In 2010, a group of founders with experience in business, practical medicine, and biotechnology launched a new project: Moderna, Inc.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They decided to found a company. And 10 years later, they were perfectly situated to develop a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 \u2014 in a matter of weeks. This vaccine played a huge role in curbing the pandemic and has likely saved millions of lives.<\/p>\n
This illustrates that if you can find an important gap in a pressing problem<\/a> area and found an organisation that fills this gap, that can be one of the highest-impact things you can do \u2014 especially if that organisation can persist and keep growing without you.<\/p>\n In a nutshell:<\/strong> 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 \u2014 ideally building something that can continue without you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you are well suited to this career, it may be the best way for you to have a social impact.\n<\/p><\/div>\n Based on a medium-depth investigation Table of Contents<\/p> 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 which we cover in the next section.<\/p>\n First, among the problems we think are most pressing, there are many ideas for new organisations<\/a> that seem impactful. But it seems like there’s comparatively few people able to execute on them.<\/p>\n This is probably because founder skills are rare, which means that if you do<\/em> have these skills, using them is a very impactful thing to do.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Again, this means if you can<\/em> create an organisation that’s sufficiently effective, it’s possible to raise millions of dollars relatively quickly \u2014 and we’ve seen this happen.<\/p>\n Second, building an organisation is a route to leverage<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n Finally, founding a project can also \u2014 depending on your personality \u2014 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.)<\/p>\n You might have noticed that many of the reasons that make founding an impactful organisation impactful also make it hard<\/em>. So we don’t suggest entering this path lightly.<\/p>\n In the next section, we talk about what’s required.<\/p>\n Founding a successful social impact organisation is not easy.<\/p>\n 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\u201310 years you probably need to get something off the ground.<\/p>\n Here are some of the things you need to succeed.<\/p>\n This sounds obvious, but spotting an idea that’s actually good is not easy.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This is one reason why great startup ideas often emerge out of fun projects that weren’t expected to turn into organisations.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>). Different funders have different bars, and the bars often aren’t explicit.<\/p>\n Generally, here are some of the features funders we most often work with are looking for in ideas and projects they want to support:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n It may be harder to impress funders than you think, because of:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 all of which happen in the lifetime of most startups.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> they’re implementing. And in the nonprofit space, taking a ‘top down’ approach to finding an idea can sometimes<\/em><\/a> work.<\/p>\n Having a founding team you love working with is also a huge factor here.<\/p>\n Running a social impact organisation requires significant skill, and in particular, some degree of leadership potential \u2014 i.e. the ability to develop a vision and inspire people to back it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Founders tend to be generalists \u2014 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.’<\/p>\n We encourage people to work on issues like biosecurity<\/a> and AI safety<\/a>, 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Having these connections can also help avoid accidentally setting back<\/a> the field.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Here’s an article that goes into more depth about the bottlenecks to entrepreneurship within longtermism<\/a>.<\/p>\n Recommended<\/h3>\n
Review status<\/h4>\n
\n <\/i><\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<\/span>Why might founding a new project be high impact?<\/h2>\n
<\/span>What does it take to succeed?<\/h2>\n
<\/span>A good enough idea<\/h3>\n
<\/span>You need to be able to convince donors<\/h3>\n
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<\/span>An idea that really motivates you<\/em><\/h3>\n
<\/span>Leadership potential<\/h3>\n
<\/span>Generalist skills<\/h3>\n
<\/span>Enough knowledge of the area<\/h3>\n
<\/span>Good judgement<\/h3>\n
<\/span>The ability, willingness, and resilience to work on something that might not work out<\/h3>\n
<\/span>Examples of people pursuing this path<\/h2>\n