No pressure to respond, reading this made me curious about some other stuff:
I’m curious how you’ve updated via this project re: your own fit for starting a charity in this space? Do you have plans to continue trying your hand at starting charities?
Separately, if you’re looking for next project ideas, I’m extremely not an animal welfare expert, but I’d be quite interested for someone to look into the shrimp paste market. I have no useful advice on who should do what in this space though, and probably Ren’s opinions are much better than mine on this.
Please correct me if this is mistaken, it sounds like the cofounder match between you two was: Ren as the research-y wing / domain expert, and you as maybe the more execute-y wing / person with more time and keenness to make this happen (sounds like this was part time for Ren, unsure if this was a part time level project for you?). Sorry if those impressions are wrong! If they are ~correct, I’m curious how well that structure worked for you!
I’m curious if you have reflections on the strategy of attempting to “blend into industry”. When I hear animal advocates talk about this kind of strategy, it makes me feel slightly uneasy, because it seems to maybe imply some level of deceptiveness. I’m tempted to hold out that uneasy feeling, weigh that against the truly immense suffering at stakes, and conclude that this is a feature of the world being bad and having to make sad tradeoffs. (And I worry this whole worry is silly or naive in the face of so much suffering.) But then a voice in my head gets a bit worried about naive utilitarian tradeoffs and sacrificing integrity. But maybe the high integrity move here is to find products that really are positive sum for farmers, and choose to emphasize the parts that you genuinely believe are beneficial. I don’t know! Would be curious for your thoughts :)
Thank you for your comments :) I can’t speak for Koen, but some rough thoughts:
At least for me, my view going into this was “we have like a 30% chance to succeed, and it won’t be the first (edit!) last project/charity we take a crack at”. I’m very happy to fail fast, as it means I can move onto the next promising idea.
Re shrimp paste—my thoughts are basically summarised in this paper that I recently posted to the forum. I’m very very excited about wild shrimp stuff (as I am with farmed shrimp stuff), though shrimp paste specifically seems to have a few tricky hurdles—not a reason not to do it, but a shrimp paste charity would definitely need to spend a bit of time thinking very hard about the theory of change and tractability. Definitely lots of room for impact if navigated well. That said, I think there’s loads of room for new wild shrimp charities to work in Northern Europe, the United States, etc.
As for your last point, my general strategic view is simply “do the thing that has the highest impact”. I think the problems we are facing are immense and urgent. That said, the specific intervention (installing electric stunners on farmers’ harvest vessels in the Mediterranean) does already have a fair bit of support among farmers for various reasons.
I’m also still very motivated to continue working on these topics in whatever way would be useful. And if one of those is trying to start a new charity, I’m definitely willing to give that another shot.
Your assessment of our co-founder dynamic sounds accurate. For the past six months, I’ve mostly focused on general tasks with eye towards applying my maritime engineering skills later on once we got to talking with farmers. I do think that this approach has worked well for us. Early on, we did recognize a gap in sales-oriented skills, including negotiations and legal matters, which we planned to address with external help if needed.
No pressure to respond, reading this made me curious about some other stuff:
I’m curious how you’ve updated via this project re: your own fit for starting a charity in this space? Do you have plans to continue trying your hand at starting charities?
Separately, if you’re looking for next project ideas, I’m extremely not an animal welfare expert, but I’d be quite interested for someone to look into the shrimp paste market. I have no useful advice on who should do what in this space though, and probably Ren’s opinions are much better than mine on this.
Please correct me if this is mistaken, it sounds like the cofounder match between you two was: Ren as the research-y wing / domain expert, and you as maybe the more execute-y wing / person with more time and keenness to make this happen (sounds like this was part time for Ren, unsure if this was a part time level project for you?). Sorry if those impressions are wrong! If they are ~correct, I’m curious how well that structure worked for you!
I’m curious if you have reflections on the strategy of attempting to “blend into industry”. When I hear animal advocates talk about this kind of strategy, it makes me feel slightly uneasy, because it seems to maybe imply some level of deceptiveness. I’m tempted to hold out that uneasy feeling, weigh that against the truly immense suffering at stakes, and conclude that this is a feature of the world being bad and having to make sad tradeoffs. (And I worry this whole worry is silly or naive in the face of so much suffering.) But then a voice in my head gets a bit worried about naive utilitarian tradeoffs and sacrificing integrity. But maybe the high integrity move here is to find products that really are positive sum for farmers, and choose to emphasize the parts that you genuinely believe are beneficial. I don’t know! Would be curious for your thoughts :)
Thank you for your comments :) I can’t speak for Koen, but some rough thoughts:
At least for me, my view going into this was “we have like a 30% chance to succeed, and it won’t be the
first(edit!) last project/charity we take a crack at”. I’m very happy to fail fast, as it means I can move onto the next promising idea.Re shrimp paste—my thoughts are basically summarised in this paper that I recently posted to the forum. I’m very very excited about wild shrimp stuff (as I am with farmed shrimp stuff), though shrimp paste specifically seems to have a few tricky hurdles—not a reason not to do it, but a shrimp paste charity would definitely need to spend a bit of time thinking very hard about the theory of change and tractability. Definitely lots of room for impact if navigated well. That said, I think there’s loads of room for new wild shrimp charities to work in Northern Europe, the United States, etc.
As for your last point, my general strategic view is simply “do the thing that has the highest impact”. I think the problems we are facing are immense and urgent. That said, the specific intervention (installing electric stunners on farmers’ harvest vessels in the Mediterranean) does already have a fair bit of support among farmers for various reasons.
Thanks for the kind comment!
To add to Ren’s reply:
I’m also still very motivated to continue working on these topics in whatever way would be useful. And if one of those is trying to start a new charity, I’m definitely willing to give that another shot.
Your assessment of our co-founder dynamic sounds accurate. For the past six months, I’ve mostly focused on general tasks with eye towards applying my maritime engineering skills later on once we got to talking with farmers. I do think that this approach has worked well for us. Early on, we did recognize a gap in sales-oriented skills, including negotiations and legal matters, which we planned to address with external help if needed.