Talk for West Coast EA retreat, Apr 2026
What are projects?
- projects vs schoolwork
- projects vs employment
- projects vs “orgs” or “startups”
- so: a project is a labor of love, starts small, on the side
some of the projects I’ve started:
- Manifund, nonprofit charity
- Manifold, tech startup
- Mox, coworking space
- Manifest, conference/festival
- Taco Tuesday, weekly dinner series
- many, many websites and apps
Why start projects?
- it’s fun!
- you get to make a thing happen, the way you want it to
- a lot of impact comes from founding the thing, ability to shape and steer
- projects can then scale up, take on a life of their own
- you learn a lot
- learn a lot faster when you’re directly responsible
- also, covers things that you don’t learn as an employee
- full spectrum: leadership, sales, marketing, eng, product, finances, etc
- ultimate responsibility, hero license
- “good for resume” “prestigious”
- “EA needs new projects”
Motivations that help when starting out
- surely I could do better than that
- huh, why doesn’t anyone do this easy obvious thing
- “focus on the places where it feels like everyone else is dropping the ball”
- working with these cofounders/colleagues is great
- I love these people and want to serve them
- I haven’t done this before, but seems fun to try
- wow this is hard, but I think I can rise to the challenge
- riches, glory, “impact”
Lean into your advantages!
advantages of being young:
- free time, no obligations
- energy
- ambition, hunger
- fluid intelligence, speed, rate of learning
- people want to help you, bet on you
- earnestness (naivety?)
- “we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they’d be easy”
- also: personal comparative advantage
- eg me: coding, I found software fun, it’s fast and leveraged
- I also read and type pretty fast, so decent at lots of info-processing things
Useful skills for projects
- talking to users, user interviews, getting feedback (qualitative, quantitative)
- product taste, making your thing good, caringness/attention to detail
- project management, executing efficiently, prioritizing, shipping
- communications:
- marketing — creating things (landing pages, tweets, announcements), broadcasting
- outreach, sales — cold emails, taking meetings, intros, follow up
- meta-skill of learning new skills, asking for feedback, copying what works and tweaking
Hot takes
- object level vs meta projects (projects that help others do projects)
- my guess is people in this room are much more exposed to meta-level stuff
- easier to think of meta projects when brainstorming, but setup costs can be higher, require a lot of getting people on board, overcoming cold start problem
- meta can be kinda fake, disconnected from reality
- meta can be slower; I personally enjoy projects that don’t require anyone’s permission
- hackathons are great for projects
- spend time with people who start projects
- work on things for fun, rather than “impact” or “good on resume” or “i can get funding”
- making money >> getting funding
- when users give you money, you know that the thing you’re getting is positive sum; better feedback loops
- forward chain vs backward chaining
- move fast, learn from the world
- EA & AIS do not have a monopoly on effectiveness, altruism, truth, importance
- other places I learn from: startups, Catholicism, rationality,
Questions?
Appendix
- Who to read
- Paul Graham
- Patrick McKenzie?
- Charity Entrepreneurship / AIM
- Incubator for new charities
- The Mom Test
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