Lots of young EAs want to found companies. I like encouraging people to be ambitious, and this can be really good. Oftentimes the reasoning seems somewhat confused though.
1. People say it’s for personal growth, but don’t have great models of how startups are good for growth. Starting a 3-5 person organization that never does very big things in the world isn’t good for growth. Joining as employee 10 at a top company that grows to 100 is great
I first came across that idea in a Dustin Moskovitz talk ~7y ago, second half of this video http://youtu.be/CBYhVcO4WgI It worked out well for me in deciding to join a company as it grew from 30-300 instead of trying to do my own thing.
2. For some reason it’s a meme in EA that everyone should either do AI safety or community building. I think a lot of young people look up to other community builders and want to replicate what they’re doing, which looks like running 3-5 person community building orgs.
I’m excited for a bunch of that work. But I also think there are a bunch of high impact and high growth projects people could work on if they were more open to a wider array of projects.
When I joined Aurora, I went from intern —> project lead for a high priority team of eight 6mo later. You have to be willing to put in the leg work, but then people will happily hand you high growth opportunities because there aren’t enough people for all the problems.
Also, helping grow a top AI or bio org is likely great for community building. “It also suggested to me that high-quality object-level work can be as effective at achieving “meta” goals as meta work for a variety of reasons.”
I think people tend to be too focused on “founding a company” and not focused enough on the people they work with. Much of the impact comes from the top ~10 companies in a 5 year period. Is the company you’re at plausibly one of those?
I made a twitter! Copy/pasted thread.
Lots of young EAs want to found companies. I like encouraging people to be ambitious, and this can be really good. Oftentimes the reasoning seems somewhat confused though.
1. People say it’s for personal growth, but don’t have great models of how startups are good for growth. Starting a 3-5 person organization that never does very big things in the world isn’t good for growth. Joining as employee 10 at a top company that grows to 100 is great
I first came across that idea in a Dustin Moskovitz talk ~7y ago, second half of this video http://youtu.be/CBYhVcO4WgI It worked out well for me in deciding to join a company as it grew from 30-300 instead of trying to do my own thing.
2. For some reason it’s a meme in EA that everyone should either do AI safety or community building. I think a lot of young people look up to other community builders and want to replicate what they’re doing, which looks like running 3-5 person community building orgs.
I’m excited for a bunch of that work. But I also think there are a bunch of high impact and high growth projects people could work on if they were more open to a wider array of projects.
When I joined Aurora, I went from intern —> project lead for a high priority team of eight 6mo later. You have to be willing to put in the leg work, but then people will happily hand you high growth opportunities because there aren’t enough people for all the problems.
Also, helping grow a top AI or bio org is likely great for community building. “It also suggested to me that high-quality object-level work can be as effective at achieving “meta” goals as meta work for a variety of reasons.”
Update from Open Philanthropy’s Longtermist EA Movement-Building team—EA Forum
I think people tend to be too focused on “founding a company” and not focused enough on the people they work with. Much of the impact comes from the top ~10 companies in a 5 year period. Is the company you’re at plausibly one of those?