Former CTO and co-founder of earn-to-give fintech Mast.
Henry Stanley šø
Karma: 1,922
Cool also that @Jeff Kaufman šø ās story is the tenth most-viewed page on effectivealtruism.org!
Right but in practice you can only donate it on a liquidity event (although per Juliaās comment maybe OP considers donating a bunch of illiquid stock satisfactory; even then I doubt many people are donating stock in an early-stage low-valuation startup).
In which case the goal of ā¬1M donated can only be reached when the company has a liquidity event, which will take several years. I hope OP isnāt planning on locking himself in a room for the best part of a decade...
84 hour weeks are also common in industries like investment banking. If someone said they were giving up all distractions, working 84h weeks as an investment banking VP and donating 70% of their salary for 3 years, we would just call them dedicated. So I think the only caveats that are needed are to ensure the path to ā¬1M is realistic and to avoid burnout.
In practice a lot of those people end up horribly burnt out. If I knew a friend who was planning on going into investment banking (into a role where working 80+ hour weeks was the norm) I would discourage them from doing so.
Looks like a lovely retreat. I love how incredibly cheap this worked out at as well! (Not that I dislike the semi-lavishness of EAG, but quite refreshing too.)
Iāll have to come along next year!
I love the name
I feel like not many people really have āa job that can mostly be done from anywhereā, and a lot hinges on that assumption here. If youāre full time remote then sure, the case for being in a high COL area is weaker. But I suspect the majority of jobs have some expectation of being in the office at least sometimes.
If your organisation pays people less if they do the same work from a cheaper area, consider if you are creating weird incentives
If your org takes the view than collaborating in person is better than working fully remote (and plenty of orgs do take this view, and quite reasonably) then that org should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and pay people more if theyāre coming into the office. This is what we did when I was running a fintech startup. By extension you should be willing to take a lower salary if youāre going to work remotely from a cheaper place.
I think your piece treats being in a high COL place as solely an EA move; in reality EA hubs are not picked from a random list and are attractive places in themselves. People want to be in e.g. London for lots of reasons (more connections, friends, fun things going on) and it being an EA hub is a nice side benefit. I was based in London for many years and wouldnāt for example make the move out to a cheaper UK city, leaving behind friends and family and a large dating poolāthere would need to be a strong draw to overcome the cost of doing that beyond just lower cost of living.
My ānew & upvotedā feed on the homepage is now all zero karma posts (or perhaps ā1 to +2). Is that expected?
Looks like the linked post has been removed
Is it just me or is the post itself not showing here?
A fantastically inspiring story and a super interesting takeāsounds like Wasoko was a lot of hard graft. Well done for sticking with it for 11 years. I also see youāve pledged 70% of the proceeds with Founders Pledge; also extremely cool.
(Makes my B2B SaaS founding to give efforts seem much less Herculean in comparison!)
we already had multiple strong studies showing that the availability of equivalent substitutes does not lead to major changes in meat consumption.
This feels like your weakest argument. So far there arenāt āequivalent substitutesā to meatāonly plant based imitationsāso itās not clear what these studies are telling us. The RP study you link to explicitly says itās an analysis of plant-based meats and not cultured meat.
Katjaās blogging from Inkhaven too!
Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like itās barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.
April Foolās isnāt for a couple more weeks
Thank you for your service š«”
The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Could you give more detail on this?
I donāt see any mention here or in the comments about neglectedness, which seems like the most obvious reason for why EA isnāt a good fit here. There are enormous, well-funded, long-established ecosystems dedicated to exactly this sort of thingācivil liberties organisations, legal defence funds, democratic governance NGOs, journalism, academic institutions, unions, anti-fascist networks etc.
I think thereās some argument that the EA mindset could be applied to finding tractable interventions here but ultimately I just think there are more pressing problems that need our attention.
An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital āyouāre welcome to use our drug so long as you donāt use it in any abortions,ā it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead).
This is a great intuition pump.
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least thereās no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/āits author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Donāt have much to add except that this sounds exceptionally fucked-up and Iām sorry you had to go through it.
I like this! Neatly sidesteps the issue of people being unwilling to negotiate hardāalready something people donāt like doing, and Iām sure EAs at non-profits even moresoāin favour of letting them ask for what they need.
Same for startup founders; I know people who took a tiny or no salary for many years, only to find that when their startup failed they were broke. The upside is small, the downside very large.
Pay among EA orgs has (as I understand it) been reasonably competitive in general, so perhaps AIM is an exception (I remember Joeyās salary was mentioned explicitly in the application form for CEO!) rather than the rule. But notable that Lewis Bollard said recently that animal welfare as a movement pays extremely badly, and perhaps with the influx of new funding weāll see this change.