EA - Downsides of Small Organizations in EA by Ozzie Gooen

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Downsides of Small Organizations in EA, published by Ozzie Gooen on June 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic Status: This is a subject I've been casually thinking about for a while, but I wrote this document fairly quickly. Take this with a big grain of salt. This is written in a personal capacity.A lot of EA, especially in meta and longtermism, is made up of small organizations and independent researchers. This provides some benefits, but I think the downsides are substantial and often unappreciated.More clearly:EA funding mostly comes from a very few funders, but it goes to a mass of small organizations. My impression is that this is an unusual combination.I think that there are a lot of important downsides to having things split up into a bunch of small nonprofits.I'm suspicious of many of the reasons for having small organizations that I've come across. There might well still be good reasons I haven't heard or that haven't been suggested.I suggest some potential changes we could make to try to get some of the best incremental tradeoffs.DownsidesLow Management FlexibilityIf you want to quickly create a new project in a sizeable organization, you can pull people from existing teams. This requires upper management but is normal for said management. On the other hand, if you instead have a bunch of tiny independent organizations, your options are much more limited. Managers of tiny organizations can be near-impossible to move around because many of them own key funding relationships. Pulling together employees from different organizations is a pain, as no one has the authority to directly do this. The best you can do is slowly encourage people to join said new project.Moving people around is crucial for startups and tech firms. The first version Amazon Prime was made in under two months, in large part because Jeff Bezos was able to rapidly deploy the right people to it. At other tech companies, some amounts of regularly rotating team members is considered healthy. Strong software engineers get to work on many projects and people.Small nonprofit teams with locked-in mission statements are the opposite of this. This rigidness could be good for donors with little trust, but it comes at a substantial cost of flexibility.I’ve seen several projects in EA come up that could use rapid labor. Funding rounds seem particularly labor-intensive. It often seems to me like it should be possible to pull trusted people from existing organizations for a few weeks or months, but doing so is awkward because they’re formally part of separate organizations with specific mission statements and funding agreements.A major thing that managers at sizeable organizations do is size up requests for labor changes. The really good requests (with good managers) get quickly moved forward, and the bad ones are shot down. This is hard to do without clear, able, and available authorities.Low Employee FlexibilityEmployees that join small organizations with narrow missions can be assured that they will work on those missions. But if they ever want to try working with a different team or project, even just for a few months, the only option is often that they formally quit and formally apply for new roles. This is often a massive pain that could take 2-6+ months. The employee might be nervous about resentment or retaliation from other team members.My org, QURI, is doing fairly niche work and has a small team (2 people now!). I’d be excited to have some team members try rotating on and off for a few months here and there. It’s very valuable for us to have people with certain long-term skills “available” for long periods of time, but they don’t need to be active for long portions. I think this project makes sense to keep small, but I also feel awkward about asking others to joi...