2018 Annual Review: Work & Impact

Your work, job, career, and business. My position, title, role, and responsibilities. My source of impact (and income).

This is part of my 2018 Annual Life Review, a framework I used for reflecting on and evaluating different areas in my life.

Status

2018 was a year of exploration. I had just sold my company and was trying to figure out how to make the best use of what I had. I had some hypotheses on how to best spend my time, but primarily felt that there was a lot of unknown unknowns. My mindset at the beginning of the year is captured in this article: So What’s Next?: Maximizing impact after my startup.

A year later, I can confirm that there was definitely a lot of interesting work out there that I didn’t know about. I was able to take deeper dives into certain fields, and also learn more about my professional strengths and weaknesses by working with new partners and colleagues, many of whom come from much more diverse cultural backgrounds.

The good stuff

• Hands-on strategy work with over 30 founders from around the world, in capacities ranging from 1-on-1 consulting, lead mentor, entrepreneur-in-residence, “interim cofounder” and advisor.
• Accelerated learning about industries I was curious about — fitness, recruitment, geotech, co-working, effective altruism
• Working (paid!) around the world: Jakarta, Tirana, Mostar, Skopje, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Geneva
• Started forming ideas worth sharing, e.g. What Founders Need To Grow
• Working at multiple scales: one-on-one with with founders, business transformation with growth-stage organizations, and ecosystem optimization with meta-organizations, e.g. government bodies
• Getting a CEA grant for strategy consulting work within EA / x-risk
• 5 EA events attended (in order of chronology): CEA Operations Forum, EAG SF, EAG London, CFAR workshop, Mohist Summit (EA China), organized two dinners for Founders Pledge to assess viability in Greater China
• Started The Good Growth Co. — currently working on the positioning and model, as part of consolidating learnings from the past year

Analysis

Mistakes and plan changes

• Too much travel
• My motivation is extremely contingent on my interest in the founders’ business and our rapport (perhaps obvious) — but not all programs allow free choice here.
• The culture and norms of the (core?) EA community is vastly different from the startup and environmental circles that I’ve been in

Insights / ideas

• It seems that growth-stage startups generally suffer from a shortage in operations talent, especially in areas of process and systems design, documentation and internal communications (also user research)
• Hypothesis: the ability to simultaneously work at multiple levels within an ecosystem puts one in a unique position to identify and implement relevant and practical interventions (on all levels, but particularly for ecosystem) — possibly more effectively than an external consultant or consultancy could
• It seems that my comparative advantage is to bridge some knowledge / experience that exists outside the EA ecosystem, in particular functional expertise related to organizational management and growth
• Was a good decision to give myself more time to decide. Also think it’s good to take a different approach, letting things emerge organically, rather than trying to set a vision / structure up front

Pains

• Funding: impact vs income

What I’m most excited about in 2019

1. Building a solution that help high-impact orgs scale

• Building out The Good Growth Co.
• Delivering 5 high impact projects within EA
• Working with and learning from experts, like Mark McCoy
• Figure out the most effective (business) model for solving bottlenecks (likely working with external experts)

2. Ecosystem-level optimization

• Launching the first EAGx in China — leverage comparative advantages of Hong Kong, build partnerships with value-aligned influencers and communities, build foundation for self-propagating community (and community leaders)
• Implementing recommendations for the Balkan ecosystem, based on my initial work and observations in 2018

3. Build knowledge and networks to enable work at higher scales of impact

Currently, this is more of a known unknown, so these are pretty rough hypotheses:

• Learn more about priority causes, including looking at cause / intervention prioritisation done by institutions not formally associated with EA
• Work with more diverse types of stakeholders, e.g. government, academia, politicians — possibly by leveraging “ideas worth sharing”, e.g. What Good Founders Need to Grow