Startup Nonprofits

Vision: A nonprofit startup starts with a vision. There must be some large, intractable problem, for which the solution is hard to capture value from. This must be the animating vision behind the nonprofit, like Stripe’s ‘increasing the GDP of the internet’ or SpaceX’s ‘colonize Mars’. The vision must be sufficiently ambitious to attract talent an

Incrementalism: The vision must be broken down into incremental steps. If you are building the ecosystem for charter cities, where do you start? Who are the first groups you need to build a coalition with, how to get early wins to demonstrate credibility to various stakeholders? How do you balance the decades long nature of city development with g

In practice, a startup nonprofit has several important distinctions from traditional nonprofits: 1) it begins with a large goal and works backwards to identify incremental steps to achieve that goal, 2) it has an iterative, experimental mindset, and 3) it is an internet first organization.