Effective Altruism organizations are finding a sudden lack of funding constraint. When businesses have relaxed funding constraints, it is because they either have revenue themselves, or because venture capital or similar markets have found that there is a clear path towards revenue or success otherwise defined. EA organizations are instead finding funders that view the problems they are addressing as critical and worth funding, and those funders are often asking the organizations themselves what the best path forward is.

Early stage startups usually explore fairly widely until they find a path to commit to. EA organizations are exploring and exploiting simultaneously, and the usual strategy of building narrow capacity to execute an agenda is difficult when the agenda itself is malleable. When commercial organizations grow, there is at least some set of clear short term metrics for success — user growth, sales, profitability — that do not exist for nonprofits. Nonprofits, on the other hand, typically have narrowly defined roles, where they are expected to perform a given type of task. Cancer research organizations are expected to find the most promising research areas in cancer research, political advocacy organizations are expected to promote the policies they espouse, and so on.

Read the full article about challenges in scaling EA organizations by David Manheim at Effective Altruism Forum.