Reflections on Two Years at EA Germany I'm stepping down this week after two years as co-director of EA Germany. While I deeply valued the team and helped build successful structures, I stayed too long when my core values and personal fit no longer aligned. When I joined EAD, I approached it like the other organisations I’ve worked with, planning on staying 5-10 years to create stability during growth and change. My co-director, Sarah, and I aimed to grow EAD quickly and sustainably. But the FTX collapse hit just as I started in November 2022, and the dream of expanding the team disappeared. This wasn’t the only challenge. I treated EAD as a single organisation rather than part of a global ecosystem where impact shouldn’t be geographically contained. I slipped into a “soldier mindset,” focused on proving EAD’s local value instead of prioritising international scalability or considering where I could provide the most impact. By the end of my first year, I could see that I’d reached the end of what I was best at and passionate about. The organisation was running well, and my full-time input wasn’t needed anymore. But I stayed—because I felt so good with the team, because of my long-term commitment, and because I hoped we’d find a path to grow the organisation within Germany. Meanwhile, I started consulting for Claire Boine at Successif. When she secured new funding to expand, I joined her team part-time. Instead of using this as a chance to leave EAD, I tried to balance both roles—while still running my company, serving as a trustee at EV UK, and mentoring on the side. Looking back, this was my biggest mistake: I didn’t recognise that my counterfactual impact at EAD had become the lowest of all my commitments. Instead of staying true to my value of helping solve the most pressing problems as effectively as possible, I acted out of connection and obligation. This experience has taught me to recognise when to step back and refocus on where my skills, passion, and

I often return to this bit of 80000 Hours' anonymous career advice, about how when you're great at your job, no one's advice is that useful. I like it a lot. It reminds me of Agnes Callard's observation about a young writer asking Margaret Atwood for advice and getting only the trite advice to "write every day":

I would REALLY appreciate if someone quite good at math (especially distributions/graphs) could hop on (what I expect would be a short call) to help me sort out an issue I'm panicking over

Anthropic's Twitter account was hacked. It's "just" a social media account, but it raises some concerns. Update: the post has just been deleted. They keep the updates on their status page: https://status.anthropic.com/

We just wanted to transparently share that CEA’s University Groups Team is not running two of our historical programs over the next few months: * A University Group Organizer Retreat (UGOR), which was usually run over (northern hemisphere) winter break * Our summer internship, usually run from May - September We think both programs are relatively valuable, but are less aligned with our current vision (of providing value through helping EA university group organizers run better groups) than some of our alternatives. We have made this (difficult!) decision so that we can instead focus on: * Running our Organizer Support Program, a three-week to semester-long mentorship program * Increasing capacity on the team (currently under 3 FTE), including by recruiting a strategy lead for our pilot university work (and building out that work more generally) * Further building out our grantmaking capacity * Potentially piloting new scalable programming * (And more) This decision does not rule out running UGOR or our internship in the future. In fact, we are exploring whether we should run UGOR over (northern hemisphere) summer break, allowing more groups to better prepare for their academic year. We piloted such a retreat as part of our pilot university programming this summer, and that worked well. We aim to continue to transparently share updates such as this one! We are also always open to feedback (including anonymously), especially if you have specific suggestions on what things we should deprioritize to create space for UGOR or the summer internship.