I agree with lots of this, to the extent that I’m in the process of starting a new blog/newsletter with a view to reaching a new audience (online sports nerds like me) with a new frame (analytical principles you already know work in sport also unlock hidden value in other—more important—domains).
(I’m Chief of Staff at CEA and co-authored some of our posts linked to in your post. I’m currently on parental leave so not directly involved in CEA’s other ongoing marketing and comms efforts; I do think things like our stories campaign were working along the lines you recommend.)
Oscar Howie
Karma: 1,404
Having your mutually beneficial trade proposals turned down flat because the other side believes the world is a zero sum game sure is…a relevant lesson in the live environment.
The best auction leagues allow for weekly waivers and free agency, so there’s much more ongoing decision-making than is optimal under the one-transfer-per-week regime. (The demands of being on top of this, combined with us all being on the wrong side of the age curve, were among the things that made us decide it was time to call it a day for TWFC.)
I’m retired, rip.
I played the official FPL for years unseriously, and then started a draft league (the Theo Walcott Fan Club) with friends, before turning it into an auction league. I highly recommend getting yourself in an auction league if you aren’t already. (Draft leagues are also way better than official FPL, because each player can only be owned by one manager; auctions are the pinnacle of the game.)
Fantasy auctions are about the most fun you can have (tonight, I am Billy Beane!), and about the best way to practice rigorous analytical thinking (cost-effectiveness! Ever-changing counterfactuals! Emotional attachment to my own public predictions!). Some might dread to think how many hours I spent building and refining my player pricing model over the 9 years TWFC existed. But I don’t regret them: I carry the lessons I learned with me every day, and they’re one of the main sources of inspiration for my new Blog with No Name (working title). There will be blogs about this! Like and subscribe!
Maybe blogging will get me back in the game..
Legend. Love that you went for it! Looking forward to learning why I was wrong to ignore The Franchise Universes..
Peak Andy. Applying discount rates to pledge shortfalls is delightful on so many levels. Thanks for writing this!
I might just take my own
footnoteidea seriously and start writing a sports blog for impact reasons, and because you only live once.We can have all sorts of fun learning from sporting rigour and the glory of randomness. Sporting competitions and complex collaborations. Sporting politics and power structures. Sporting regulations and unwritten rules. Sporting incentives and ingenious-to-idiotic strategies.
You can get ahead of the curve by subscribing here, if you’d enjoy reading headlines like these ones I just found on the back of an old envelope:
You don’t have to stick to your picks
Solving the most pressing problems starts with updating your preseason predictions
Kicking the ball in the goal is not what makes goalscorers great
From shot selection to cause prioritization
The referees are not the problem
Regulating AI is the handball rule and the offside rule in a trenchcoat
You’re right that CEA (including EA Funds) is the last project remaining within EV.
We are spinning out to build an entity structure optimized for an independent CEA. Among the lessons we learned from the EV experience were that entity structures and associated regulatory requirements can be complex, especially when operating in multiple jurisdictions, and that getting our structure right matters in many ways. To take one example: the EV structure requires two CEOs (in the US and the UK), whereas our new CEA structure will require only one.
CEA grew the number of people engaging with our programs in 2025 by 20–25% year-over-year, beating our targets of 7.5–10% without increasing spending, and reversing the moderate decreases in engagement with our programs during 2023–24.
We were joined in January by two new Directors: Loic Watine, who will lead EA Funds, and Rory Fenton, who will lead our new Strategy and M&E function.
You can read our full 2025 progress report here.
“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff
I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:
Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.
Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/deputy duos regardless of titles):
Split the CEO’s role into component parts and assign responsibility for each part to CEO or CoS
Example: CEO does fundraising; CoS does budgets
Advantages: focus, accountability
Share the CEO’s role with both CEO and CoS actively involved in each component part
Example: CEO speaks to funders based on materials prepared by CoS; CEO assigns team budget allocations which are implemented by CoS
Advantages: flex capacity, gatekeeping
Some things to note about these approaches:
In practice, it’s inevitably some combination of the two, but I think it’s really important to be intentional and explicit about what’s being split and what’s being shared
Failure to do this causes confusion, dropped balls, and duplication of effort
Sharing is especially valuable during the early phases of your collaboration because it facilitates context-swapping and model-building
I don’t think you’d ever want to get all the way or too far towards split, because then you functionally have one more department-lead-equivalent, and you lose a lot of the benefits in terms of flex capacity and especially continuity
Both approaches depend on trust, and maximising them depends on an unusually high degree of trust
CEO trusting CoS to act on their behalf
In turn, this depends on trusting their judgement, and in particular trusting their judgement of when it’s appropriate to act unilaterally and when it’s appropriate to get input/approval from CEO
Others trusting that CoS is empowered to and capable of acting on CEO’s behalf
Doesn’t work if CEO and CoS disagree or undermine each other’s decisions in view of others, or if others expect CoS decisions to be overturned by CEO
It being easier to burn credibility than to build it is something close to an iron law, which means CoS should tread carefully while establishing the bounds of their delegated authority
It’s not a seniority thing: an Executive Assistant having responsibility for scheduling is an example of splitting the role; a Managing Director doing copyedits for the CEO’s op-ed is an example of sharing the role
I don’t think the title “CoS” matters, but I do think maximising the benefits of both models requires the deputy to have a title that conveys that they both represent and can act unilaterally on behalf of the principal to some meaningful degree
Managing Director and Chief of Staff do this; Project Manager and Exec Assistant do not
Congratulations on developing and launching this new strategy!
I’m Chief of Staff at CEA, and as we wrote in our own recently-published strategy post, we’re making diversifying EA funding a central part of our efforts to steward the community in the coming years, and I’m excited about us exploring more ways to collaborate on making pledges a big piece of that puzzle.
Staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our total spending, but the proportion increased in 2024 compared to 2023 (28% vs 21%).
Between 2021 and 2023, our total spending increased by 264% (from $6.9m to $25.1m), while our headcount increased only 40% (from 24 to 34), which meant we had insufficient capacity to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs. This informed our decision to make foundation-building our organizational priority in 2024, including both investing in hiring to increase our capacity and cutting non-staff costs, with the majority of savings (per Ollie’s comment) being contributed by lower spending on events, especially EAG.
If you want to know more, we (CEA) just published our stewardship strategy, focused on building sustainable momentum for the EA community
“In my role at CEA, I embrace an approach to EA that I (and others) refer to as “principles-first”. This approach doubles down on the claim that EA is bigger than any one cause area. EA is not AI safety; EA is not longtermism; EA is not effective giving; and so on. Rather than recommending a single, fixed answer to the question of how we can best help others, I think the value of EA lies in asking that question in the first place and the tools and principles EA provides to help people approach that question.”
Zach wrote this last year in his first substantive post as CEO of CEA, announcing that CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA. (I’m Zach’s Chief of Staff.) Our approach remains the same today: we’re as motivated as ever about stewarding the EA community and ensuring that together we live up to our full potential.
Collectively living up to our full potential ultimately requires making a direct impact. Even under our principles-first approach, impact is our north star, and we exist to serve the world, not the EA community itself. But Zach and I continue to believe there is no other set of principles that has the same transformative potential to address the world’s most pressing problems as EA principles. So, in our assessment, at this moment in time, the best way for CEA to make progress towards our ultimate goal is sustainably growing the number of people putting EA principles into practice.
In reaching and implementing their decision to shift their strategic approach, Niel and others at 80k are putting those principles into practice. While we might disagree about some of the particulars, or draw different conclusions, we don’t disagree that updating in response to new information is appropriate, that AI risk reduction is a critically important cause, or that achieving progress at the scale and speed required will require making some hard trade-offs. We agree that there will be implications and opportunities for our community, including for CEA, in terms of filling some of the gaps 80k might leave behind, and this transition will be made smoother by the fact we are all still shooting for the same north star.
I want to recognize that these are big shoes to fill: 80k has built an incredibly impressive team, developed a set of remarkable products, and earned great respect from a wide audience. I’m both sad that this unique combination won’t be deployed so directly in stewardship of EA, and excited to see what it can achieve with even greater focus.
Quick followup to note that collaborative spirit is included among CEA’s Guiding Principles listed on the CEA site. Clearly it’s confusing—including to a member of CEA’s own staff like me! - that we refer to different things as ‘principles’ in different places, and that might be something we look to clarify if and when we revisit these pages as Zach Era CEA.
Thanks for reading closely, and for flagging this! While CEA is the owner of EA.org, the intro essay was drafted by a collaborative process including non-CEA staff, and the final version was written by 80k’s Ben Todd (more in the essay’s announcement here).
The discrepancy is tracking the reality that there is no consensus about how best to define EA, although I think the omission of collaborative spirit from the CEA page is an oversight and I expect we will edit it accordingly soon.
Our (CEA’s) website has a page about core EA principles.
And note that Zach has said elsewhere he intends to write more about his views in due course.
Circling back to say we recently published CEA’s 2023 budget.
Note that we project spending to be substantially under budget.
In 2021, we spent $6.9m and ended the year with 29 staff. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because those staff include five members of what was then the CEA ops team, and is now the EV Ops team, so the more direct comparison is with 24 staff at that time.
You can see on our dashboard some of the ways our programs have changed since 2021 (three in-person EAG events compared to one, nine EAGx events compared to zero, etc).
CEA’s spending in 2023 is substantially lower than in 2022: down by $4.8 − 5.8 million.
The graph below shows our budget as it stood early in the year, reflecting our pre-FTX plans, and compares that to how our plans and spending have evolved as we’ve adapted to the new funding environment. This has happened during an Interim period in which we’ve tried where possible not to make hard-to-reverse changes that constrain the options of a new CEO.
We currently have the same number of Core staff that we did at the end of 2022 (37), but staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our overall spending (around 20% in 2023).
For example, we spend a lot on events, and have cut a lot of event spending, but largely by reducing passthrough costs rather than by firing people from what is already a small team relative to the scale of its activities.
In contrast, the costs of the Online team responsible for the Forum are much more staff-heavy, and we don’t have plans to replace several people who left the team this year. We did recently hire one new person to work on Forum content.
It’s also worth noting that we postponed as much hiring as we could during our ongoing Interim period, so we expect our total number of staff to increase in 2024 relative to today’s benchmark. We expect that increasing staff costs as a proportion of our spending will increase the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs.
Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting! I’m not sure we disagree much, but I think the emphasis matters.
For sure you’re right, there were many, many forces at play in the revolution. It’s a book-length story (tempting), and it wouldn’t be able to contain itself to hoops: there’s no Daryl Morey without Billy Beane (and there’s no Beane without Jonah Hill, and there’s no Jonah Hill without Bill James…). Morey says the Rockets owner pitched him they were looking for a Moneyball type, and the owner says it was reading the Lewis book that made him overhaul his organization by injecting analytics (they tried to hire Beane before Morey). Curry is no less a product of his environment than anyone else, and that environment was shaped by these guys from the inside, and by Nate Silver and Benjamin Morris and the rest of the blogosphere from the outside.
And I still want to defend the position that Curry was singularly responsible for inflecting the curve in the mid-2010s.
By the time of Steph’s breakout in 2014⁄15, Morey had been in post long enough to become the face of the nerds (it was his name Barkley was yelling, right before the bit about not getting any girls in high school), and not long enough to have won anything (which isn’t necessarily shade: it takes time to build things, especially when you’re the insurgency and you don’t have a cheat code). Despite eschewing the midrange and shooting more and more threes, his Rockets’ offense topped out at 4th and their net rating at 7th. They shot more threes than anyone else for the first time in 2014, and their offense was 7th. They’d won one playoff series in seven seasons. The reason Barkley could punch down at him was because he hadn’t succeeded rising up.
Steph is different. He could stand out while fitting in: far from being a self-consciously nerd-coded outsider pointing at spreadsheets and telling OGs they don’t know their own business, he’s the son of an NBA shooter out there shimmying the shimmy. And he proved the doubters wrong in terms they couldn’t fail to comprehend: not if you know where to look our offense overperforms its underlying talent level, but you can torch everyone in your path shooting threes and look irresistibly cool doing it.
It’s not just that Steph won over fans. He won over everyone, including all the decision-makers not called Daryl who’d been resisting the revolution. He made it crystal clear that people in positions of power had been looking for edges in the wrong places. That, according to me at least, is why the league-wide curve shoots up from 2015, not from when Morey gets his gig in 2007 or when he trades for Harden in 2012.
I think this matters. EA already has lots of people running the Morey playbook, optimizing their own decisions within their own organizations. What we don’t have are many Stephs, getting out there and performing the new way of thinking so successfully and so joyfully that it changes everyone else’s behaviour.
A couple of things on the local level:
Placing as much emphasis as you do on illegal screens seems kinda wild to me. Not that it wasn’t a thing at all (I don’t really know), and they certainly set a trend in setting so many off-ball screens, but it seems unlikely to me that them moving a bit was more impactful than them being set in the first place, or that they were being set for—and by! - the Splash Brothers. Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball is great on this.
I agree Steve Kerr is not an analytics guy, but it seems like he is an elite model builder in his own way, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence Steph breaks out in Kerr’s first season. Based on his map of the court, filled in with what he’d learned as a shooter in Phil Jackson’s Triangle, and from taking over as Suns GM towards the end of Seven Seconds or Less, he could see clearly enough to know the best bits of each to borrow and blend to get the most out of Steph, and that wasn’t asking him to be like Jordan or Nash. He knew the power of the open three, and of cutting and screening, and he could imagine an offense not being dependent on the midrange or the pick and roll, and that a superstar with Steph’s gravity could be more effective off the ball. He had the credentials (and the soft skills) to get people to go along with something new. And he was willing to stick his neck out to try it even though he’d look silly if it failed.
Morey and the Rockets contribute to the first league-wide uptick in threes from 2010-15, but Moreyball only takes its extreme final form post-Steph. Maybe they would have got to five-out spacing anyway, without the Death Lineup doing switchy small-ball first, and Harden would have found his way to all the iso stepbacks anyway, and they would have spent a Game 7 missing 27 straight threes anyway, who knows. Their counterfactual trajectory is lost to history because after 2016, every roster-building move and tactical tweak they made was geared towards beating the greatest team ever assembled at their own game.