I generally feel like there’s a bit too much focus in your model on number of people vs. getting those people to do high-quality work, or directing those people towards important problems. I also think it’s worth remembering that staff (time, compensation) come on the cost side of the cost-effectiveness calculation.
E.g. I don’t think that GW succeeded because it had more staff than 80k. I think they succeeded because they were doing really high-quality work on an important problem. To do that they had to have a reasonable number of staff, but that was a cost they had to pay to do the high-quality work.
And then related to the question about how fast to grow, it looks like it took them 6 years to get to 10 staff, and 9 years to get to 20. They had 18 staff around the time that Good Ventures was founded. So I think that simply being big wasn’t a critical factor in their success, and I suspect that that relatively slow growth was in fact critical to figuring out what the org was doing and keeping quality high.
It’s of course difficult to express a complete worldview in a few (even long) comments. To be clear, I definitely acknowledge that hiring has substantial costs (I haven’t really done it yet for QURI), and is not right for all orgs, especially at all times. I don’t think that hiring is intrinsically good or anything.
I also agree that being slow, in the beginning in particular, could be essential.
All that said, I think something like “ability to usefully scale” is a fairly critical factor in success for many jobs other than, perhaps, theoretical research. I think the success of OpenPhil will be profoundly bottlenecked if it can’t find some useful ways to scale much further (this could even be by encouraging many other groups).
It could take quite a while of “staying really small” to “be able to usefully scale”, but “be able to usefully scale” is one of the main goals I’d want to see.
Yeah, I agree that “be able to usefully scale” is a pretty positive instrumental goal (and maybe one I should pay attention to more).
Maybe there are different versions of “be able to usefully scale”:
I’m mostly thinking of this in terms of “work on area X such that you have a model you can scale to make X much higher impact”. I think this generally doesn’t help you much to explore/scale area Y. (Maybe it helps if X and Y are really related.)
I think you’re thinking of this mostly in terms of “Be able to hire, manage, and coordinate large numbers of people quickly”. I think this is also useful, and it’s also something I’m aiming towards (though probably less than more object-level goals, like figuring out how to make our programs great, at the moment).
I generally feel like there’s a bit too much focus in your model on number of people vs. getting those people to do high-quality work, or directing those people towards important problems. I also think it’s worth remembering that staff (time, compensation) come on the cost side of the cost-effectiveness calculation.
E.g. I don’t think that GW succeeded because it had more staff than 80k. I think they succeeded because they were doing really high-quality work on an important problem. To do that they had to have a reasonable number of staff, but that was a cost they had to pay to do the high-quality work.
And then related to the question about how fast to grow, it looks like it took them 6 years to get to 10 staff, and 9 years to get to 20. They had 18 staff around the time that Good Ventures was founded. So I think that simply being big wasn’t a critical factor in their success, and I suspect that that relatively slow growth was in fact critical to figuring out what the org was doing and keeping quality high.
Thanks for the details and calculation of GW.
It’s of course difficult to express a complete worldview in a few (even long) comments. To be clear, I definitely acknowledge that hiring has substantial costs (I haven’t really done it yet for QURI), and is not right for all orgs, especially at all times. I don’t think that hiring is intrinsically good or anything.
I also agree that being slow, in the beginning in particular, could be essential.
All that said, I think something like “ability to usefully scale” is a fairly critical factor in success for many jobs other than, perhaps, theoretical research. I think the success of OpenPhil will be profoundly bottlenecked if it can’t find some useful ways to scale much further (this could even be by encouraging many other groups).
It could take quite a while of “staying really small” to “be able to usefully scale”, but “be able to usefully scale” is one of the main goals I’d want to see.
Yeah, I agree that “be able to usefully scale” is a pretty positive instrumental goal (and maybe one I should pay attention to more).
Maybe there are different versions of “be able to usefully scale”:
I’m mostly thinking of this in terms of “work on area X such that you have a model you can scale to make X much higher impact”. I think this generally doesn’t help you much to explore/scale area Y. (Maybe it helps if X and Y are really related.)
I think you’re thinking of this mostly in terms of “Be able to hire, manage, and coordinate large numbers of people quickly”. I think this is also useful, and it’s also something I’m aiming towards (though probably less than more object-level goals, like figuring out how to make our programs great, at the moment).