(Founder of Wave here, who employs Ben Kuhn who you linked to.)
You should probably try to find early-stage projects locally that you can contribute to. If you find projects you like, you can make them succeed and it will be a rewarding experience. Don’t index too heavily on expected EA impact early on—it’s worth considering whether the thing you’re putting time into can be big/impactful someday, but I think it’ll be better to just focus on things where you think you will resonate and can make a big difference to the project/company’s success. Look specifically for team fit: you should enjoy working with the colleagues, but also complement their skills in a useful way.
(I’m writing all this based on our experience hiring Ben—I think he complements our founding/exec team’s skills in a really unique way, and that’s why Wave is so resonant for him.)
If you can’t do that or it doesn’t satisfy, you should at least consider working remotely for Wave :). You won’t make as much impact as Ben, but you will get to work on satisfying things for real people; depending on what it is that you like/don’t like about remote work, you might get a lot of what you’re looking for in social connection from our retreats (every couple of months you see teammates for a fairly intense week).
(Founder of Wave here, who employs Ben Kuhn who you linked to.)
You should probably try to find early-stage projects locally that you can contribute to. If you find projects you like, you can make them succeed and it will be a rewarding experience. Don’t index too heavily on expected EA impact early on—it’s worth considering whether the thing you’re putting time into can be big/impactful someday, but I think it’ll be better to just focus on things where you think you will resonate and can make a big difference to the project/company’s success. Look specifically for team fit: you should enjoy working with the colleagues, but also complement their skills in a useful way.
(I’m writing all this based on our experience hiring Ben—I think he complements our founding/exec team’s skills in a really unique way, and that’s why Wave is so resonant for him.)
If you can’t do that or it doesn’t satisfy, you should at least consider working remotely for Wave :). You won’t make as much impact as Ben, but you will get to work on satisfying things for real people; depending on what it is that you like/don’t like about remote work, you might get a lot of what you’re looking for in social connection from our retreats (every couple of months you see teammates for a fairly intense week).