically more excited about AIM charities than identical charities that have not gone through the program. I think the same goes for hiring high talent staff. Why that happens concretely, I think cofounder pairing and idea pairing create a huge value add and the training, mentorship and community help new charities avoid some predictable mistakes.

I like meta and I like HNW broadly as areas partly due to there already being a solid number of country-level effective giving organizations. More specific ideas within other comment.

I am very optimistic about promising things being done in this area. I think being able to talk genuinely about multiple cause areas and being less directly pitchy on one worldview/NGO is a huge advantage a lot of EAs have. We are running a round on improving philanthropy and I would guess ideas we recommend there will be UHNW leaning. I wrote about a couple to do with dessert events and dragons den. Other things that are high on my list right now include grantmaker and philanthropic advisor training (a bit like our grantmaking training program), funder networks (like FAF but for other cause areas), more cross-cutting quizzes/tools (like GWWC's how rich are you tool). We are putting pretty active research into this over the next 6 months so I think I will have a better answer then, but on net, I think it's quite feasible there will be like 6 ideas we would be excited to see a full charity on - maybe 3 on HNWs.

Definitely an entrepreneur with no research skills. Given that most folks pick an idea our research team already looked heavily into, research skills are a bonus but far from mandatory. Academics have categorically struggled in our program and entrepreneurs have categorically done really well.

Good question. I think talent vs funding - most people get this fully backwards, with NGOs worrying way more about funding than they should and way less about talent than they should. I also think a lot of charities worry about doing something that causes harm (pretty rare) vs just being really inefficient at accomplishing your goals and effectively wasting resources (very common). NGOs that focus on great talent and getting a lot done per $ end up going a pretty long way.

I am probably more excited about outreach than research when it comes to high absorbancy opportunities like vitamin A vs malaria nets. I am probably most excited about research on things like family planning or livelihoods that we have not as a movement dug as deeply into and I think there are reasonable ethical views that would prioritize the top of those areas over the top of classic direct delivery global health.