As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time with the SV startup scene (have cofounded multiple companies) and the EA scene, I’d flag that the cultures of at least these two are quite different and often difficult to bridge.
Most of the large EA-style projects I’d be excited about are ones that would require a fair amount of buy-in and trust from the senior EA community. For example, if you’re making a new org to investigate AGI safety, bio safety, or expand EA, senior EAs would care a lot about the leadership having really strong epistemics and understand of existing EA thinking on the topic.
One problem is that entrepreneurship culture can present a few challenges: 1) There’s often a lot of overconfidence and weird epistemics 2) Often there’s not much spare time to learn about EA concepts 3) Leaders often seem to grow egos
The key thing, to me, seems to be some combination of humility and willingness to begin at the bottom for a while. I think that becoming well versed in EA/longtermism enough to found something important, can often require beginning in a low-level research role or similar.
One strategy some people give is something like, “I don’t care about buy-in from the EA community, I could start something myself quickly, and raise a lot of other money”. In sensitive areas, this can get downright scary, in my opinion.
Of my current successful entrepreneur friends, I can’t see many of them going the “go low-status for a few years route”, but I could see some. Most people I know don’t seem to want to go down a few status and confidence levels for a while.
There are definitely some prominent examples in EA of people who have done similar things (I’d flag Ben West, who seems have pulled off a successful transition, and is discussed in these comments), but there aren’t all too many.
The FHI RSP program was a nice introductory program, but was definitely made more for researchers than entrepreneurs. I could imagine us having similar transitionary programs for entrepreneur-types in the future. There are probably some ways more programs and work in this area could make things easier; for instance, they could seem really prestigious (flashy branding), in part to make it more palatable for people taking status-decreases for a while.
If there are successful entrepreneurs out there reading this interested in chatting, I’d of course be happy to (just message me), though I’m sure 80k and other groups would be interested as well.
(Note: I think Charity Entrepreneurship gets around this a bit by first, focusing on younger people with potential to be entrepreneurs, rather than people who are already very successful, and second, focusing on particular interventions that can be done more independently.)
As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time with the SV startup scene (have cofounded multiple companies) and the EA scene, I’d flag that the cultures of at least these two are quite different and often difficult to bridge.
Most of the large EA-style projects I’d be excited about are ones that would require a fair amount of buy-in and trust from the senior EA community. For example, if you’re making a new org to investigate AGI safety, bio safety, or expand EA, senior EAs would care a lot about the leadership having really strong epistemics and understand of existing EA thinking on the topic.
One problem is that entrepreneurship culture can present a few challenges:
1) There’s often a lot of overconfidence and weird epistemics
2) Often there’s not much spare time to learn about EA concepts
3) Leaders often seem to grow egos
The key thing, to me, seems to be some combination of humility and willingness to begin at the bottom for a while. I think that becoming well versed in EA/longtermism enough to found something important, can often require beginning in a low-level research role or similar.
One strategy some people give is something like, “I don’t care about buy-in from the EA community, I could start something myself quickly, and raise a lot of other money”. In sensitive areas, this can get downright scary, in my opinion.
Of my current successful entrepreneur friends, I can’t see many of them going the “go low-status for a few years route”, but I could see some. Most people I know don’t seem to want to go down a few status and confidence levels for a while.
There are definitely some prominent examples in EA of people who have done similar things (I’d flag Ben West, who seems have pulled off a successful transition, and is discussed in these comments), but there aren’t all too many.
The FHI RSP program was a nice introductory program, but was definitely made more for researchers than entrepreneurs. I could imagine us having similar transitionary programs for entrepreneur-types in the future. There are probably some ways more programs and work in this area could make things easier; for instance, they could seem really prestigious (flashy branding), in part to make it more palatable for people taking status-decreases for a while.
If there are successful entrepreneurs out there reading this interested in chatting, I’d of course be happy to (just message me), though I’m sure 80k and other groups would be interested as well.
(Note: I think Charity Entrepreneurship gets around this a bit by first, focusing on younger people with potential to be entrepreneurs, rather than people who are already very successful, and second, focusing on particular interventions that can be done more independently.)
A lot of this rings true to me.