I proposed the Nonlinear Emergency Fund and Superlinear as Nonlinear Intern.[1]
I co-founded Singapore’s Fridays For Future (featured on Al Jazeera and BBC). After arrests + 1 year of campaigning, Singapore adopted all our demands (Net Zero 2050, $80 Carbon Tax and fossil fuel divestment).
I developed a student forum with >300k active users and a study site with >25k users. I founded an education reform campaign with the Singapore Ministry of Education.
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I proposed both ideas at the same time as the Nonlinear team, so we worked on these together.
Hello!
I’m Minh, Nonlinear intern from September 2022 to April 2023. The last time allegations of bad practices came up, I reiterated that I had a great time working at Nonlinear. Since this post is >10,000 words, I’m not able to address everything, both because:
I literally can’t write that much.
I can’t speak for interactions between Nonlinear and Alice/Chloe, because everything I’ve heard on this topic is secondhand.
I’m just sharing my own experience with Nonlinear, and interpreting specific claims made about Kat/Emerson’s character/interaction styles based on my time with Nonlinear. In fact, I’m largely assuming Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, and speaking in good faith.
Disclaimers
In the interest of transparency, I’d like to state:
I have never been approached in this investigation, nor was I aware of it. I find this odd, because … if you’re gonna interview dozens of people about a company’s unethical treatment of employees, why wouldn’t you ask the recent interns? Nonlinear doesn’t even have that many people to interview, and I was very easy to find/reach. So that’s … odd.
I was not asked to write this comment. I just felt like it. It’s been a while since I’ve written on the EA Forum. I generally don’t write, unless I have a unique perspective on the topic.
My internship was unpaid, aside from reimbursements for costs. I honestly never prioritised asking for more pay, because I always valued asking for advice/networking more. I just found that more personally useful/advantageous for my circumstances—no near-term financial pressure, being from a non-EA hub and having to actively network very far in advance to get roles I want, compared to people from EA hubs. So it was unpaid, I just … didn’t really care.
[EDIT]: I’m addressing parts of the post that imply a pattern of behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.
I agree this can sound suspicious, but I’ve always had the same principle. I refrain from creating negative impressions of others, because I think everyone should have a chance to make 1 good first impression. I also think it’s subjectively easier to echo negative rumours than positive rumours. All this can add up to a very warped perception, if most of what you hear about a person is secondhand.
Of course, this doesn’t extend to possible harm/abuse, so don’t take any of this as me minimising/refuting Alice or Chloe’s experiences. And, as mentioned, I don’t like assuming ill
of others based purely on secondhand information.
This is the one part I’m outright skeptical of. It sounds very out-of-character, to the point where I can’t foresee the Nonlinear team ever saying this. My experience with Kat, Drew or Emerson is that they love their families/partners a lot, and frequently communicate/visit. They are extremely intentional, scheduling in time to talk to loved ones every day. And if you think about it … why would someone visit a dozen countries a year, plus all the bureaucracy and hassle involved, if they didn’t like interacting with locals.
This daily pattern of behaviour would be really odd/suboptimal from a cold, logical, utility-maximising standpoint, as implied here.
My Occam’s Razor read is that Kat is basically externalising her internal dialogue. Kat naturally tends to procrastinate, so she uses these strategies to get herself to do work, and that self pep-talk sounds really weird when she externalises it to others. I struggle with procrastination as someone with ADHD, so my internal dialogue sounds very similar, I just don’t use that phrasing when talking to others haha.
If it means anything, when I stayed with Kat and Emerson for around 2 weeks, I never experienced anything similar. Driving, dishwashing and laundry I was never asked to do, which somehow felt weird the other way, because I thought I was doing too little.
OK, I feel this is a misinterpretation. Kat said this to me, but I had a different interpretation. Basically, I was discussing my idea of “the deferred life plan”: that, in my experience, ambitious people who want to start/build/work on meaningful things have a tendency to rationalise not doing it by simply not thinking too hard about the details.
[DISCLAIMER: Taken at face value, Kat’s response to Alice is an insensitive response to a subordinate saying they have money problems and need a pay rise. I’m suggesting that there might have been more context, based on Kat saying very similar things in a very different tone to me.]
I’m sure a lot of EAs have heard/believed some variation of “instead of trying to help the world/pursue meaningful things, you need to first go to a good college, get a good degree, build a good resume/CV, climb the corporate ladder, achieve financial independence and retire with a 3% rate of withdrawal and then do the thing you want”. My background is climate activism in Singapore, so that’s basically the only advice I’d ever heard.
I asked Kat for her opinion, because I knew she basically didn’t do any of that. She didn’t have a college degree, travelled a lot and spent years starting a nonprofit and living on very little. This topic is worth its own very long post, but essentially, she said “you need to break down and plan out exactly what your financial needs are, because intentionally maximising your runway gives you more room for risk tolerance”.
I think that makes sense. I think young EAs, and honestly, most young people, don’t confront themselves on what tradeoffs they need to have the life they want, purely out of discomfort. I’m a guy surrounded by guys from prestigious colleges, I feel all my peers just procrastinate pursuing things that matter to them by seeking high-status, high paying jobs. A lot of them have no goal of “if I make 75k a year for 3 years and rent with 3 roommates, I can pursue what I want for a decade at 25 years old”, even though that’s exactly the kind of calculation you need to … pursue meaningful things. And if you remove rent from the equation by living with parents, your risk tolerance goes way up.
Anyway, that’s my interpretation, based on hearing the exact same words from Kat, but extracting a very different meaning.
As for Emerson, he gives very transparent advice about how sharks operate, and how to survive them. He’s very perceptive (or at least, sounds perceptive) about adversarial strategies in high-growth, highly competitive spaces like online media and Web3, due to his 2 decades of experience in these fields.
Do I think Emerson can sound like a bad actor? Absolutely. It’s hard for a person to explain common manipulative strategies with sounding incredibly suspicious. However, for me, I spent the entire 2 weeks with him writing down notes on my laptop, notes I’ve found incredibly helpful as I’ve been scaling a generative AI startup for the past 4-5 months. Personally, I had to learn to deal with bad actors and adversarial business practices, either by being taught beforehand, or by experiencing it myself, and I vastly,vastly prefer being taught.