Founder of new projects (Topic archive) - 80,000 Hours https://80000hours.org/topic/careers/top-recommended-careers/founder-of-new-projects/ Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:53:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lucia-coulter-lead-exposure-elimination-project/ Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:36:16 +0000 https://80000hours.org/?post_type=podcast&p=84938 The post Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

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Organisation-building https://80000hours.org/skills/organisation-building/ Mon, 18 Sep 2023 10:39:52 +0000 https://80000hours.org/?post_type=skill_set&p=83652 The post Organisation-building appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

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When most people think of careers that “do good,” the first thing they think of is working at a charity.

The thing is, lots of jobs at charities just aren’t that impactful.

Some charities focus on programmes that don’t work, like Scared Straight, which actually caused kids to commit more crimes. Others focus on ways of helping that, while thoughtful and helpful, don’t have much leverage, like knitting individual sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills (this actually happened!) instead of funding large-scale ocean cleanup projects.

A penguin wearing a knitted sweater
While this penguin certainly looks all warm and cosy, we’d guess that knitting each sweater one-by-one wouldn’t be the best use of an organisation’s time.

But there are also many organisations out there — both for-profit and nonprofit — focused on pressing problems, implementing effective and scalable solutions, run by great teams, and in need of people.

If you can build skills that are useful for helping an organisation like this, it could well be one of the highest-impact things you can do.

In particular, organisations often need generalists able to do the bread and butter of building an organisation — hiring people, management, administration, communications, running software systems, crafting strategy, fundraising, and so on.

We call these ‘organisation-building’ skills. They can be high impact because you can increase the scale and effectiveness of the organisation you’re working at, while also gaining skills that can be applied to a wide range of global problems in the future (and make you generally employable too).

In a nutshell: Organisation-building skills — basically, skills that let you effectively and efficiently build, run, and generally boost an organisation you work for — can be extremely high impact if you use them to support an organisation working on an effective solution to a pressing problem. There are a wide variety of organisation-building skills, including operations, management, accounting, recruiting, communications, law, and so on. You could choose to become a generalist across several or specialise in just one.

Key facts on fit

In general, signs you’ll be a great fit include: you often find ways to do things better, really dislike errors, see issues that keep happening and think deeply about fixes, manage your time and plan complex projects, pick up new things fast, and really pay attention to details. But there is a very wide range of different roles, each with quite different requirements, especially in more specialised roles.

Why are organisation-building skills valuable?

A well-run organisation can take tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people working on solving the world’s most pressing problems and help them work together far more effectively.

An employee with the right skills can often be a significant boost to an organisation, either by directly helping them deliver an impactful programme or by building the capacity of the organisation so that it can operate at a greater scale in the future. You could, for example, set up organisational infrastructure to enable the hiring of many more people in the future.

What’s more, organisation-building skills can be applied at most organisations, which means you’ll have opportunities to help tackle many different global problems in the future. You’ll also be flexibly able to work on many different solutions to any given problem if you find better solutions later in your career.

As an added bonus, the fact that pretty much all organisations need these skills means you’ll be employable if you decide to earn to give or step back from doing good all together. In fact, organisational management skills seem like some of the most useful and highest paid in the economy in general.

It can be even more valuable to help found a new organisation rather than build an existing one, though this is a particularly difficult step to take when you’re early in your career. (Read more on whether you should found an organisation early in your career.) See our profile on founding impactful organisations to learn more.

What does organisation-building typically involve?

A high-impact career using organisation-building skills typically involves these rough stages:

  1. Building generally useful organisational skills, such as operations, people management, fundraising, administration, software systems, finance, etc.
  2. Then applying those skills to help build (or found) high-impact organisations

The day-to-day of an organisation-building role is going to vary a lot depending on the job.

Here’s a possible description that could help build some intuition.

Picture yourself working from an office or, increasingly, from your own home. You’ll spend lots of time on your computer — you might be planning, organising tasks, updating project timelines, reworking a legal brief, or contracting out some marketing. You’ll likely spend some time communicating via email or chatting with colleagues. Your day will probably involve a lot of problem solving, making decisions to keep things going.

If you work for a small organisation, especially in the early stages, your “office” could be anywhere — a home office, a local coffee shop, or a shared workspace. If you manage people, you’ll conduct one-on-one meetings to provide feedback, set goals, and discuss personal development. In a project-oriented role, you might spend lots of time developing strategy, or analysing data to evaluate your impact.

What skills are needed to build organisations?

Organisation builders typically have skills in areas like:

  • Operations management
  • Project management (including setting objectives, metrics, etc.)
  • People management and coaching (Some manager jobs require specialised skills, but some just require general management-associated skills like leadership, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution.)
  • Executive leadership (setting and achieving organisation-wide goals, making top-level decisions about budgeting, etc.)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Recruiting
  • Fundraising
  • Marketing (which also benefits from communications skills)
  • Communications and public relations (which also benefits from communications skills)
  • Human resources
  • Office management
  • Events management
  • Assistant and administrative work
  • Finance and accounting
  • Corporate and nonprofit law

Many organisations have a significant need for generalists who span several of these areas. If your aim is to take a leadership position, it’s useful to have a shallow knowledge of several.

You can also pick just one skill to specialise in — especially for areas like law and accounting that tend to be their own track.

Generally, larger organisations have a greater need for specialists, while those with under 50 employees hire more generalists.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

There’s no need to focus on the specific job or sector you work in now — it’s possible to enter organisation-building from a very wide variety of areas. We’ve even known academic philosophers who have transitioned to organisation-building!

Some common initial indicators of fit might include:

  • You have an optimisation mindset. You frequently notice how things could be done more efficiently and have a strong internal drive to prevent avoidable errors and make things run more smoothly.
  • You intuitively engage in systems thinking and enjoy going meta. This is a bit difficult to summarise, but involves things like: you’d notice when people ask you similar questions multiple times and then think about how to prevent the issue from coming up again. For example: “Can you give me access to this doc” turns into “What went wrong such that this person didn’t already have access to everything they need? How can we improve naming conventions or sharing conventions in the future?”
  • You’re reliable, self-directed, able to manage your time well, and you can create efficient and productive plans and keep track of complex projects.
  • You might also be good at learning quickly and have high attention to detail.

Of course, different types of organisation-building will require different skills. For example, being a COO or events manager requires greater social and system building skills, whereas working in finance requires fewer social skills, but does require basic quantitative skills and perhaps more conscientiousness and attention to detail.

If you’re really excited by a particular novel idea and have lots of energy and excitement for the idea, you might be a good fit for founding an organisation. (Read more about what it takes to successfully found a new organisation.)

You should try doing some cheap tests first — these might include talking to someone who works at the organisation you’re interested in helping to build, volunteering to do a short project, or doing an internship. Then you might commit to working there for 2–24 months (being prepared to switch to something else if you don’t think you’re on track).

How to tell if you’re on track

All of these — individually or together — seem like good signs of being on track to build really useful organisation-building skills:

  • You get job offers (as a contractor or staff) at organisations you’d like to work for.
  • You’re promoted within your first two years.
  • You receive excellent performance reviews.
  • You’re asked to take on progressively more responsibility over time.
  • Your manager / colleagues suggest you might take on more senior roles in the future.
  • You ask your superiors for their honest assessment of your fit and they are positive (e.g. they tell you you’re in the top 10% of people they can imagine doing your role).
  • You’re able to multiply a superior’s time by over 2–20X, depending on the role type.
  • If you’re aiming to build a new organisation, write out some one-page summaries of ideas for new organisations you’d like to exist and get feedback from grantmakers and experts.
  • If founding a new organisation, you get seed funding from a major grantmaker, like Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, EA Funds, or a private donor.

This said, if you don’t hit these milestones, you might still be a good fit for organisation-building — the issue might be that you’re at the wrong organisation or have the wrong boss.

How to get started building organisation-building skills

You can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of the skills listed above. Work in one specialisation will often give you exposure to the others, and it’s often possible to move between them.

If you can do this at a high-performing organisation that’s also having a big impact right away, that’s great. If you’re aware of any organisations like these, it’s worth applying just in case.

But, unfortunately, this is often not possible, especially if you’re fresh out of college, for a number of reasons:

  • The organisations have limited mentorship capacity, so they most often hire people with a couple of years of experience rather than those fresh out of college (though there are exceptions) and often aren’t in a good position to help you become excellent at these skills.
  • These organisations usually hire people who already have some expertise in the problem area they’re working on (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity), as these issues involve specialised knowledge.
  • We chose our recommended problems in large part because they’re unusually neglected. But the fact that they’re neglected also means there aren’t many open positions or training programmes.

As a result, early in your career it can easily be worth pursuing roles at organisations that don’t have much impact in order to build your skills.

The way to do this is to work at any organisation that’s generally high-performing, especially if you can work under someone who’s a good manager and will mentor you — the best way to learn how to run an organisation is to learn from people who are already excellent at this skill.

Then, try to advance as quickly as you can within that organisation or move to higher-responsibility roles in other organisations after 1–3 years of high-performance.

It can also help if the organisation is small but rapidly growing, since that usually makes it much easier to get promoted — and if the organisation succeeds in a big way, that will give you a lot of options in the future.

In a small organisation you can also try out a wider range of roles, helping you figure out which aspects of organisation-building are the best fit for you and giving you the broad background that’s useful for leadership roles in the future. Moreover, many of the organisations we think are doing the best work on the most pressing problems are startups, so being used to this kind of environment can be an advantage.

One option within this category we especially recommend is to consider becoming an early employee at a tech startup.

If you pick well, working at a tech startup gives you many of the advantages of working at a small, growing, high-performing organisation mentioned above, while also offering high salaries and an introduction to the technology sector. (This is even better if you can find an organisation that will let you learn about artificial intelligence or synthetic biology.)

We’ve advised many people who have developed organisation-building skills in startups and then switched to nonprofit work (or earned to give), while having good backup options.

That said, smaller organisations have downsides such as being more likely to fail and less mentorship capacity. Many are also poorly run. So it’s important to pick carefully.

Another option to consider in this category is working at a leading AI lab, because they can often offer good training, look impressive on your CV, and let you learn about AI. That said, you’ll need to think carefully about whether your work could be accelerating the risks from AI as well.

One of the most common ways to build these skills is to work in large tech companies, consulting or professional services (or more indirectly, to train as a lawyer or in finance). These are most useful for learning how to apply these skills in very large corporate and government organisations, or to build a speciality like accounting. We think there are often more direct ways to do useful work on the problems we think are most pressing, but these prestigious corporate jobs can still be the best option for some.

However, it’s important to remember you can build organisation-building skills in any kind of organisation: from nonprofits to academic research institutes to government agencies to giant corporations. What most matters is that you’re working with people who have this skill, who are able to train you.

Should you found your own organisation early in your career?

For a few people, founding an organisation fairly early in your career could be a fantastic career step. Whether or not the organisation you start succeeds, along the way you could gain strong organisation-building (and other) skills and a lot of career capital.

We think you should be ambitious when deciding career steps, and it often makes sense to pursue high-upside options first when you’re doing some career exploration.

This is particularly true if you:

  • Have an idea that you’ve seriously thought about, stress tested, and got positive feedback on from relevant experts
  • Have real energy and excitement for your idea (not for the idea of being an entrepreneur)
  • Understand that you’re likely to fail, and have good backup plans in place for that

It can be hard to figure out if your idea is any good, or if you’ll be any good at this, in advance. One rule of thumb is that if, after six months to a year of work, you can be accepted to a top incubator (like Y Combinator), you’re probably on track. But if you can’t get into a top incubator, you should consider trying to build organisation-building skills in a different way (or try building a completely different skill set).

There are many downsides of working on your own projects. In particular, you’ll get less direct feedback and mentorship, and your efforts will be spread thinly across many different types of tasks and skills, making it harder to develop specialist expertise.
To learn more, see our article on founding new projects tackling top problems.

Find jobs that use organisation-building skills

See our curated list of job opportunities for this path, which you can filter by ‘management’ and ‘operations’ to find opportunities in this category (though there will also be jobs outside those filters where you can apply organisation-building skills).

    View all opportunities

    Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

    The problem you work on is probably the biggest driver of your impact, so the first step is to decide which problems you think are most pressing.

    Once you’ve done that, the next step is to identify the highest-potential organisations working on your top problems.

    In particular, look for organisations that:

    1. Implement an effective solution, or one that has a good chance of having a big impact (even if it might not work)
    2. Have the potential to grow
    3. Are run by a great team
    4. Are in need of your skills

    These organisations will most often be nonprofits, but they could also be research institutes, political organisations, or for-profit companies with a social mission.1

    For specific ideas, see our list of recommended organisations. You can also find longer lists of suggestions within each of our problem profiles.

    Finally, see if you can get a job at one of these organisations that effectively uses your specific skills. If you can’t, that’s also fine — you can apply your skills elsewhere, for example through earning to give, and be ready to switch into working for a high-impact organisation in the future.

    Career paths we’ve reviewed that use organisation-building skills

    These are some reviews of career paths we’ve written that use ‘organisation-building’ skills:

    Read next:  Explore other useful skills

    Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

    Plus, join our newsletter and we’ll mail you a free book

    Join our newsletter and we’ll send you a free copy of The Precipice — a book by philosopher Toby Ord about how to tackle the greatest threats facing humanity. T&Cs here.

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    Founder of new projects tackling top problems https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/founder-impactful-organisations/ Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:01:53 +0000 https://80000hours.org/?post_type=career_profile&p=74762 The post Founder of new projects tackling top problems appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

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    In 2010, a group of founders with experience in business, practical medicine, and biotechnology launched a new project: Moderna, Inc.

    After witnessing recent groundbreaking research into RNA, they realised there was an opportunity to use this technology to rapidly create new vaccines for a wide range of diseases. But few existing companies were focused on that application.

    They decided to found a company. And 10 years later, they were perfectly situated to develop a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 — in a matter of weeks. This vaccine played a huge role in curbing the pandemic and has likely saved millions of lives.

    This illustrates that if you can find an important gap in a pressing problem area and found an organisation that fills this gap, that can be one of the highest-impact things you can do — especially if that organisation can persist and keep growing without you.

    In a nutshell: Founding a new organisation to tackle a pressing global problem can be extremely high impact. Doing so involves identifying a gap in a pressing problem area, formulating a solution, investigating it, and then helping to build an organisation by investing in strategy, hiring, management, culture, and so on — ideally building something that can continue without you.

    Recommended

    If you are well suited to this career, it may be the best way for you to have a social impact.

    Review status

    Based on a medium-depth investigation 

    Why might founding a new project be high impact?

    If you can find an important gap in what’s needed to tackle a pressing problem, and create an organisation to fill that gap, that’s a highly promising route to having a huge impact.

    But here are some more reasons it seems like an especially attractive path to us, provided you have a compelling idea and the right personal fit — which we cover in the next section.

    First, among the problems we think are most pressing, there are many ideas for new organisations that seem impactful. But it seems like there’s comparatively few people able to execute on them.

    This is probably because founder skills are rare, which means that if you do have these skills, using them is a very impactful thing to do.

    Moreover, the donors to the problems we’re most focused on would often like to donate more money each year if only there were more projects that met their bar for effectiveness.

    Again, this means if you can create an organisation that’s sufficiently effective, it’s possible to raise millions of dollars relatively quickly — and we’ve seen this happen.

    Second, building an organisation is a route to leverage. By creating a scalable system and team for delivering an impactful programme, through economies of scale, you can achieve much more than you could individually. Moreover, if the organisation can continue to exist without you working there, then that impact can persist into the future.

    More broadly, founding new organisations is an example of a high-upside, low-probability way to have an impact, and these are often especially promising due to the reasons we outline in our article on why to be more ambitious.

    Even a moderate chance of success with potentially high-impact ventures could rank as one of the most influential paths you might take. (We also argue, though, that you should be careful to limit the downsides).

    Finally, founding a project can also — depending on your personality — be among the best options for building your career capital, since it’s impressive (even if you fail), and you’ll need to learn a huge amount. (Though many people learn more in a more structured environment where they can get close mentorship, rather than ‘learning by doing’ or the ‘sink or swim’ approach you get in entrepreneurship.)

    You might have noticed that many of the reasons that make founding an impactful organisation impactful also make it hard. So we don’t suggest entering this path lightly.

    In the next section, we talk about what’s required.

    What does it take to succeed?

    Founding a successful social impact organisation is not easy.

    We often speak to people who first decide they want to be entrepreneurs and then look around for an idea to execute on. This often results in finding an idea that sounds reasonable but is not actually amazing. It’s also likely not a route to staying motivated for the 5–10 years you probably need to get something off the ground.

    Here are some of the things you need to succeed.

    A good enough idea

    This sounds obvious, but spotting an idea that’s actually good is not easy.

    Once you’ve identified a pressing problem area, it’s hard to identify what’s most needed to solve those problems and which remaining gaps are most pressing.

    It’s then even harder to figure out how to build an organisation around filling those gaps that can actually raise funding, attract a good enough team, and scale up.

    Moreover, while the world of doing good is not especially efficient (especially compared to the world of making money), it is efficient enough that the most obvious ideas are often taken.

    Finding a great idea that isn’t yet taken, therefore, usually requires some kind of ‘edge’ compared to other people interested in doing good, such as discovering something new or being much more motivated by the idea than others. And finding something like this often requires significant expertise within a pressing problem or being lucky to stumble over an idea others have neglected.

    This is one reason why great startup ideas often emerge out of fun projects that weren’t expected to turn into organisations.

    You need to be able to convince donors

    On a more practical level, you’ll need to convince funders that your idea is worth their resources (whether you’re raising donations as a nonprofit or investment as a for-profit).

    Donors who want to maximise their impact should only be willing to fund projects above a certain ‘bar’ for cost effectiveness based on their estimate of how effectively they’ll be able to deploy funds in the long term.

    So, your project will only get off the ground if you can convince donors that it has a reasonable shot of being more cost-effective than this bar (read more). Different funders have different bars, and the bars often aren’t explicit.

    Generally, here are some of the features funders we most often work with are looking for in ideas and projects they want to support:

    • Problem area: Does it address one of the most pressing problems?
    • Solution: Are you focusing on an intervention that has at least some chance of making a big difference to the problem? Have you found a compelling gap in the field? (See hits-based giving.) Or is it evidence-backed, cost-effective, and scalable?
    • Do you have a great team?
    • Does it seem like you have the skills to build a well-functioning and scalable organisation?

    Many nonprofit donors aren’t as systematic as this and give more based on which projects they find exciting. Raising money from these kinds of donors can help you get off the ground, but they’re often a less reliable source of funding.

    One advantage of funders who have a clear bar is that, provided you clear the bar, they’ll be open to giving you more and more funding as you scale up (until you hit diminishing returns).

    It may be harder to impress funders than you think, because of:

    • Overoptimism — estimates of cost-effectiveness typically regress to the mean when done more carefully. Pilot programmes are also typically significantly more cost-effective than the scaled-up version of a programme.
    • Counterfactuals — e.g. if a fundraising charity appears to raise $100, typically some of that money would have been donated anyway, and that needs to be removed from the estimate.
    • The opportunity cost of labour invested in the project — if you hire people who could have had a positive impact otherwise, such as by earning to give, then their effective ‘cost’ could be much higher than their salaries.
    • Indirect ways the project could have a negative impact or affect others trying to do good — e.g., it might create PR risks.
    • Time discounting reduces the benefits of a project that takes a long time to pay off.

    While it’s often well worth testing out many ideas to see if they can succeed, it’s not an easy thing to do, and we should expect most projects to not work out.

    An idea that really motivates you

    Successful founders are typically obsessed with their idea and find it hard to imagine working on anything else. This level of motivation is often necessary to see an idea through despite facing challenges like key team members leaving, missing a fundraising target, or having major projects fail — all of which happen in the lifetime of most startups.

    This is another reason why sitting down and trying to think of startup ideas in the abstract often doesn’t work. Developing the level of obsession required often requires working in the area for years until the gap really starts to bother you.

    In the case of 80,000 Hours, I was motivated in part to solve a problem I actually had: I had all these questions about how to have an impact with my career, but the existing resources didn’t answer them or had answers that seemed wrong. I couldn’t let people be wrong on the internet, and this compelled me to get started.

    That said, we have seen people who are really motivated by a particular issue (like factory farming), or even doing good and effective altruism in general, and this has provided enough motivation to found an organisation, even without being intensely motivated by the particular programme they’re implementing. And in the nonprofit space, taking a ‘top down’ approach to finding an idea can sometimes work.

    Having a founding team you love working with is also a huge factor here.

    Leadership potential

    Running a social impact organisation requires significant skill, and in particular, some degree of leadership potential — i.e. the ability to develop a vision and inspire people to back it.

    Many founders who seem formidable today did not seem impressive when they first started. So you shouldn’t eliminate this path if you don’t feel like a CEO right now. But you can look for small-scale signs of potential, such as whether you can convince one or two people to support the idea and whether you often have lots of ideas for ways to make things better.

    Generalist skills

    Founders tend to be generalists — running a startup requires juggling more duties than one can really learn how to do ‘the right way.’ It crucially relies on the ability and willingness to handle many things ‘just well enough’ (usually with very little training or guidance), and focus one’s energy on the few things that are worth doing ‘reasonably well.’

    Enough knowledge of the area

    We encourage people to work on issues like biosecurity and AI safety, which require specialist knowledge and connections. You can often gain these within around a year if you make meeting people in the area your top priority (though it’s useful to have more experience than that).

    In the for-profit world, industry experience and age are both correlated with probability of success, and we expect the same applies to projects aiming to do good.1

    Having these connections can also help avoid accidentally setting back the field.

    Good judgement

    Nonprofit ideas often lack good feedback mechanisms (such as revenue), which means that the leader’s judgement about what the biggest priorities are is much more important. It’s easy to focus on the wrong thing and lose most of what matters. (Learn more about how to develop your judgement.)

    The ability, willingness, and resilience to work on something that might not work out

    Not everyone has the flexibility to try a project for a while that is likely to not go anywhere. You can try to reduce the risks by testing it as a side project first. (It’s also important to have a backup plan, which we discuss in our career planning course.)

    That said, it’s also easy to overstate the downsides of starting a new project. You might well find it wouldn’t be hard to return to regular employment (especially if you have a specific backup plan and/or have some savings), and you’ll likely gain good career capital that will serve you in your next role.

    Here’s an article that goes into more depth about the bottlenecks to entrepreneurship within longtermism.

    Examples of people pursuing this path

    Next steps if you already have an idea

    If you already have an idea you feel really motivated by, we’d encourage you to pursue testing it further.

    Even if it doesn’t work out, you’ll probably learn a lot about entrepreneurship and the problem area in question. Most people in our community (and many people in general) respect someone who’s tried to do something ambitious and difficult, even if it didn’t work out. You’ll probably end up with at least similarly good career capital to what you would have otherwise.

    The next steps typically involve further testing out your idea, since getting started is often the quickest way to learn about whether funders and potential hires are interested, how quickly you can make progress, and what the main strategic uncertainties are. This could mean trying to pursue it on the side while you stay in your current job, or if you have the flexibility, you could aim to work on it exclusively for a few months.

    Pick one very small and simple version of your idea as the test. An extremely common mistake among founders is to try to do way too much at once. Most great startups have an idea that can be simply explained even at scale, and when you’re just getting started, it’s even more important to start small.

    People underestimate how hard it is just to do one thing well — but doing something well on a small scale is the best way to build trust with funders and unlock more resources to expand your idea to the next stage.

    Besides starting small, try to design a test that can resolve one of your key uncertainties about the project. Ask yourself, “What’s the minimum amount of validation I need to justify the next level of funding?” Then do that. If it works out, go to the next level of scale.

    It’s hard to give much more general purpose advice, so if the idea is for a project within one of our priority problem areas or problem areas that seem promising, then we’d be interested to speak to you.

    If you’re further along, you could:

    There are also many other organisations that can help you outside of the effective altruism ecosystem. For example:

    In the first couple of years, you’re probably doing reasonably well if your organisation is in a reasonable financial position, hasn’t had any clear disasters, and has done pretty well at attracting talent. Beyond that, how long to stick with your project is a difficult judgement call.

    Next steps if you don’t have an idea yet

    Normally we recommend working within the problem areas that you might want to found something within.

    You could seek almost any job that gives you either organisation building skills or that lets you work within the relevant problem area.

    The ideal option would probably be working in a small but rapidly growing, high-performing organisation focused on a pressing problem because this will let you learn how to run this kind of organisation.

    It’s ideal to work in a generalist role where you can practise different skills needed in running an organisation (e.g. recruiting, strategy, management, finances).

    If you’re not able to find an impactful organisation that’s high-performing, you could consider working at a tech startup instead in an organisation-building role (or any other kind of organisation-building role).

    Alternatively, you could work at a highly-relevant organisation that’s less well-performing (though this is risky), or find a different kind of role that lets you learn about the area. This could even involve working in applied research or policymaking, since this can be a route to understanding a complex global issue and spot gaps related to it.

    Working within the problem area will help you gain relevant knowledge and connections while giving you a chance to stumble across gaps you might help fill. This is more likely if you’re excited to explore ideas on the side at the same time.

    Another option is to find a position that lets you or encourages you to explore project ideas on the side — many startups began in graduate school for this reason. Alternatively you could find a 9–5 style job at a company with lots of potential cofounders.

    There’s a difficult question about how ‘directed’ to be about finding an idea. In the for-profit world, people often say that the best ideas are stumbled across rather than the result of a deliberate search. There’s also a lot of scepticism about whether someone can be ‘handed’ an idea from someone else — the thought is that if you don’t come up with the idea yourself, you’re unlikely to be obsessed with it enough to make it work.

    This, however, seems to be somewhat less true in the nonprofit world. We think it can be worth entertaining other people’s ideas and seeing if they catch your motivation. If you have the flexibility, you could consider taking 3–12 months off from your normal work to learn about and test ideas.

    Might founding a for-profit company just aimed at growth rather than impact be good training for later starting another high-impact organisation? You’ll probably learn a lot, but this often involves being locked in for 5–10 years. So it isn’t generally the most efficient route to founding a project with direct impact (though it could give you money and other good career capital).

    Lists of ideas

    If you’re interested in hearing the most promising current ideas, we’d encourage you to apply for our one-on-one advice, and we can introduce you to people trying out new projects.

    To give you a flavour of what exists, here are some of the best public lists we’re aware of:

    Want one-on-one advice on pursuing this path?

    If you think this path might be a great option for you, but you haven’t found the right idea for a new organisation to found, our team might be able to tell you about ideas that aren’t public yet and introduce you to others pursuing this path.

    APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

    Read next:  Learn about other high-impact careers

    Want to consider more paths? See our list of the highest-impact career paths according to our research.

    Plus, join our newsletter and we’ll mail you a free book

    Join our newsletter and we’ll send you a free copy of The Precipice — a book by philosopher Toby Ord about how to tackle the greatest threats facing humanity. T&Cs here.

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