RTI and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in your earlier comment are good counterexamples to what I said—I didn’t expect to see a research organisation hiring quite that many people. I would be really surprised to see the organisations you listed grow to more than 5000 employees, but you’re right that it’s not impossible, especially for Open Philanthropy.
I don’t think of Bell Labs as a counterexample because afaik they spent a lot of money on expensive equipment, rather than spending $50M+ just on staff, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
Note that at $100M/year, having >5000 employees means the average cost per employee is <20k people.
Also I think Ben’s post about scalability was primarily about cost-effective ways to deploy capital at scale, so number of employees isn’t a major crux.
RTI and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in your earlier comment are good counterexamples to what I said—I didn’t expect to see a research organisation hiring quite that many people. I would be really surprised to see the organisations you listed grow to more than 5000 employees, but you’re right that it’s not impossible, especially for Open Philanthropy.
I don’t think of Bell Labs as a counterexample because afaik they spent a lot of money on expensive equipment, rather than spending $50M+ just on staff, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
Note that at $100M/year, having >5000 employees means the average cost per employee is <20k people.
Also I think Ben’s post about scalability was primarily about cost-effective ways to deploy capital at scale, so number of employees isn’t a major crux.