Here’s some parts of my personal take (which overlaps with what Abraham said):
I think we ourselves feel a bit unsure “why we’re special”, i.e. why it seems there aren’t very many other EA-aligned orgs scaling this rapidly & gracefully.
But my guess is that some of the main factors are:
We want to scale rapidly & gracefully
Some orgs have a more niche purpose that doesn’t really require scaling, or may be led by people who are more skilled and excited about their object-level work than about org strategy, scaling, management, etc.
RP thinks strategically about how to scale rapidly & gracefully, including thinking ahead about what RP will need later and what might break by default
Three of the examples I often give are ones Abraham mentioned:
Realising RP will be be management capacity constrained, and that it would therefore be valuable to give our researchers management experience (so they can see how much they like it & get better at it), and that this pushes in favour of running a large internship with 1-1 management of the interns
(This definitely wasn’t the only motivation for running the internship, but I think it was one of the main ones, though that’s partly guessing/vague memory.)
Realising also that maybe RP should offer researchers management training
Expanding ops capacity before it’s desperately urgently obviously needed
RP also just actually does the obvious things, including learning and implementing standard best practices for management, running an org, etc.
And that all seems to me pretty replicable!
OTOH, I do think the people at RP are also great, and it’s often the case that people who are good at something underestimate how hard it is, so maybe this is less replicable than I think. But I’d guess that smart, sensible, altruistic, ambitious people with access to good advisors could have a decent chance at making their org more like that or starting a new org like that, and that this could be quite valuable in expectation.
(If anyone feels like maybe they’re such a person and maybe they should do that, please feel free to reach out for advice, feedback on plans, pointers to relevant resources & people! I and various other people at RP would be excited to help it be the case that there are more EA-aligned orgs scaling rapidly & gracefully.
Some evidence of that is that I have in fact spent probably ~10 hours of my free time over the last few months helping someone work towards possibly setting up an RP-like org, and expect to continue helping them for at least several months. Though that was an unusual case, and I’d usually just quickly offer my highest-value input.)
Here’s some parts of my personal take (which overlaps with what Abraham said):
I think we ourselves feel a bit unsure “why we’re special”, i.e. why it seems there aren’t very many other EA-aligned orgs scaling this rapidly & gracefully.
But my guess is that some of the main factors are:
We want to scale rapidly & gracefully
Some orgs have a more niche purpose that doesn’t really require scaling, or may be led by people who are more skilled and excited about their object-level work than about org strategy, scaling, management, etc.
RP thinks strategically about how to scale rapidly & gracefully, including thinking ahead about what RP will need later and what might break by default
Three of the examples I often give are ones Abraham mentioned:
Realising RP will be be management capacity constrained, and that it would therefore be valuable to give our researchers management experience (so they can see how much they like it & get better at it), and that this pushes in favour of running a large internship with 1-1 management of the interns
(This definitely wasn’t the only motivation for running the internship, but I think it was one of the main ones, though that’s partly guessing/vague memory.)
Realising also that maybe RP should offer researchers management training
Expanding ops capacity before it’s desperately urgently obviously needed
RP also just actually does the obvious things, including learning and implementing standard best practices for management, running an org, etc.
And that all seems to me pretty replicable!
OTOH, I do think the people at RP are also great, and it’s often the case that people who are good at something underestimate how hard it is, so maybe this is less replicable than I think. But I’d guess that smart, sensible, altruistic, ambitious people with access to good advisors could have a decent chance at making their org more like that or starting a new org like that, and that this could be quite valuable in expectation.
(If anyone feels like maybe they’re such a person and maybe they should do that, please feel free to reach out for advice, feedback on plans, pointers to relevant resources & people! I and various other people at RP would be excited to help it be the case that there are more EA-aligned orgs scaling rapidly & gracefully.
Some evidence of that is that I have in fact spent probably ~10 hours of my free time over the last few months helping someone work towards possibly setting up an RP-like org, and expect to continue helping them for at least several months. Though that was an unusual case, and I’d usually just quickly offer my highest-value input.)