EA - Learning from Matching Co-Founders for an AI-Alignment Startup by Patrick Gruban

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: Learning from Matching Co-Founders for an AI-Alignment Startup, published by Patrick Gruban on September 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. At EAG London in April 2022, Beth Barnes was looking for potential founders of a new startup that could provide better human data for AI Alignment research. Six of the people interested organised a self-run multi-step co-founder matching process over 7 weeks. It resulted in identifying 2 potential co-founders that have been exploring the founding opportunity in detail. In this post, we, as part of the group, will describe the process of the co-founder matching and the learnings based on a survey of participants. The initial idea The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition this March awarded prizes to Marc-Everin Carauleanu and Beth Barnes for suggestions regarding human data for AI Alignment. Beth met with several people at EAG London in April and provided a five-page Google Doc writeup after the conference to everyone who had expressed interest and had spoken with her. The email doubled as an introduction. Coordinating the process As Beth implicitly had handed over the idea to the group to self-coordinate, I (Patrick), as one of the participants, set up a Google Form to gauge the level of interest. Everyone was able to see the results. Additionally, I set up a channel in the EA Entrepreneur Slack for further discussion. Based on the interest expressed as well as the time zones of the participants, I scheduled a group call. We decided to ask Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) if they could facilitate the process as they have several years of experience in finding and matching co-founders for new EA startups. In a call, Joey Savoie provided helpful guidance, sharing documents and later also inviting the team to use the CE offices for a joint weekend at the end of the process. Although they didn’t have the capacity to facilitate the process, their resources were very helpful for us in setting up our own process. Steps in the matching process With the input of CE, a group of six people decided to start a matching process that would end in an in-person meeting in June, where the final decision on the co-founders would be made. We think the process length would have been excessive had many participants not been available before mid-June. Questions for co-founders The group took the document 50 Questions to Explore with a Potential Co-Founder, removing some and adding additional questions. Once everybody had commented on the document, it was finalized, and everyone filled it out for themselves and shared it. Discussing questions for co-founders in 1:1s All participants then set up 1:1 calls with each of the other participants where they discussed the potential compatibility and roles each could take on in the new organisation. No co-founder pair ruled itself out after this process. 5 weeks of online work In order to bridge the time until an in-person meeting was feasible, a process was set up where each participant worked with one of the other five for 45 minutes each week. As we didn’t have any assignments prepared, we came up with a process where each pair would create an assignment that another pair would have to work on in the following week. This is how the agenda looked: WeekGoalWorkstream 1Workstream 2Workstream 31Create assignment for week 2Marc, MarisMatt, PatrickRudolf, Simeon2Work on assignmentPatrick, RudolfMaris, SimeonMarc, Matt3Create assignment for week 4Marc, SimeonMatt, RudolfMaris, Patrick4Work on assignmentMaris, RudolfMarc, PatrickSimeon, Matt5Work on agenda for London meetingSimeon, PatrickMaris, MattMarc, Rudolf The different workstreams ensured that each pair generated or received assignments from another pair. We also found that trying to quickly brainstorm tasks that are good for testing co-founder fit was i...