Thanks for writing this. Really interesting. I find it quite insightful that you got the job that wasn't advertised out of all the jobs you applied for. I think that currently the advertised jobs are too competitive to feel like it's worth applying, even though of course it can be worth it for a small number of people, but great job on listing your details on the database that you were picked up. Enjoy your new role!

Hey Richie, many thanks for reading and your comment! Appreciate it. I basically agree with you on most of the points. 

Really like the additional detail on how engagement should be clearly for the engagement’s sake and not advertised as leading to employment, if it’s increasingly rarely the case, or in the future, when we use it as a tool to keep people in the movement without employment.

Re: management and mentorship: I think I mostly agree with you, but I may be using “management” in a slightly broader sense.

I agree that high-performing, motivated people usually need much less direction and oversight, and that hiring for autonomy matters a lot. In that sense, great people absolutely reduce the need for micromanagement.

Where I still think management remains important, even with very strong people and very advanced AI, is around coordination, prioritisation, decision-making under uncertainty, and looking after the human side of work. Once you have more than a handful of people, someone still needs to hold the whole picture, notice misalignment early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure people aren’t burning out or duplicating effort.

I also think mentoring and management can blur a bit. Helping people understand context, giving feedback, supporting growth, and creating the conditions for good work are often framed as mentoring, but they’re also core parts of good management.

So I’m less convinced that we’ll “need less management” so much as we’ll need a different kind of management: lighter-touch, more relational, more focused on sense-making and coordination rather than task assignment. AI may reduce some parts of the job, but I’m not sure it replaces the human judgment and care elements that show up as soon as teams scale beyond a few people.

Very much enjoying thinking through this topic and grateful to you for starting the conversation! 

How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?

Seconding what @huw wrote: I’d be happy for an AI to write a draft, but (at this time) I will never publish something without a thorough review and strong work to put it in my own voice. I will never let a single AI-written word go unreviewed.

Also I usually also ask humans to review my drafts even after I have a first/final pass, and the ideas that I input into the prompt are mine, not just something I asked AI to create. Also, my AI tools know my voice quite well at this point and I'm constantly tweaking the instructions. 

thanks a lot Shanil, appreciate you reading! Founder/Ed distinction is quite useful as not all founders should be EDs and not all EDs should be founders. They are definitely very different roles and have different personal fit and skills requirements, even though they often seem to appear together on someone's job title. 

Many thanks Lorenzo! Appreciate the read and agreed that it can be useful to separate the movement role from the job market, especially considering how competitive the roles can be! 

Many thanks Dilan! I really appreciate your posts on farmed animal advocacy and I think you are a good example of having a movement role along with your job role!

Many thanks Alex, appreciate you reading! Thanks for linking to this, I will have a read, looks very interesting! 

Thank you for sharing this so openly, and for your work on this project over the years! As a fellow community builder, I really recognise how hard this work can be, especially when it comes to funding and impact uncertainty.

I can confirm that what you describe matches the reality for many community builders. I’ve been running Hive on a paid basis for almost three years, and funding has consistently been one of our biggest challenges. Tracking and evidencing impact is also genuinely difficult in community building, even when the work feels clearly valuable on the ground.

Given that context, your decision to transition feels thoughtful and solid. I appreciate you taking the time to reflect on this publicly. I think pieces like this are really important for setting more realistic expectations about what long-term community building actually looks like!

Solid advice, concisely put! 
I think you may have chosen this title for emphasis, but I would say that applying for jobs can still work and I wouldn't recommend people to just stop completely, but I agree it's longer timelines and much lower chances. If I were looking for a job now, I think I would spend 10% applying for jobs and all the rest of the time increasing my surface area for serendipity and doing directly what you're talking about. 

I agree, I was speaking to @Jordan Pieters 🔸  about this and I think it's often unclear whether an EAG or an EAGx is valuable for animal advocates as you can't see the talks or attendees (I appreciate attendees provide most value at such networking events and it's hard to see who is going before people have committed to going). Since there are now many more animal welfare-only conferences, I think it's easier for people to just go to those rather than attend EAGs if they are not sure that it will be relevant for them. To be clear, I think most EAGs will have enough animal welfare attendees for you to meet, but it's not immediately clear when the conferences are advertised, and it's also harder to calculate the value of the attending the conference without this knowledge.