I don’t know what the right salary for founders is. But I feel like your statement has a missing mood. From your tone I expected a salary range similar to lightcone- a substantial haircut from free market wages, but not a dramatic shift in the kind of life you’re able to have. But $25k-$45k is a major sacrifice, prohibitively so for many very reasonable circumstances.
Maybe you’re okay with losing those founders and the benefits make up for it, but I think the appropriate mood is “it’s sad funders won’t cover more, and we accept that this will lose us a lot of people”. And in practice it seems like you’re not getting enough applicants
And I suspect it is costing you a lot of people, who either you’re not sampling or aren’t accurately reporting their preferences. I personally wouldn’t rule out working at those wages in absolutely every circumstance (and I’m currently working at 1/10th of my normal fee, because I care about the project), but my default interpretation is someone doesn’t value the role or my work very much. And the potential of earning up to $80k, with no compensation for the risk, doesn’t change that.
I still don’t know what the right salary is. I suspect there are a lot of other factors that haven’t been brought up yet that make the salary more reasonable, like an expectation founders will live in very low COL areas. But I would like the sacrifice level of the salary to be explicit common knowledge.
“My default interpretation is that someone doesn’t value the role or my work very much.”
I think this is a pretty unfortunate norm that some EAs have. In practice, it results in EAs by far prioritizing the best-funded areas instead of the most impactful ones. I think the reality is that offered salaries have far more to do with funding availability and perceived counterfactuals of funding. At the end of the day, AMF can absorb more money, and thus there is a higher bar for spending in global health than there is in areas without clear benchmarks.
Can I ask how you settled on the salary range you did? I realize that applicants have some choice in the matter, but CE clearly has a lot of power with norm-setting such that I think it’s appropriate to ask.
Because I agree that it’s bad to overweight funders’ opinions (which is why I self-fund projects I care about), or to punish work with more measurable results. But CE has an opportunity, perhaps unique within EA, to set norms that value this work. Especially when highly-vetted people are using interventions you also vetted, which removes a lot of reasons to expect people to self-fund an experimental stage.
To be fair to CE, their salary scale appears generally consistent with the non-US, non-EA nonprofit sector as a whole. “Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. (There could of course be good reasons—or not—for EA’s divergence.)
Joey had written recently about challenges in finding funding for new orgs in years 2-4ish, so my guess is that CE has higher priorities in the funding realm than higher salary norms.
I think “aimed at people with low COL, and we accept that this is prohibitive for many people, including most Americans living in cities and people with dependents” is a pretty reasonable policy. I don’t know if it’s optimal, but CE has much more information and I defer to them on the trade-offs. I do wish that was said explicitly instead of obfuscated, given that ~1/3 of EAF is in the US, presumably more in other HCOL countries, and having kids is not that weird.
(I do think something is off about norming founder salaries against general-non-profit salaries, since founding is so much harder, but someone did say salaries often went up after the first year so that may not matter much).
“Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. ”
This is a strong point, be which I think should be given more weight in the “EA salary debate”
I do not think it reasonable to expect a Lightcone-like salary (150k+) from a co-founder position of an experimental new organisation aiming for high cost-effectiveness in the current EA non-longtermist funding structure.
The article mentions that a typical CE charities seed funding budget is between 110-190k and that is the reality high impact cofounders have to deal with, and looking at the track record of CE-incubated charities, quite successfully.
However, I agree that its prohibitive for some demographics, especially the US and UK. And of course it would be great if we could change that!
If Readers think this to be a big enough problem, I suggest them to earn-to-give and join the CE funding circles—and consider this a cost-effective alternative to taking a potentially overpaying EA job with a less clear roadmap to impact.
While I agree that Lightcone-level salaries would be wildly inappropriate here (and don’t think the EA salary scale should generally give very much weight to Bay Area tech salaries as a general rule), I don’t think that is what Elizabeth was trying to say. I took her comment more as “if you’re only able to offer what is roughly minimum-wage salary for a significant portion of the readership base, you need to be explicit about that, recognize that this is unfortunate, and recognize that it is a dealstopper for a lot of people.”
Thanks for spelling that out, makes it clearer to me. I am ambivalent here because that might scare off many people that could actually afford going lower for 1-3 years but are just very anchored on their market rate.
I feel many people have never questioned how much they would compromise their salary for the chance of 10-100x their impact in the world—until they get a real opportunity to do so. I feel assumptions like “I’m OK with my market rate-30 to 50%” are quite common even though the threshold for living a comfortable life for them might be much lower.
I only found out how much salary I was willing to sacrifice after engaging more deeply with the idea of founding. Thus, based on my experience I find it fair to discuss salary expectations as a part of the co-founder matching process, not upfront. On a sidenote, I see an important psychological difference to make an active founder choice of setting your own starting salary low, in contrast to “being offered only minimum wage”.
All in all, maybe I am a bit disappointed that 90% of the discussion here so far has focused on salary, while impact potential and cost-effectiveness are more important matters to cover.
FWIW, I think telling people “This salary was below what I originally would have considered, but as I learned and engaged with it more I decided the impact was worth it. I urge potential co-founders to reach out even if the salary seems prohibitive, you might change your mind.” is a perfectly reasonable and informative thing to say. Maybe even beautiful. It’s only surprising people I object to.
My own concerns on this thread have been centered around the offered salary not being enough for a fairly basic standard of living in some people’s life circumstances (e.g., people with financial responsibility for dependents, people in the US with significant medical issues), rather than viewing it as a discount from “market rate.” For instance,my initial suggestion in response to the salary range was that “covering special financial needs of people so they can take high impact / low salary roles” could be a mixed meta/object-level funder purpose to promote diversity and inclusion within EA.
Unlike the class of people who are being asked to consider a heavy discount from “market rate,” people in this category are drawing dead at the outset—no amount of engagement with the pre-founding process will change (e.g.) how much childcare costs. So it’s hard to justify asking them to go through a process that would be known as a dead end for them if salary info were disclosed upfront. Unfortunately, neither childcare nor medical providers can be paid in impact. So one concern with a delayed-disclosure approach is that I don’t think it is particularly respectful of the time, energy, and emotions of people in those situations.
Thank you for posting this, Joey. I think people too often talk about things like this in the abstract, not knowing the realities of the market. Two considerations I have when considering salary:
Counterfactuals: Money, at the end of the day, is a limited resource. When considering the counterfactuals, I personally would feel unethical accepting a super high salary from CE, as I think the counterfactual of this money would be, e.g., one less high-impact organization being founded. In the early days, some of our charities started with just $25K-$50K grants; I can’t imagine myself using this money for my salary. Some people say, “Give founders more money for their salaries,” but what if this money means one less highly-impactful organization (like LEEP, FEM, FWI) not being started? As the donor would choose to make sure a person has an EA-standard salary and not put the money into starting another organization? There is significant flexibility in terms of what the salary will be in different countries and circumstances (e.g., one of the co-founders having dependents), but if this is secured (the needs of the founder are secured), then every additional dollar needs to be thought of in counterfactuals. And this is how most of the CE community thinks.
What It Takes to Live a Good Life Money-wise: People think CE staff are paid small salaries, while I, as CE Staff, am paid a London market-rate salary + I receive benefits like a small donation bonus, equipment allowance, and training allowance. I feel overall very happy. I mean, with an average market salary, you can live a super good life in London: rent a room, save for retirement, help your mom in Poland, and go to theatres and Billie Eilish concerts :). So this is a very lavish lifestyle compared to the people and animals we’re helping.
Those need to be adjusted for COL though (including that someone in the UK benefits from a modern social welfare state in the way that someone in the US does not). That is not saying that the US candidate should expect a better standard of living, only that the UK standard of living simply costs more in the US.
I don’t think the US is an edge case given that IIRC 30 to 35 percent of EAs on the survey live here. I’m OK with the possibility that being a CE incubatee may not be realistic for certain people in the US, but that would still be sad and should be openly discussed.
For a candidate based in the US, its not clear why mostly UK based reference classes are the best choice. On mobile right now, but a quick look suggests the median salary in the US is about 55K USD and 80K in Washington DC (somewhat analogous to London). I do not think US candidates need as much of an uplift from UK as those numbers might suggest, but they are a sanity check for my view that UK reference ranges don’t apply well to US candidates.
I agree that EA jobs aren’t really an appropriate reference class for my concern.
The reference class I had in the back of my head for my comment was the minimum wage for the non-Bay city in which I live, augmented for the near-universal understanding that the legal minimum wage isn’t a livable wage. That put me at 30K legal minimum plus 10K uplift = 40K livable wage for most, with recognition for special needs. It will also need an uplift for health insurance for many candidates. So I would judge a range of 40-60K generally viable for basic living expenses for a candidate where I live. Not so much 25-45K.
Your source on median UK salary says “median annual pay for full-time employees was £33,000 for the tax year ending on 5 April 2022”.
Since then we’ve seen record wage increases. In the 18 months since April 2022 annual wage growth has been between 5% and 8.5%. I’m not sure if we can simply apply average wage growth to the national median wage, but it seems likely that the UK median full-time wage is now in the mid-30,000s.
This still admits the broader point about EA salaries inhabiting a different world.
Another alternative is for people to stay in their well-paying EA job but just donate more to the leaner EA orgs.
Example: someone earning 100k (which is close to the starting salaries I see posted for OP and CEA jobs) that already donates 10% of their income could donate another 5% to a CE charity to increase a founder salary. That 5% sacrifice would represent a salary increase of 10-20% for the founder.
It seems to me that you’d have to think that that marginal difference from 90k to 85k had a very outsized impact on your productivity/well-being AND that your work is as important or more important than the work of the new org for you to hold on to that 5k rather than donate it to the increase the salary of the founder of that new org.
To be clear I am not CE staff or a seed funder. I don’t make decisions regarding how much is doled out or the culture upstream of those decisions. I’m an incubatee focused on the co-founder search here. Yes, I’d like to see more funding, but I’m not gonna benefit by railing here against a group of people who I don’t know and don’t know their circumstances or reasoning in their decision making.
Also worth noting most CE charity founders are not American. The range is much more manageable for other people around the globe. But people with more needs have asked for more. E.g. A line item for American health insurance.
I don’t know what the right salary for founders is. But I feel like your statement has a missing mood. From your tone I expected a salary range similar to lightcone- a substantial haircut from free market wages, but not a dramatic shift in the kind of life you’re able to have. But $25k-$45k is a major sacrifice, prohibitively so for many very reasonable circumstances.
Maybe you’re okay with losing those founders and the benefits make up for it, but I think the appropriate mood is “it’s sad funders won’t cover more, and we accept that this will lose us a lot of people”. And in practice it seems like you’re not getting enough applicants
And I suspect it is costing you a lot of people, who either you’re not sampling or aren’t accurately reporting their preferences. I personally wouldn’t rule out working at those wages in absolutely every circumstance (and I’m currently working at 1/10th of my normal fee, because I care about the project), but my default interpretation is someone doesn’t value the role or my work very much. And the potential of earning up to $80k, with no compensation for the risk, doesn’t change that.
I still don’t know what the right salary is. I suspect there are a lot of other factors that haven’t been brought up yet that make the salary more reasonable, like an expectation founders will live in very low COL areas. But I would like the sacrifice level of the salary to be explicit common knowledge.
“My default interpretation is that someone doesn’t value the role or my work very much.”
I think this is a pretty unfortunate norm that some EAs have. In practice, it results in EAs by far prioritizing the best-funded areas instead of the most impactful ones. I think the reality is that offered salaries have far more to do with funding availability and perceived counterfactuals of funding. At the end of the day, AMF can absorb more money, and thus there is a higher bar for spending in global health than there is in areas without clear benchmarks.
Can I ask how you settled on the salary range you did? I realize that applicants have some choice in the matter, but CE clearly has a lot of power with norm-setting such that I think it’s appropriate to ask.
Because I agree that it’s bad to overweight funders’ opinions (which is why I self-fund projects I care about), or to punish work with more measurable results. But CE has an opportunity, perhaps unique within EA, to set norms that value this work. Especially when highly-vetted people are using interventions you also vetted, which removes a lot of reasons to expect people to self-fund an experimental stage.
To be fair to CE, their salary scale appears generally consistent with the non-US, non-EA nonprofit sector as a whole. “Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. (There could of course be good reasons—or not—for EA’s divergence.)
Joey had written recently about challenges in finding funding for new orgs in years 2-4ish, so my guess is that CE has higher priorities in the funding realm than higher salary norms.
I think “aimed at people with low COL, and we accept that this is prohibitive for many people, including most Americans living in cities and people with dependents” is a pretty reasonable policy. I don’t know if it’s optimal, but CE has much more information and I defer to them on the trade-offs. I do wish that was said explicitly instead of obfuscated, given that ~1/3 of EAF is in the US, presumably more in other HCOL countries, and having kids is not that weird.
(I do think something is off about norming founder salaries against general-non-profit salaries, since founding is so much harder, but someone did say salaries often went up after the first year so that may not matter much).
“Norms that value this work” feels a bit strong where it is the rest of EA, rather than CE, that has chosen not to follow the norms of the broader non-profit world. ”
This is a strong point, be which I think should be given more weight in the “EA salary debate”
I do not think it reasonable to expect a Lightcone-like salary (150k+) from a co-founder position of an experimental new organisation aiming for high cost-effectiveness in the current EA non-longtermist funding structure.
The article mentions that a typical CE charities seed funding budget is between 110-190k and that is the reality high impact cofounders have to deal with, and looking at the track record of CE-incubated charities, quite successfully.
However, I agree that its prohibitive for some demographics, especially the US and UK. And of course it would be great if we could change that! If Readers think this to be a big enough problem, I suggest them to earn-to-give and join the CE funding circles—and consider this a cost-effective alternative to taking a potentially overpaying EA job with a less clear roadmap to impact.
While I agree that Lightcone-level salaries would be wildly inappropriate here (and don’t think the EA salary scale should generally give very much weight to Bay Area tech salaries as a general rule), I don’t think that is what Elizabeth was trying to say. I took her comment more as “if you’re only able to offer what is roughly minimum-wage salary for a significant portion of the readership base, you need to be explicit about that, recognize that this is unfortunate, and recognize that it is a dealstopper for a lot of people.”
Thanks for spelling that out, makes it clearer to me. I am ambivalent here because that might scare off many people that could actually afford going lower for 1-3 years but are just very anchored on their market rate.
I feel many people have never questioned how much they would compromise their salary for the chance of 10-100x their impact in the world—until they get a real opportunity to do so. I feel assumptions like “I’m OK with my market rate-30 to 50%” are quite common even though the threshold for living a comfortable life for them might be much lower.
I only found out how much salary I was willing to sacrifice after engaging more deeply with the idea of founding. Thus, based on my experience I find it fair to discuss salary expectations as a part of the co-founder matching process, not upfront. On a sidenote, I see an important psychological difference to make an active founder choice of setting your own starting salary low, in contrast to “being offered only minimum wage”.
All in all, maybe I am a bit disappointed that 90% of the discussion here so far has focused on salary, while impact potential and cost-effectiveness are more important matters to cover.
FWIW, I think telling people “This salary was below what I originally would have considered, but as I learned and engaged with it more I decided the impact was worth it. I urge potential co-founders to reach out even if the salary seems prohibitive, you might change your mind.” is a perfectly reasonable and informative thing to say. Maybe even beautiful. It’s only surprising people I object to.
My own concerns on this thread have been centered around the offered salary not being enough for a fairly basic standard of living in some people’s life circumstances (e.g., people with financial responsibility for dependents, people in the US with significant medical issues), rather than viewing it as a discount from “market rate.” For instance,my initial suggestion in response to the salary range was that “covering special financial needs of people so they can take high impact / low salary roles” could be a mixed meta/object-level funder purpose to promote diversity and inclusion within EA.
Unlike the class of people who are being asked to consider a heavy discount from “market rate,” people in this category are drawing dead at the outset—no amount of engagement with the pre-founding process will change (e.g.) how much childcare costs. So it’s hard to justify asking them to go through a process that would be known as a dead end for them if salary info were disclosed upfront. Unfortunately, neither childcare nor medical providers can be paid in impact. So one concern with a delayed-disclosure approach is that I don’t think it is particularly respectful of the time, energy, and emotions of people in those situations.
It might be helpful to add some useful reference classes here as I think it’s often forgotten how unusual EA salaries are relative to other fields.
Average GDP of the world: £11,000
London’s living wage: £21,800
Median full-time UK employees: £26,800
Average salary nonprofit jobs: £31,700
The average annual salary in London: £39,000
Average salary nonprofit London: £39,600
Average CE employee salary: £39,300
Entry-level EA job: £48,000
Average EA job: £80,000
Thank you for posting this, Joey. I think people too often talk about things like this in the abstract, not knowing the realities of the market. Two considerations I have when considering salary:
Counterfactuals: Money, at the end of the day, is a limited resource. When considering the counterfactuals, I personally would feel unethical accepting a super high salary from CE, as I think the counterfactual of this money would be, e.g., one less high-impact organization being founded. In the early days, some of our charities started with just $25K-$50K grants; I can’t imagine myself using this money for my salary. Some people say, “Give founders more money for their salaries,” but what if this money means one less highly-impactful organization (like LEEP, FEM, FWI) not being started? As the donor would choose to make sure a person has an EA-standard salary and not put the money into starting another organization? There is significant flexibility in terms of what the salary will be in different countries and circumstances (e.g., one of the co-founders having dependents), but if this is secured (the needs of the founder are secured), then every additional dollar needs to be thought of in counterfactuals. And this is how most of the CE community thinks.
What It Takes to Live a Good Life Money-wise: People think CE staff are paid small salaries, while I, as CE Staff, am paid a London market-rate salary + I receive benefits like a small donation bonus, equipment allowance, and training allowance. I feel overall very happy. I mean, with an average market salary, you can live a super good life in London: rent a room, save for retirement, help your mom in Poland, and go to theatres and Billie Eilish concerts :). So this is a very lavish lifestyle compared to the people and animals we’re helping.
Those need to be adjusted for COL though (including that someone in the UK benefits from a modern social welfare state in the way that someone in the US does not). That is not saying that the US candidate should expect a better standard of living, only that the UK standard of living simply costs more in the US.
I don’t think the US is an edge case given that IIRC 30 to 35 percent of EAs on the survey live here. I’m OK with the possibility that being a CE incubatee may not be realistic for certain people in the US, but that would still be sad and should be openly discussed.
For a candidate based in the US, its not clear why mostly UK based reference classes are the best choice. On mobile right now, but a quick look suggests the median salary in the US is about 55K USD and 80K in Washington DC (somewhat analogous to London). I do not think US candidates need as much of an uplift from UK as those numbers might suggest, but they are a sanity check for my view that UK reference ranges don’t apply well to US candidates.
I agree that EA jobs aren’t really an appropriate reference class for my concern.
The reference class I had in the back of my head for my comment was the minimum wage for the non-Bay city in which I live, augmented for the near-universal understanding that the legal minimum wage isn’t a livable wage. That put me at 30K legal minimum plus 10K uplift = 40K livable wage for most, with recognition for special needs. It will also need an uplift for health insurance for many candidates. So I would judge a range of 40-60K generally viable for basic living expenses for a candidate where I live. Not so much 25-45K.
Your source on median UK salary says “median annual pay for full-time employees was £33,000 for the tax year ending on 5 April 2022”.
Since then we’ve seen record wage increases. In the 18 months since April 2022 annual wage growth has been between 5% and 8.5%. I’m not sure if we can simply apply average wage growth to the national median wage, but it seems likely that the UK median full-time wage is now in the mid-30,000s.
This still admits the broader point about EA salaries inhabiting a different world.
Another alternative is for people to stay in their well-paying EA job but just donate more to the leaner EA orgs.
Example: someone earning 100k (which is close to the starting salaries I see posted for OP and CEA jobs) that already donates 10% of their income could donate another 5% to a CE charity to increase a founder salary. That 5% sacrifice would represent a salary increase of 10-20% for the founder.
It seems to me that you’d have to think that that marginal difference from 90k to 85k had a very outsized impact on your productivity/well-being AND that your work is as important or more important than the work of the new org for you to hold on to that 5k rather than donate it to the increase the salary of the founder of that new org.
To be clear I am not CE staff or a seed funder. I don’t make decisions regarding how much is doled out or the culture upstream of those decisions. I’m an incubatee focused on the co-founder search here. Yes, I’d like to see more funding, but I’m not gonna benefit by railing here against a group of people who I don’t know and don’t know their circumstances or reasoning in their decision making.
Also worth noting most CE charity founders are not American. The range is much more manageable for other people around the globe. But people with more needs have asked for more. E.g. A line item for American health insurance.
Apologies, I did think you were speaking for CE in an official capacity.