Joey’s comment was in respect to a $40K-$60K range, which is considerably different than $25K-$45K.
I totally get the economic realities of the situation, but I think it’s unavoidable that low salaries are going to be a dealbreaker for some highly-qualified candidates. For example, where I live, childcare for one young child is ~ $25K, so this would be a non-starter for many people with a young child (unless, e.g., a co-parent/partner made enough money to largely support the household solo).
I was referencing the comment for this:
“We are a bit skeptical about the perception that talent increases from offering higher salaries (instead of attracting new talent, we typically see the same EA people getting job roles but just for a higher cost). ”
My understanding is that the 40-60k figure is for CE itself not the founders of CE charities.
Yah I’m not opposed to better compensation for founders. Note: founders with more needs have asked for more before. How the seed funders have considered that is opaque though.
Agree that the comment was in response to a question about salaries at CE itself. However, I think the reference to “offering higher salaries” most naturally points back to the 40K-60K range identified in a preceding sentence. I wouldn’t read it as necessarily applicable to a lower range.
The opacity about funding for people with higher needs is unfortunate. It’s understandable that people would be hesitant to invest all that time—especially if going through the incubation program—without first getting some more clarity on that point. It also would suck for CE and other members of the cohort for someone in the incubation program to have to drop over this issue rather than drop much earlier.
Salary questions and discussions always happen well before someone goes through the program (typically during the interviews or soon after an invitation is offered). Ultimately, the co-founders select how much they ask for, and many have asked for considerably higher amounts.
How reliably are those asks met? If someone needs (e.g.) a 25K uplift for childcare costs, when do they learn if that’s actually in the cards?
My understanding was that funding allocations were locked in fairly late in the program, but I could be mistaken. Even if the candidate exits prior to starting the program, they may have invested significant time, energy, and emotion into the process.
I definitely understand the realities of reliance on seed funding, and the fact that some uncertainty and opacity is unavoidable as a result. It remains unfortunate in my view.
[For reference, 25K is about what full-time childcare costs for a young child where I live. Some people are single parents, and many have more than one child, so I didn’t think it an unreasonable test case.]
About 75% of seed project proposals get funded at the amount they ask for. That part is not known until after the incubation process. The typical seed grants are between $100k-$200k. I do not expect a great proposal to be stopped by a $25k higher budget. I think entrepreneurship is a higher-risk career path, one that is probably not suited for the majority of people. CE is already extremely de-risked relative to equivalents in the for-profit and incubated nonprofit space, to the point where I think the founding step is not the highest-risk part of founding a charity (having an impact 3 years down the line is).
Joey’s comment was in respect to a $40K-$60K range, which is considerably different than $25K-$45K.
I totally get the economic realities of the situation, but I think it’s unavoidable that low salaries are going to be a dealbreaker for some highly-qualified candidates. For example, where I live, childcare for one young child is ~ $25K, so this would be a non-starter for many people with a young child (unless, e.g., a co-parent/partner made enough money to largely support the household solo).
I was referencing the comment for this: “We are a bit skeptical about the perception that talent increases from offering higher salaries (instead of attracting new talent, we typically see the same EA people getting job roles but just for a higher cost). ”
My understanding is that the 40-60k figure is for CE itself not the founders of CE charities.
Yah I’m not opposed to better compensation for founders. Note: founders with more needs have asked for more before. How the seed funders have considered that is opaque though.
Agree that the comment was in response to a question about salaries at CE itself. However, I think the reference to “offering higher salaries” most naturally points back to the 40K-60K range identified in a preceding sentence. I wouldn’t read it as necessarily applicable to a lower range.
The opacity about funding for people with higher needs is unfortunate. It’s understandable that people would be hesitant to invest all that time—especially if going through the incubation program—without first getting some more clarity on that point. It also would suck for CE and other members of the cohort for someone in the incubation program to have to drop over this issue rather than drop much earlier.
Salary questions and discussions always happen well before someone goes through the program (typically during the interviews or soon after an invitation is offered). Ultimately, the co-founders select how much they ask for, and many have asked for considerably higher amounts.
How reliably are those asks met? If someone needs (e.g.) a 25K uplift for childcare costs, when do they learn if that’s actually in the cards?
My understanding was that funding allocations were locked in fairly late in the program, but I could be mistaken. Even if the candidate exits prior to starting the program, they may have invested significant time, energy, and emotion into the process.
I definitely understand the realities of reliance on seed funding, and the fact that some uncertainty and opacity is unavoidable as a result. It remains unfortunate in my view.
[For reference, 25K is about what full-time childcare costs for a young child where I live. Some people are single parents, and many have more than one child, so I didn’t think it an unreasonable test case.]
About 75% of seed project proposals get funded at the amount they ask for. That part is not known until after the incubation process. The typical seed grants are between $100k-$200k. I do not expect a great proposal to be stopped by a $25k higher budget. I think entrepreneurship is a higher-risk career path, one that is probably not suited for the majority of people. CE is already extremely de-risked relative to equivalents in the for-profit and incubated nonprofit space, to the point where I think the founding step is not the highest-risk part of founding a charity (having an impact 3 years down the line is).