John Salter
Bio
Participation1
Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity
Posts 14
Comments201
1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it's extremely small.
You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it's impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it's extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school.
- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project?
- Will people actually use it?
- Can you keep your staff?
- Can you cost-effectively produce results?
It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.
2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW
Don't fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.
As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don't delegate it. It'll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won't be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won't learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well.
3. Be lean AF
The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you've been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It's about surviving until that point.
4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can
As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application - especially the facts and figures.
5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else
Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you're trying to inform, not persuade.
- Avoid abstractions
- State exact values ("few" -> "four", "lots" -> "nine", "soon" -> "by the 15th March 2024")
- Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions.
- Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind
OLD: mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it's quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year"
NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7/10. Our goal is to hit 9/10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].
Good luck!
I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.
It'd be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we'd naturally enjoy to do.
Updating your website feels extremely low urgency as a charity founder. Often you're facing existential threats, deadlines for funding applications, operational issues that can literally be the difference between life and death, and a million other pressing issues you know you'll never get round to because of the aforementioned.
I'm firmly on the side of sharing a draft.
YC aims at making VCs money; the Charity Entrepreneurship programme focuses on helping poor people and animals
I think both are trying to create value at scale. YC cares about what percentage of that value they're able to capture. AIM doesn't. I suspect one ought, by default, assume a large overlap between the two.
I don't think the best ideas for helping poor people and animals are as likely to involve generative content creation as the best ideas for developed world B2B services and consumer products
As every charity listed is focused on human wellbeing, let's focus on that. I think access to generative AI is better placed to help poorer people than it is to help richer people - it produces lower quality outputs than otherwise available to rich people, but dramatically better than those accessible to poor people. For example, the poorest can't afford medical advice while the rich get doctors appointments the same week.
The EA ecosystem isn't exactly as optimistic about the impact of developing LLM agents as VCs either..
It think the type of agent matters. It's unclear how a chatGPT wrapper aimed at giving good advice to subsistence farmers, for example, would pose an existential threat to humanity
The more I think about it, the more I suspect the gap is actually more to do with the type of person running / applying to each organisation, than the relative merit of the ideas.
In the UK, it seems as though if you form an independent school, you get a ton of leeway about what you teach and how. If it could fund itself, it could be a really cost-effective experiment with big implications if it's better and others adopt it.
You probably need:
1. A few rich early-adopters who're die hard haters of traditional schooling, all concentrated in a single location, ideally with children around the same age.
2. An inexpensive school building to start with. Perhaps an office near a large park.
3. A model that lets you be the sole teacher, and insurance for a cover teacher if you fall ill.
4. A mentor who's started an independent school before
5. A large loan / grant from an UHNWI. You likely have little hope at getting a grant from a foundation so it's probably not worth trying (if the education sector is anything like the rest of the charity sector)
It's likely that starting a full school right away is completely hopeless. You probably need a series of intermediate steps to move you in that direction slowly. For example, if you homeschooled for rich parents, that'd let you build a network of rich parents while testing / refining your ideas.
For now, I suspect you'd be better off asking for advice from domain experts than EAs. If you're serious about this, you might want to meet with the author and try to sell them on promoting your school. I suspect marketing would be your biggest issue by far, at least for the first few years.
Two questions I imagine prospective funders would have:
- Can you give some indication as to the value of stripends? It's not clear how the benefits trade off against that cost. It's tempting to think that stripends are responsible for >80% of the costs but bring <20% of the benefit.
What would your attendees have been doing otherwise?
I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:
1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly
2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin
3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts
4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome
5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting
6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal
7. Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting
In generally, looking for the most anxiety provoking, boring, and lowest social status work is a good way of finding impactful opportunities.