You should turn your project into an organization

If your team's work is worth doing, it's worth doing as an org

When a few people are doing good work together, the question of whether to formally incorporate into an organization can feel like a distraction from doing the actual work. Why take time away from your exciting research project to create an org? There are some real up-front costs to incorporating – dealing with bureaucracy, legal overhead, governance obligations – but I think the benefits of doing so are usually greater and underappreciated.

Orgs are sticky

A project that loses its founder usually just ends. An org that loses its founder is usually able to recruit a replacement and persist. Orgs can outlast their founders in a way that projects almost never do. This is because orgs have persistent identity, infrastructure, culture and mutual commitments that projects lack and this allows them to live on. In other words, the org itself is a form of capacity and it has a ‘spirit’ that survives the individuals involved. If the work matters, you don't want it to be dependent on any one person choosing to stay, and forming an org reduces that dependency.

Orgs can hire

Orgs hire people; people join projects. The difference is larger than it sounds. There's a large pool of people who will respond to a job posting at a real organization with a website, but a much smaller pool of people who would respond to a vaguer ask to join a project. When you hire someone, they quit their current job, accept a salary, and take on a defined role with actual responsibility and accountability. When you add someone to a project, they help out at whatever level of commitment they find convenient, which is often not that much, and even that can change at any point. The quality and reliability of the people you can attract and retain is substantially different, and orgs give you the option value to grow in ways that projects don't.

Orgs are legitimate

A formal organization is a more credible actor in basically every relevant dimension. Funders take you more seriously if you have good governance. Potential hires prefer to work at places with some structure and processes in place, as well as being able to confidently tell people where they might work. Journalists and policymakers have something real and credible to signal that it’s worth their time to engage with you. You can also make credible long-term commitments – receive multi-year grants or investments, make long-term hires, establish lasting institutional relationships – in a way a project simply can't. These things compound over time in ways that are easy to underestimate at the start.

Orgs force clarity

Incorporating forces you to answer questions that a project lets you defer indefinitely: who's actually in, what are you aiming for, what is everyone's role. Projects have no forcing function to resolve these questions productively, so they can stay unresolved for years and eventually become the reason why people drift away from projects and they fall apart. The forced clarity of forming an org is usually good, even when it's uncomfortable in the moment.

The marginal cost of forming an org is low but the benefits compound. If your team’s work is worth doing, it's probably worth doing as an org.

Same post on Substack