Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Advice for prospective incubators” by Aidan Alexander, Ambitious Impact, Jacintha Baas, SamanthaK
Description
Often folks hit us up because they are thinking of starting an incubator and want advice.
Typically their motivation is that they have a list of specific things they want built that no one is building or because they think an ecosystem needs more new projects or more talent absorption generally to deploy more funding effectively.
Here are six questions we often ask prospective teams, to help them figure out what to do. If you're incubator-curious, we recommend asking them of yourself. This is a companion to "What even is an incubator?" which lays out our framework for deciding what kind of incubator to build. This piece is the messier, more opinionated list of everything else we tend to say.
(Note: This is AIM's ‘house view’ from incubating 60+ charities across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and “Meta” (including many bangers, we think!). We've only recently launched a MEL function to more robustly test our hypotheses about how to incubate field-leading charities, so expect us to learn that some of what follows is wrong)
((Also: We are generally excited about more, strong, organisations doing incubation with a variety of theses and specialisations and are happy to share resources [...]
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Outline:
(01:27) 1. Are you sure the answer is starting new orgs?
(04:53) 2. What do you mean by "incubator"?
(06:27) 3. What are you going to do about talent?
(08:22) 4. What are you going to tell that talent to do?
(11:06) 5. Do you have domain expertise and entrepreneurial talent on your team?
(12:49) 6. What are your takes on how to beat the market on entrepreneurship?
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
September 21st, 2026
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Jgpe9fS9enYgJKkrx/advice-for-prospective-incubators
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.