EA - Announcing Interim CEOs of EVF by Owen Cotton-Barratt

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Announcing Interim CEOs of EVF, published by Owen Cotton-Barratt on January 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.OverviewEffective Ventures Foundation USA (“EVF US”) has appointed Zachary Robinson as its Interim CEO as of today. We’re also taking this time to announce that Effective Ventures Foundation (“EVF UK”) appointed Howie Lempel as its Interim CEO back in November.EVF UK and EVF US together act as hosts and fiscal sponsors of many key projects in effective altruism, including the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), 80,000 Hours (80k), Longview Philanthropy, etc. These charities (EVF UK and EVF US) previously did not have the position of CEO, and project leads (for CEA, 80k, etc.) reported directly to EVF boards for management oversight.The FTX situation has given rise to a number of new challenges. In particular, there are financial and legal issues that occur at the level of the charities (EVF UK and EVF US), not at the project level, because the projects are not separate legal entities. Because of this, we’ve chosen to coordinate the legal, financial, and communications strategies of the projects under EVF much more than before.In response to the new challenges from FTX, the boards became much more involved in the day-to-day operations of the charities. But it’s not ideal to have boards playing the role of executives, so the boards have now also appointed Interim CEOs to each charity.The Interim CEO roles are about handling crises and helping the entities transition to an improved long-term structure. They are naturally time-limited roles; we aren’t sure how they might change, or when it will make sense for Howie and/or Zach to hand the reins off. The announcement of these Interim CEOs doesn’t constitute any change of project leadership; for example, Max Dalton will continue as leader of CEA, the community-building project which is part of EVF.Meta remarksThis post is written on behalf of the boards of EVF. It’s difficult to write or act as a group without either doing things that not everyone is totally behind, or constraining ourselves to the bland. In the case of this post, it is largely the work of the primary authors; other board members might not agree with the more subjective judgements.The impetus for getting this post out now was a desire to empower the CEOs to speak on behalf of the entities; there are some time-sensitive updates they expect to share soon.Edit: Howie has now shared oneThere’s a lot to say about what FTX’s collapse means for EA and EVF; in many ways we’re still in the early days of wrestling with what this means for us and our communities. This post isn’t about that. However, we know that this is the first major public communication from the EVF boards, and we don’t want the implicature to be that we don’t think this is important or worth discussing.We’re hoping to write more soon about why we haven’t said more, how we’re seeing the situation, and how EVF’s choices may have impacted EA discourse about FTX.About Howie and ZachHowie Lempel has been Interim CEO of EVF UK since mid-November. To take this on, Howie took leave from his role as CEO of 80k, one of the largest EVF projects. In light of Howie’s move, Brenton Mayer was appointed as Interim CEO of 80k in December. Brenton was previously Director of Internal Systems at 80k.Before he worked at 80k, Howie went to Yale Law for two years. He left Yale to join Open Philanthropy while it was still being incubated at GiveWell, working as their first Program Officer for Global Catastrophic Risks. Howie has also worked on white collar crime at the Manhattan DA’s office and on U.S. economic policy as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution. In addition to his role as CEO of 80k, he’s also known in the EA community for his personal podcast episode on mental he...