Why?

Why walk away from a lucrative job with a great employer to do something highly uncertain for a lot less money? 

There’s 4 broad factors that combined to make a clear decision.

1. A general desire to have a greater positive impact in the world.

Perhaps it’s a function of age, or having kids, reaching a pretty comfortable place in life, or gradually becoming a “better person” in some way, but working long weeks to further the interests of a mega-corp felt decreasingly meaningful. 

I’m not cynical enough to characterise worker drones delivering only shareholder value: Far from it, but I’d credit my recent self, in terms of “things that matter”, with no more than being a good manager to a few 10s of people, a collaborative co-worker/partner to 50-100 more, and enabling some better satnavs. I could do a lot more, and want to. (The narrative of “Android Automotive reinforcing a revolution in how the Automotive industry does software” may have some truth to it, but to-date the positive social impact is, in my estimation, delivered mostly through fewer drivers navigating with a phone in a cup-holder (and associated accident rate), improved usability of electric vehicles (vs combustion engine, thanks to EV-optimised routing in Maps), and early steps in safety-related driver assistance. I’ve previously asked-for but never seen estimates of lives-saved by these efforts: the absence of quantification says something about priorities.

I’d seriously thought about a career pivot into “doing good” from early 2020. Pandemic and first child born coincide in time. Generous paternity leave and a large reduction in travel gave me the chance to purge my brain of work overload, look at life more broadly, and pick up an interest in Effective Altruism (EA) which I’d re-discovered through the excellent 80,000 Hours podcast. EA as a movement champions the use of rigorous scientific methods in focussing charitable effort+funds on doing the most good (selecting cause areas and interventions based on cost-effectiveness in saving/improving lives with a universal metric like $s per Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY)). This resonated strongly with me. They also have excellent “on-ramp” resources (EA Virtual Programs) which provided an engaging entrypoint to the wider “doing good” sector.

Altruism, depending on your dictionary of choice, is defined with words like “unselfish regard” or “disinterested and selfless concern” for others. I don’t see it as that puritanical. Most people I’ve encountered in life get pleasure from helping others, even in very minor ways. The resulting positive endorphin hit is a reward. Help enough people and consciously choose to recognise the good that you’re doing, and the reward is significant. Compare that with spending life doing some sort of corporate BS for more money when, on the margin, those extra ££s only really translate to a fancier car or nicer restaurants, and altruism is rather attractive! (I recognise that it’s easy for me to say this after 15 years of Google money, more below.)

At the risk of gesturing toward moral high-ground that I absolutely do not deserve to occupy, this article on moral ambition (in Dutch; Chrome should offer to auto-translate) gives a compelling perspective.

2. Seeking greater professional fulfillment and significant new experiences

I thought I was time-poor before having kids; 2 kids later and having maximum 3-4 hours per week “me time”, it reached a new level. (Sure the 10s of hours spent on toddler entertainment are rewarding in their own way, but they further increase the need for some real downtime!) A result of this was the thinking “if I’m spending 10-15x more time on work than myself, I’d better really love what I’m doing.” And on reflection there was very significant room for improvement.

Parallel in mind was #YOLO. It may be a Millenial’s cliché, but we do only get one shot at life. While the Google years provided me with some fantastic experiences, there’s a huge world out there with “Big Tech” jobs being just a small part of it. Aiming for another 25+ years in that same vein felt like a terribly wasted opportunity.

3. Being in a position to take a significant risk (financially & professionally)

All this talk of moral ambition and personal fulfillment points directly to privilege. Of course it does. Without nearly-2-decades of tech sector experience and pay packets, I might not be nearly so bold. One shouldn’t have to have such a significant safety net to take a step into the charity world, and undoubtedly it isn’t required, but with sky-high childcare costs, rocketing inflation, etc, it sure makes for an easier decision. The pay-cut will be proportionally larger, and loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias, but it’s a nice problem to have!

4. Finding an opportunity that was an unusually good match for me

A background in Tech is not a clear match for most EA-aligned roles (with the exception of AI Safety), which might mean starting-over completely career-wise. Yet my most relevant strengths at this point in my career are in leadership, people & program management, building an organization/strategy, etc – typically the stuff that folks new to a field don’t get to do. So discovering that Charity Entrepreneurship really valued those skills, despite my gaps in other domain expertise, and provided a really exciting opportunity to boot, was an aha moment. Credit to the 80K After Hours interview with former CE-incubatee Andrés for bringing this to life as a realistic prospect for me.

As I write this a few days before the Incubation Program kick-off, it still feels barely credible that there’s a better-than-evens chance I’ll be successfully founding a high-impact charity with an awesome co-founder and brilliant support network in just ~3 months time. Let’s see what happens!