I’m quite happy to see the progress here. Kudos to everyone at CEA to have been able to scale it, without major problems yet (that we know of). I think I’ve been pretty impressed by the growth of the community; intuitively I haven’t noticed a big drop in average quality, which is obviously the thing to worry about with substantial community growth.
As I previously discussed in some related comment threads, CEA (and other EA organizations in general) scaling, seems quite positive to me. I prefer this to trying to get tons of tiny orgs, in large part because I think the latter seems much more difficult to do well. That said, I’m not sure how much CEA should try to scale over the next few years; 2x/year is a whole lot to sustain, and over-growth can of course be a serious issue. Maybe, 30%-60%/year feels safe, especially if many members are siloed into distinct units (like seems to be happening).
Some random things I’m interested in, in the future:
With so many people, is there a strong management culture? Are managers improving, in part to handle future growth?
What sorts of pockets of people would make great future hires for CEA, but not so much for other orgs? If there are distinct clusters, I could imagine trying to make projects basically around them. We seem pretty limited for “senior EA” talent now, so some of the growth strategy is about identifying other exciting people and figuring out how to best use them.
With the proliferation of new community groups, how do we do quality control to make sure none turn into cults or have big scandals, like sexual assault? Sadly, poor behavior is quite endemic in many groups, so we might have to be really extra rigorous to reach targets we’d find acceptable. The recent Leverage issues come to mind; personally, I would imagine CEA would be in a good position to investigate that in more detail to make sure that the bad parts of it don’t happen again.
Also, while there’s much to like here, I’d flag that the “Mistakes” seem pretty minor? I appreciate the inclusion of the section, but for a team with so many people and so many projects, I would have expected more to go wrong. I’m sure you’re excluding a lot of things, but am not sure how much is being left out. I could imagine that maybe something like a rating would be more useful, like, “we rated our project quality 7⁄10, and an external committee broadly agreed”. Or, “3 of our main projects were particularly poor, so we’re going to work on improving them next time, but it will take a while.”
I’ve heard before a criticism that “mistakes” pages can make things less transparent (because they give the illusion of transparency), not more, and that argument comes to mind.
I don’t mean this as anything particularly negative, just something to consider for next time.
Yeah, I agree 2x is quite a lot! We grew more this year because I think we were catching up with demand for our projects. I expect more like 50% in the future.
Is there a strong management culture? I think there is: I’ve managed this set of managers for a long while, and we regularly meet to discuss management conundrums, so I think there’s a shared culture. We also have shared values, and team retreats to sync up together. But each manager also has their own take, and I think that is leading to different approaches to e.g. project management or goal setting on each team (but not yet to conflict).
Are managers improving? Broadly, I think they still are! For each of them, there’s generally some particular area they’re focused on improving via feedback or mentorship. But I also think that we’re all just getting extra years of management under our belt, and that helps a lot. I think we’re still interested in also bringing in people with management experience or aptitude, to help us keep scaling.
People who are a good fit for CEA: One thing that I think people haven’t fully realized is that we’re a remote org first. So if you can’t find EA jobs nearby, we might be a good fit. I’m particularly interested in hiring ambitious, agile, user-focused people right now. You can read a lot more on our careers page.
I have recently been talking to some people who are interested in setting up new projects that are adjacent to or complementary to our current work, and we’re exploring whether some of those could be a part of CEA. So I’m open to that, but the current things are in their early stages. If you are interested in setting up a new thing, and you think it might be better as part of CEA, feel free to get in touch and we can explore that. I think the key reason it might be better at CEA is if it fits in really closely with our current projects, or if there are synergies (e.g. you want to build off Forum tech or do something in the groups space).
Re cults/scandals at local groups: I agree that this is a risk. We hope that with more group calls we might catch some of this, but ultimately it’s hard to vet all local groups. I’d encourage anyone who has concerns about a group or individual to consider reaching out to Julia Wise.
Re mistakes: Those do feel like the biggest ones that directly harmed our outside work. Then I think there were a lot of cases where we could have moved a bit more quickly, or taken on an extra thing that really mattered, or made a slightly better decision. Those really matter too—maybe more than the things that look more like “mistakes” - but it’s often a bit hard to write them up cleanly. I guess I think that this post overall gives an accurate summary of the balance of successes vs. harm-causing mistakes, but it’s not comprehensive about either. And then it might under-weight all of the missed opportunities. (Our mistakes page has that disclaimer (“not comprehensive”) at the top, but I expect people still sometimes see it as comprehensive.)
I’m quite happy to see the progress here. Kudos to everyone at CEA to have been able to scale it, without major problems yet (that we know of). I think I’ve been pretty impressed by the growth of the community; intuitively I haven’t noticed a big drop in average quality, which is obviously the thing to worry about with substantial community growth.
As I previously discussed in some related comment threads, CEA (and other EA organizations in general) scaling, seems quite positive to me. I prefer this to trying to get tons of tiny orgs, in large part because I think the latter seems much more difficult to do well. That said, I’m not sure how much CEA should try to scale over the next few years; 2x/year is a whole lot to sustain, and over-growth can of course be a serious issue. Maybe, 30%-60%/year feels safe, especially if many members are siloed into distinct units (like seems to be happening).
Some random things I’m interested in, in the future:
With so many people, is there a strong management culture? Are managers improving, in part to handle future growth?
What sorts of pockets of people would make great future hires for CEA, but not so much for other orgs? If there are distinct clusters, I could imagine trying to make projects basically around them. We seem pretty limited for “senior EA” talent now, so some of the growth strategy is about identifying other exciting people and figuring out how to best use them.
With the proliferation of new community groups, how do we do quality control to make sure none turn into cults or have big scandals, like sexual assault? Sadly, poor behavior is quite endemic in many groups, so we might have to be really extra rigorous to reach targets we’d find acceptable. The recent Leverage issues come to mind; personally, I would imagine CEA would be in a good position to investigate that in more detail to make sure that the bad parts of it don’t happen again.
Also, while there’s much to like here, I’d flag that the “Mistakes” seem pretty minor? I appreciate the inclusion of the section, but for a team with so many people and so many projects, I would have expected more to go wrong. I’m sure you’re excluding a lot of things, but am not sure how much is being left out. I could imagine that maybe something like a rating would be more useful, like, “we rated our project quality 7⁄10, and an external committee broadly agreed”. Or, “3 of our main projects were particularly poor, so we’re going to work on improving them next time, but it will take a while.”
I’ve heard before a criticism that “mistakes” pages can make things less transparent (because they give the illusion of transparency), not more, and that argument comes to mind.
I don’t mean this as anything particularly negative, just something to consider for next time.
Thanks! Some comments:
Yeah, I agree 2x is quite a lot! We grew more this year because I think we were catching up with demand for our projects. I expect more like 50% in the future.
Is there a strong management culture? I think there is: I’ve managed this set of managers for a long while, and we regularly meet to discuss management conundrums, so I think there’s a shared culture. We also have shared values, and team retreats to sync up together. But each manager also has their own take, and I think that is leading to different approaches to e.g. project management or goal setting on each team (but not yet to conflict).
Are managers improving? Broadly, I think they still are! For each of them, there’s generally some particular area they’re focused on improving via feedback or mentorship. But I also think that we’re all just getting extra years of management under our belt, and that helps a lot. I think we’re still interested in also bringing in people with management experience or aptitude, to help us keep scaling.
People who are a good fit for CEA: One thing that I think people haven’t fully realized is that we’re a remote org first. So if you can’t find EA jobs nearby, we might be a good fit. I’m particularly interested in hiring ambitious, agile, user-focused people right now. You can read a lot more on our careers page.
I have recently been talking to some people who are interested in setting up new projects that are adjacent to or complementary to our current work, and we’re exploring whether some of those could be a part of CEA. So I’m open to that, but the current things are in their early stages. If you are interested in setting up a new thing, and you think it might be better as part of CEA, feel free to get in touch and we can explore that. I think the key reason it might be better at CEA is if it fits in really closely with our current projects, or if there are synergies (e.g. you want to build off Forum tech or do something in the groups space).
Re cults/scandals at local groups: I agree that this is a risk. We hope that with more group calls we might catch some of this, but ultimately it’s hard to vet all local groups. I’d encourage anyone who has concerns about a group or individual to consider reaching out to Julia Wise.
Re mistakes: Those do feel like the biggest ones that directly harmed our outside work. Then I think there were a lot of cases where we could have moved a bit more quickly, or taken on an extra thing that really mattered, or made a slightly better decision. Those really matter too—maybe more than the things that look more like “mistakes” - but it’s often a bit hard to write them up cleanly. I guess I think that this post overall gives an accurate summary of the balance of successes vs. harm-causing mistakes, but it’s not comprehensive about either. And then it might under-weight all of the missed opportunities. (Our mistakes page has that disclaimer (“not comprehensive”) at the top, but I expect people still sometimes see it as comprehensive.)