What’s the right way to interact with people whose time is extremely valuable, equivalent to $10,000-$1M per hour of OpenPhil’s last dollar? How afraid should we be of taking up their time? Some thoughts:
Sometimes people conflate time cost with status, and the resulting shyness/fear can prevent you from meeting someone—this seems unwarranted because introducing yourself only takes like 20 seconds.
The time cost should nevertheless not be ignored; how prepared you are for a 1-hour meeting might be the largest source of variance in the impact you produce/destroy in a week.
At a $24k/hour valuation, a one-hour meeting is $24k but you might only need 2 slack messages, which maybe take one minute = $400 to respond to.
Being net-negative in immediate impact by taking up more mentor/manager time than the impact you create is not necessarily bad, because you build skills towards being much more valuable.
I personally have a difficult time with this. Usually in these conversations they are looking for something specific, and it’s hard to know what I have to say that would be helpful for them. For me sometimes I see the big picture too much and it’s hard to find something meaningful out of that. Ex. I want to solve systemic issues that the person I’m talking to can’t change. I don’t know how to balance what’s realistic and helpful with what’s needed.
What’s the right way to interact with people whose time is extremely valuable, equivalent to $10,000-$1M per hour of OpenPhil’s last dollar? How afraid should we be of taking up their time? Some thoughts:
Sometimes people conflate time cost with status, and the resulting shyness/fear can prevent you from meeting someone—this seems unwarranted because introducing yourself only takes like 20 seconds.
The time cost should nevertheless not be ignored; how prepared you are for a 1-hour meeting might be the largest source of variance in the impact you produce/destroy in a week.
At a $24k/hour valuation, a one-hour meeting is $24k but you might only need 2 slack messages, which maybe take one minute = $400 to respond to.
Being net-negative in immediate impact by taking up more mentor/manager time than the impact you create is not necessarily bad, because you build skills towards being much more valuable.
I personally have a difficult time with this. Usually in these conversations they are looking for something specific, and it’s hard to know what I have to say that would be helpful for them. For me sometimes I see the big picture too much and it’s hard to find something meaningful out of that. Ex. I want to solve systemic issues that the person I’m talking to can’t change. I don’t know how to balance what’s realistic and helpful with what’s needed.