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John Salter

Founder @ Overcome
1586 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)London, UKwww.overcome.org.uk

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Founder of Overcome, an EA-aligned mental health charity

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170

I think there's a ton of obvious things that people neglect because they're not glamorous enough:

1. Unofficially beta-test new EA stuff e.g. if someone announces something new, use it and give helpful feedback regularly
2. Volunteer to do boring stuff for impactful organisations e.g. admin
3. Deeply fact-check popular EA forum posts
4. Be a good friend to people doing things you think are awesome
5. Investigate EA aligned charities on the ground, check that they are being honest in their reporting
6. Openly criticise grifters who people fear to speak out against for fear of reprisal 
7.  Stay up-to-date on the needs of different people and orgs, and connect people who need connecting

In generally, looking for the most anxiety provoking, boring, and lowest social status work is a good way of finding impactful opportunities. 

1. Get a pilot up and running NOW, even if it's extremely small. 

You will cringe at this suggestion, and think that it's impossible to test your vision without a budget. Everyone does this at first, before realizing that it's extremely difficult to stand out from the crowd without one. For you, maybe this is a single class delivered in a communal area. 30 students attending regularly, demonstrating a good rate of progress, is a really compelling piece of evidence that you can run a school. 

- Do you have the resilience and organisation skills it takes to independently run a project?
- Will people actually use it?
- Can you keep your staff?
- Can you cost-effectively produce results? 

It can compelling prove the above, whilst having a ton of other benefits.

2. YOU need to be talking to funders NOW

Don't fall into the trap of trying to read their minds. Get conversations with them. Get their take on your idea. Ask what their biggest concerns would be. Go address them. Repeat. Build relationships with them and get feedback on your grant proposals before submitting them.

As the founder, its YOUR job to raise money. Don't delegate it. It'll take forever to get them to understand your organisation well enough, they won't be as sufficiently motivated to perform, and you won't learn. This is going to be a long-term battle that you face every year. You need to build the network, skills & knowledge to do it well. 

3. Be lean AF

The best way to have money is not to spend it. Both you and your charity may go without funding for months or years. Spend what little money you have, as a person and as a charity, very slowly. The longer you've been actively serving users, the easier fundraising gets. It's about surviving until that point.

4. Funders will stalk your website, LinkedIn, and social media if they can

As much as possible, make sure that they all tell the same story as your grant application - especially the facts and figures. 

5. When writing your proposals, focus on clarity and concreteness above all else

Bear the curse-of-knowledge in mind when writing. Never submit anything without first verifying other people can understand it clearly. Write as though you're trying to inform, not persuade. 

- Avoid abstractions 
- State exact values ("few" -> "four", "lots" -> "nine", "soon" -> "by the 15th March 2024")
- Avoid adjectives and qualifiers. Nobody cares about your opinions.
- Use language that paints a clear, unambiguous image to the readers mind

OLD:  mean student satisfaction ratings have increased greatly increased since programs began and we believe it's quite reasonable to extrapolate due to our other student-engagement enhancements underway and thus forecast an even greater increase by the end of the year" 

NEW: When students were asked to rate their lessons out of 10, the average response was 5. Now, just three months later, the average is 7/10. Our goal is to hit 9/10 by 2025 by [X,Y,Z].


Good luck!

I think schlep blindness is everywhere in EA. I think the work activities of the average EA suspiciously align with activities nerds enjoy and very few roles strike me as antithetical. This makes me suspicious that a lot of EA activity is justified by motivated reasoning, as EAs are massive nerds.

It'd be very kind of an otherwise callous universe to make the most impactful activities things that we'd naturally enjoy to do.

I don't think animal interventions are worse but I do I think the statement is wild speculation. I don't think EAs can effectively compare interventions between very different cause areas. 

I suspect most EAs don't actually think through their own cause prioritisation, I think they instead defer to others, and thus don't view the consensus as compelling evidence to change my mind.

Evidence that ripple-effects of interventions are negligible would change my mind though. I find the EV calculations for the short-term supremacy of animal welfare interventions compelling but suspect that global health interventions have larger ripple effects throughout time and that ripple effects are likely more important than the immediate effect of the intervention. 


The core issue with your post is that one cannot simply state the cost of ownership then use that to calculate the cost-effectiveness, and be taken seriously. To be convincing, you need to actually factor in all the costs of your intervention:

1. The cost of getting each hospital to sign up
2. The cost of delivering the equipment
3. The cost of training people in how to use it
4. Your salaries
5. All your other costs

To do so seems intellectually dishonest, or at least that you're missing out much of the information we need to properly evaluate your intervention.  I don't think you are doing this on purpose. It looks like you're doing great work:

  1. It isn't easy to get founder's pledge to give you money, and their charity evaluations are taken pretty seriously.
  2. It seems like you're saving a lot of lives that otherwise would not have been saved
  3. It seems at first inspection like your intervention could be cost-competitive with other top EA charities, which would be an incredible accomplishment. It'd put you in the top >0.1% of charities.

I'd suggest that your presentation of your work is the biggest barrier to getting it taken seriously right now. 

1. The post is pretty long and most of the paragraphs are verbose. 
2. It took me a while to actually understand what you do. Most readers have probably clicked off before actually knowing what your intervention consists of. I believe the relevant information is in paragraph ~7? It needs to be in paragraph 1 or 2!
3. Your call-to-action (requesting feedback) as at the top. It needs to be at the very bottom

It might be worth getting some external advice on how to present your work better to donors and EA audiences. 

I've up-voted your post because I want more people to engage with your work. I've screenshot this to show you that I'm not just criticising you for fun. I want you to succeed.

What type of things would you be excited to fund?

I spoke to Kevin recently - seems like a nice guy who's serious about EA!

Here's examples from six of list of top ten companies by market cap

Apple is worth $3 trillion despite being on the verge of bankruptcy in the mid-nineties. 
Google is now worth 1.9 trillion. The founders tried and failed to sell it for 1 million.
Amazon's stock price dropped 90% during dot com crash
Nvidia, recently world's most valuable business, had to lay off half its staff in 1997 and try to win a market with ~100 other startups all competing for same prize
Elon Musk: "I thought SpaceX and Tesla both had >90% chance of failure". He was sleeping on his friends coaches to avoid paying rent at that time.
Facebook's rise was so tumultuous they made a movie about it. Now worth 1.3 trillion.
Warren buffet regretted buying Berkhire Hathway, and almost sold it. Now worth 744 billion.

Talking about EA more specifically

~10 founders have spilled the details of their journeys to me. ~70% felt hopeless at least once. There's been at least four or five times I've been close to quitting. I had to go into credit card debt to finance our charity. I've volunteered full-time for >4 years to keep the costs lower, working evenings to pay rent. Things are now looking a lot better e.g. our funders doubled our budget last year and we're now successfully treating ~4-5x more people than this time last year.

I've had similar worries. Most extremely impactful projects look destined to fail half a dozen times before they blow up.

The right balance is hard to strike between incentivising determination and encouraging people to waste less money on ideas that prove weak.

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