I’d like to devote my career to serving the world and its inhabitants. Currently working to reduce the suffering of farmed animals. I’m interested in many EA topics in general and always happy to connect to like-minded and non-like minded individuals ;)
SofiaBalderson
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So you want to start something for animals: a map of the incubators
I’m stepping down as Hive’s Executive Director, and we’re hiring my successor
A Practical Framework for Deciding When to Attend Conferences
hey Leonie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Glad it resonated.
I’m happy to hear you’ve found unemployment useful to your progress! Good luck with your role search! And many thanks for the kind sabbatical wishes :)
How to stand out as a job applicant when AI raises the bar for everyone
Love this! I think speed of deployment is a really big issue in current funding in the space, with projects often waiting for 3-12 months before a funder can make a decision (plus many only have RFPs running once or twice a year, and it can take another month of so to receive funding), and given how urgent AIxAnimals projects are, we really need faster decisions and implementation. Thanks for starting this!
The management capacity gap in animal advocacy (and what we can do about it)
Cool work! So happy our post on Building Impactful communities was useful to you folks! Good luck with your endevours!
Happy birthday Mitchell! Sorry about the existential dread. I promise the next 10,000 hours include cake!
Should 80,000 hours rebrand to 10,000 hours (max)?
Being in the Right Place at the Right Time (When You Are Looking for Opportunities or a Job)
Thanks for writing this. Really interesting. I find it quite insightful that you got the job that wasn’t advertised out of all the jobs you applied for. I think that currently the advertised jobs are too competitive to feel like it’s worth applying, even though of course it can be worth it for a small number of people, but great job on listing your details on the database that you were picked up. Enjoy your new role!
Hey Richie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Appreciate it. I basically agree with you on most of the points.
Really like the additional detail on how engagement should be clearly for the engagement’s sake and not advertised as leading to employment, if it’s increasingly rarely the case, or in the future, when we use it as a tool to keep people in the movement without employment.
Re: management and mentorship: I think I mostly agree with you, but I may be using “management” in a slightly broader sense.
I agree that high-performing, motivated people usually need much less direction and oversight, and that hiring for autonomy matters a lot. In that sense, great people absolutely reduce the need for micromanagement.
Where I still think management remains important, even with very strong people and very advanced AI, is around coordination, prioritisation, decision-making under uncertainty, and looking after the human side of work. Once you have more than a handful of people, someone still needs to hold the whole picture, notice misalignment early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure people aren’t burning out or duplicating effort.
I also think mentoring and management can blur a bit. Helping people understand context, giving feedback, supporting growth, and creating the conditions for good work are often framed as mentoring, but they’re also core parts of good management.
So I’m less convinced that we’ll “need less management” so much as we’ll need a different kind of management: lighter-touch, more relational, more focused on sense-making and coordination rather than task assignment. AI may reduce some parts of the job, but I’m not sure it replaces the human judgment and care elements that show up as soon as teams scale beyond a few people.
Very much enjoying thinking through this topic and grateful to you for starting the conversation!
How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
Seconding what @huw wrote: I’d be happy for an AI to write a draft, but (at this time) I will never publish something without a thorough review and strong work to put it in my own voice. I will never let a single AI-written word go unreviewed.
Also I usually also ask humans to review my drafts even after I have a first/final pass, and the ideas that I input into the prompt are mine, not just something I asked AI to create. Also, my AI tools know my voice quite well at this point and I’m constantly tweaking the instructions.
thanks a lot Shanil, appreciate you reading! Founder/Ed distinction is quite useful as not all founders should be EDs and not all EDs should be founders. They are definitely very different roles and have different personal fit and skills requirements, even though they often seem to appear together on someone’s job title.
AI, Talent, and the Future of Animal Advocacy
Many thanks Lorenzo! Appreciate the read and agreed that it can be useful to separate the movement role from the job market, especially considering how competitive the roles can be!
Many thanks Dilan! I really appreciate your posts on farmed animal advocacy and I think you are a good example of having a movement role along with your job role!
Many thanks Alex, appreciate you reading! Thanks for linking to this, I will have a read, looks very interesting!
Thanks for reading closely, and welcome to the Forum! You’re right that the title overreaches: three of the nine entries aren’t technically incubators, and I say so in each of their sections. A better title would have used “Founding pathways”, but people tend to recognise “incubator” better, so that’s why I chose it.
On why they’re included: the scope I set was programs whose goal (or likely outcome) is launching new organisations for animals. If you’re a would-be founder, RP’s funded runway or an SMA fellowship can get you there just as much as a classic cohort incubator, and I’d rather you see the full set of routes than only the ones with “incubator” in their name. Deliberately not covered: the rest of the talent system (courses, fellowships without a founding angle, job boards), which would be a different and much longer post.
One correction to your read: the bucketing you’re describing was mine, not the AI’s. I chose to include those three because I think excluding them would leave founding options out.