A useful post, Ozzie, and definitely food for thought.
I would just like to point out one fairly significant consideration in favour of small organizations that isn’t factored in here—ownership and motivation (i.e. the founder and other early-stage employees slave away work far harder because we feel a sense that the organization is yours—you are the organization; you don’t work for it). This has been my own experience, and I imagine it’s much the same for you. I believe Joey Savoie talks about this fairly often, when asked why Charity Entrepreneurship doesn’t just hire people to implement effective global health & animal ideas in-house, rather than using these people to incubate new orgs
For me, it really depends on what I’m comparing it to.
If I were trying to make QURI within a mediocre organization, I’d both expect to be able to produce less useful output and I’d be less motivated.
If I could run it with a fair bit of flexibility, in an org that were able to give me various resources and integrate well with our work, that could be great.
I started QURI-related work at FHI and really liked a lot of things about that environment. I left, in large part because Oxford university specifically is a poor fit for programming projects—but otherwise I could have imagined something like that working well.
After FHI, I’ve been working with a small team, often doing remote work. I’ve found it fairly isolating and lonely, although I do like some elements of the independence.
A useful post, Ozzie, and definitely food for thought.
I would just like to point out one fairly significant consideration in favour of small organizations that isn’t factored in here—ownership and motivation (i.e. the founder and other early-stage employees
slave awaywork far harder because we feel a sense that the organization is yours—you are the organization; you don’t work for it). This has been my own experience, and I imagine it’s much the same for you. I believe Joey Savoie talks about this fairly often, when asked why Charity Entrepreneurship doesn’t just hire people to implement effective global health & animal ideas in-house, rather than using these people to incubate new orgsFor me, it really depends on what I’m comparing it to.
If I were trying to make QURI within a mediocre organization, I’d both expect to be able to produce less useful output and I’d be less motivated.
If I could run it with a fair bit of flexibility, in an org that were able to give me various resources and integrate well with our work, that could be great.
I started QURI-related work at FHI and really liked a lot of things about that environment. I left, in large part because Oxford university specifically is a poor fit for programming projects—but otherwise I could have imagined something like that working well.
After FHI, I’ve been working with a small team, often doing remote work. I’ve found it fairly isolating and lonely, although I do like some elements of the independence.