Effective Altruism Funds

@tara_macaulay It's encouraging to hear that YC invests in non-profits. In general, what does the fundraising landscape look like for non-profit tech startups?

@ecwilson @tara_macaulay Yeah, it's pretty cool — I think YC, like us, is excited by the idea of the charity sector becoming more competitive and putting the focus on outcomes, rather than just good intentions. Obviously it's easier to scale something with tech solutions (Vote.org is a good example) but it's also important to make sure that your solution is actually addressing the problem at hand. Re funding, I think it really depends on your situation. In general (as with much non-profit financing) it's pretty hard to raise money. We're really lucky that our community believes very strongly in the importance of what we do (because we act as a force multiplier — donating to us means we raise more money for other effective organizations), so I think we're in a better position than most. Interestingly, the reverse can also be true from the funders' perspective — somewhat paradoxically, the effective altruism community is finding it hard to find/seed new organizations that are likely to be as good as our current top charities.

@ecwilson Hi Eric, we're excited about YC supporting non-profits too! In general, the fundraising landscape for non-profits is totally screwed, and that's part of why we're building EA Funds. Right now, many non-profits seek funding from slow-moving foundations or spend a huge proportion of their time and budget on advertising. Non-profit tech startups who can demonstrate their impact have an easier time, especially with the growing interest in scalable, highly cost-effective charities. The Gates Foundations is explicitly focused on effectiveness, but they usually don't make smaller seed grants. GiveWell and Good Ventures offer smaller, incubation grants for non-profit startups, but most of the funding is coming from smaller, angel-style individual donors. If you're interested in founding an effective non-profit, we'd recommend checking out this list on GiveWell's blog (http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10...). The next step I'd recommend is applying for Y Combinator, we've found their advice incredibly helpful, and even preparing for the interview forced us to really clarify our mission, our vision and how we were planning to scale. YC non-profits get a donation to fund their operating expenses, the same way the for-profits get an investment. We're excited about solving this problem, because right now, there is no correlation between how effective a charity is, and how much money they raise from donors. Historically, the charities which get the most money are the ones which have built the best marketing campaigns, not the ones which have the most impact. To solve this problem, we're building a community of donors who put effectiveness first. We've found that 9 out of 10 donors want their money to go a charity which has a proven, measurable impact, but comparing thousands of charities and reading dozens of research articles takes time and is incredibly difficult. If we pool donations from thousands of donors, promising non-profits can come to us to seek seed funding. Our vision is to make it easier for highly effective, start-up style non-profits to get funded quickly so that they can get back to serving beneficiaries.

@katherinekrug Thanks Katherine!