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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: So you want to be a charity entrepreneur. Read these first., published by Mathieu Putz on January 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. If you want to start a charity, you need to be learning constantly. You’ll inevitably learn by doing, but it will save you a lot of heartache to also learn from others. If you’re interested in potentially starting a charity or are already running one and want to continue improving your org, here’s what we at Nonlinear think will be useful to read. We don’t recommend reading these in order or start to finish. Skim them ruthlessly, jump around to the ones that seem relevant to you, and try to really engage with the ones that are genuinely useful to you. Blog posts Why founding charities is one of the highest impact things one can do Should I start a charity now or later? Great blog post about the benefits of starting something now vs later. How to increase your odds of starting a career in charity entrepreneurship. This post also touches on how to get a low-risk taste of startup life to see if you’ll like it. TL;DR - do self-initiated projects with no oversight, ideally recruiting and leading a team of friends/volunteers to help. What traits make a great charity entrepreneur Which jobs will best prepare you to become a charity entrepreneur? Why top performers shouldn’t go to university. There are better ways to signal competence Why EAs in particular are good people to start charities Top 13 Tools for NGO Founders. Want to particularly highlight Upwork where it’s really easy to hire freelancers for innumerable small tasks that it’s not worth hiring a full time person for. Startup Playbook by Sam Altman. Probably the most information dense piece of advice for potential founders. Just replace every mention of “business” with “charity” and “profit” with “impact” to get the most out of this. This is true for most forprofit startup material Paul Graham essays, notably What You'll Wish You'd Known How to Start a Startup Do Things that Don't Scale Charity Entrepreneurship’s resource list. Lots of good stuff listed here. A Brief Overview of Recruitment and Retention Research by Animal Advocacy Careers. Blog post reviewing the evidence for different hiring and retention techniques, ordered by evidence base and effect size. I wish all research was done and presented this way. Charity Science’s fundraising research. Fundraising is a keystone skill for charity entrepreneurship. Charity Science systematically researched all the major fundraising methods and compared how well they worked. I’d pair this with reading at least one book on fundraising. Fundraising for Dummies is good, though probably not the best. Takeaways from EAF's Hiring Round by Stefan Torges There Are No Walls. Short post about how to see how many options you truly have. Books How to Start a High-Impact Nonprofit by EA’s very own Joey Savoie and Patrick Stadler. If you could only read one book, it’d be this one. Managing to Change the World. The best book on management Kat has ever read, and it just so happens to also focus on the particular issues charities face. Peter Wildeford wrote some good notes on it here. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is a classic for a reason. How to Make a Minimum Loveable Product. Technically a blog post, but should be read after Lean Startup, so put it in this section. Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street (summary) Atomic Habits by James Clear. How to be productive as an individual. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. How to be productive as a team. 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss is one of the most instrumentally rational people that Kat has ever encountered. Take his lessons, mix in a little EA epistemology, and cross-apply them to EA. Makebook. Ridiculously practical book about ...