Today is my first day of working full-time for the Clear Fund. (Technically, since payroll doesn’t start until June, it’s my first day of unemployment.)
It’s easy to talk about ditching money for meaning, not so easy to do it. And there’s a lot more I’ve walked away from than money. The job situation I’ve left is one that anyone would be lucky to have. I was well treated and well paid. I was surrounded by intelligent and capable people whom I respect. I largely set my own career path. I was challenged, but at the same time I basically had no worries of any kind.
And, I don’t think that what I was doing was without value to society. Hedge funds help move capital to where it will be most productive. Like any other business, they create wealth that can be approximated by looking at their net profits. And any of that wealth that ends up in my pocket can be donated to the charity of my choice.
But I think that I will be way more valuable to the world working for the Clear Fund. My exact analysis of this is a little tangential, so I’ll spill it out another time (or in a comment if someone asks). Briefly, I think that the “pipes” translating wealth into a better world are broken, and that working on those pipes is a more valuable use of my time and talents than generating more wealth to funnel into them.
And that’s what drives my decision. I think being valuable to the world is an incredible desirable thing, in itself. It’s not the only thing I want, but it’s really, really desirable. (I don’t understand people whose goal is to earn so much money that they can be useless for the rest of their lives. Is watching TV all day so awesome that it makes up for having no value? Have I been watching the wrong shows or something?) The more valuable my work is, the more passionate I’ll be about it, the more I’ll enjoy it, the better I’ll do it, and the more my life will be worth living.
This isn’t about leaving a job because it’s boring or bad or makes me feel empty (none of those things applies). This is about leaving a job I like quite a bit for a mission that I’m passionately in love with. Nobody would argue with me about this if we were talking about women instead of jobs … well, my job takes up more of my waking hours than any woman ever will, and having an equally high standard seems appropriate.
Think about how weird it would be if a million dollars in cash were sitting on the sidewalk and everyone was ignoring it. That’s how I feel about the fact that no one else wants to start the world’s first transparent grantmaker.
A few people are incredulous that I’d be so crazy as to voluntarily take a large cut in pay and general security. It’s certainly true we might fail in our mission, and if that happens this will have been a bad move. But if we succeed, people will look back at my decision and be incredulous about something else: that such a tremendous opportunity to be valuable to the world was just sitting there, ready for the taking.
Here goes.
We think so. In fact, we’re banking on it. GiveWell’s mission is to help steer capital and foster dialogue, and that’s it. We plan to give grants the same way we’ve given our personal donations: look for charities that already have proven, effective, scalable ways of helping people – charities that already know what they’re doing – and give them money. No consulting, no expertise, no program development, and no restrictions. Money.
Part of it may be that foundations consider themselves experts in their fields, and they think they know more than the charities they fund. And they might be right … but that isn’t how we think of ourselves. We have a lot of options, so we demand a ton of information from charities, and we demand that they engage our questions and suggestions intelligently – but in the end, they know way more about their work than we do, and they should be the ones to decide how they do it. The donor’s role is to fund it.
But imagine if we actually put in the due diligence, and find the charities that already have smart, experienced, passionate people with proven, effective, scalable methods for helping people. Imagine if we find the organizations that have it all except money. At that point, it’s moot how much of our dollar is going to “overhead,” or anything else – sometimes overhead is necessary and sometimes it isn’t, and good people will make those decisions better than we can. At that point, it’s unnecessary for us to “keep the charities in line,” because they’ll keep themselves in line or lose next time around. Accountability, transparency, and competition are harsher taskmasters than any contract can be.
To be clear, I think NetSquared is an exciting idea. But where I come from, people celebrate a new client the day the client signs, not the day they decide to call the client and see if they’re interested. “Great research projects” refers to ideas that have been studied and stress-tested to death and produced returns, not to the ideas we had in this morning’s meeting. So as I’ve made clear, I’ve been pretty surprised by the extent to which people have called paragraphs on a screen “great projects,” and pointed to a “success” and “watershed event” where I saw an online poll that hadn’t even been tallied yet.
Our fundraising efforts have started, and dang, do I hate asking for money. For three years, I’ve had way more income than I can spend, and I’ve rarely had to ask anyone for anything. That’s a nice position to be in. This – especially for an abrasive guy like me – is tough.
That’s why you should be concerned that philanthropy is currently seen as something to do with the “second half” of your life. “Second half” here isn’t just chronological – it’s referring to the half that specifically isn’t where the philanthropist made their name. The second half is the half that lacks risk, accountability, and the people who keep one honest (a set of factors collectively known as the “eye of the tiger”). All the great foundations today are following the orders of people who’ve made their fortune doing something else, and who no longer have to consider any criticism they don’t care for. I have to believe that matters, no matter how good their intentions. 
In addition to ~20 charity/philanthropy/social-goodliness blogs, I read one blog, 
The thing is, in the business world it’s obvious to everyone that good isn’t good enough. You need to be the BEST, within your area, or else capital is better spent on your competitors – and you’re going to go under. But I don’t see why this is any less true of the nonprofit sector – all of it except the part about going under. Right now, there’s no mechanism for charitable capital (donations from individuals) to flow to where it’s best used, and that means no mechanism for inferior charities to go under, and THAT means no constant pressure to get better. That’s what we’re trying to change, because we think the people served by charities deserve the same relentless improvement and scrutiny that the people served by businesses benefit from.