What we learned from a year incubating longtermist entrepreneurship

Abstract

The Longtermist Entrepreneurship (LE) Project ran from April 2020 through May 2021, with the aim of testing ways to support the creation of new longtermist nonprofits, companies, and projects. During that time, we did market sizing, user interviews, and ran three pilot programs on how to support longtermism entrepreneurship, including a fellowship. The LE Project was run by Jade Leung, Ben Clifford, and Rebecca Kagan, and funded by Open Philanthropy. The project shut down after a year because of staffing reasons, but also because of some uncertainty about the project’s direction and value. We never had a public internet presence, so this may be the first time that many people on the EA Forum are hearing about our work. This post describes the history of the project, our pilot programs, and our lessons learned. It also describes what we’d support seeing in the future, and what our concerns are about this space, and ways to learn more. Overall, we think that supporting longtermist entrepreneurship is important and promising work, and we expect people will continue to work in this space in the coming years. However, we aren’t publishing this post because we want to encourage lots of people to start longtermist incubators. We think doing longtermist startup incubation is incredibly difficult, and requires specific backgrounds. We wanted to share what we’ve transparently and widely to help people learn from our successes and mistakes, and to think carefully about what future efforts should be made in this direction. If you’re considering starting an LE incubator , we’d love to hear about it so we can offer advice and coordination with others interested in working in this space. Please fill out this google form if you’re interested in founding programs in LE incubation.