I’m a philosophy major interested in building EA entrepreneurship!
Organiser for EA Occidental, EA LA, EA Malaysia.
I can be reached at Instagram, LinkedIn, or chantzukit@gmail.com
big Radiohead fan — very proud top 0.01% of spotify listeners in 2021, top 0.05% in 2022 :’)
glad it’s not April 1st when i posted this!
hey thanks for your comment, i think there’s a real point here about adverse selection
- where, agreed that ability to pay a lawyer generally correlates with the kind of profile that clears an O-1/EB-1A bar, and that high compensation is itself a criterion—but this is not always the case! preparing for an O1 might take some people years, and being at the start of their prep-years is where i imagine myself to be most counterfactual.
where i’d push back:
my vision for this side-project is more like a “quick 30mins to tell you some options you might have if you don’t know where to start”, and NOT “i will be your lawyer / i will stand in as your lawyer / i will commit to solving your visa problem in its entirety”!
agreed, it’ll be wonderful if someone already landed a job offer + their sponsoring-org has a legal retainer to / someone fulltime to help navigate visa challenges thoroughly! but unless you work at an established org (with dedicated HR or People Ops team etc), often enough, this is not the case!
some people are battling this visa challenge alone in the dark, and these are the people i hope to say some useful things to.
If most people I talk to shouldn’t pursue extraordinary ability visas, then telling them that in 30 minutes is the valuable outcome, not a failure mode. The alternative for someone in that position isn’t “correctly does nothing,” it’s often “spends months and several thousand dollars finding out the slow way,” or “never learns that a completely different route was open to them.” I’d rather be the person who says “your evidence is weaker than you think, and here’s what a lawyer will tell you” than have them arrive at that conclusion after paying for it.
steering clear means people in the hardest position, no employer, no retainer, no idea what exists, get nothing. That seems worse than a 30-minute call that frequently ends in “probably not this, but have you looked at X.”
[revised] my announcement post did lean toward the exciting options and probably set the wrong expectation. I should have led with “most people asking about O-1 shouldn’t file for one, but there are usually other things worth knowing about.”
was hoping to get this out there into the universe! perfect is the enemy of good here :)
Fwiw, as of posting this, I have already chatted with 2 people over a 30min-1hr call and braindumped things like
“have you considered this visa option?” based on their nationality / circumstance
“if you seriously want to try for the O1, you can consider xyz” or like “i think this evidence that you thought qualifies as an O1 criteria, is actually weaker than you think, but you should talk to xyz visa lawyers which i can recommend hopping on a consultation call”
“given that you’re graduating this date, if you want to be on track for xyz visa, consider doing xyz by xyz date and so forth”
counterfactual: and they both expressed “tremendously helpful, thank you for laying out my options (that i haven’t considered before) / scoping what it would look like within a 30min-1hr call!”
really excited to mentor this bunch who consistently get shit done. i hope to automate myself (what i’ve been doing with seeding AIS groups) away !
thank you for this post, i particularly like > Some information that I think should be published, but it’s not section
[just leaving this resource here] speaking of gaps-in-need-of-founders, checkout our work at Atlas Computing: https://blog.atlascomputing.org/p/civilizations-maintenance-backlog
relatedly, we’re also hiring for a Fields Strategist: https://jobs.80000hours.org/?jobPk=17895
i have spread it through most of my relevant whatsapp channels.
congrats to the whole 80K team (Chana, Aric, Phoebe, Sam), keep shipping more!
[meta] it felt fine listening to this post with the baked-in audio feature on eaforum, as it was intended? (question mark)
[praise] thank you for asking specific questions others would be curious to hear about as well. excited for this series Gergo!
🤘❤️🔥 Glad to see you posting this Josh! I imagine it’ll be helpful for future organizers who are also thinking about this :)
wishing yall best of luck leading up to the conference!! 🥳🥳
can’t think of better fit people to run these important programs! 🥳 congrats on the announcement launch, and cheers to more future projects under the Kairos banner!
this is really awesome to see!
glad someone wrote up a post on this! these look like your best guesses, i was wondering if we possibly have any empirical data that can support these claims?
Who should read this: EA or AIS Groups Mentors
epistemic status: quickly written mini-memo, not Claude-generated
I found lots of success with adopting this “Coaching” mindset framing going into my mentorship calls, that can strike the “firm but patient” balance:
this is possibly a (good) remnant from my past weightlifting-coaching backgrounds
accountability
so much value of paid coaching clients is from the social accountability of showing up to the scary arena together
where you’re coming from as a mentor...
from a place of “i’m rooting for you and i want you to succeed which is why i’m giving you this feedback” and “i believe you can win the Olympic gold medal if you fix xyz”
give concrete pointers
as often as possible, don’t be nebulous
eg. say less “go to gym”; say more “show up every Monday at 10am to 11am and do these five workouts, three sets of 10 reps each in this specific order.”
points out errors with immediacy;
build a relationship where error-correction is the norm
eg. “[mid-screen share] … wait wait go back, i think you should remove the picture of Terminator on the poster, because-”
leave mentees feeling like they worked with (an actual) coach and not someone they just answer to ;)