Feel like I don’t need to write out my understanding of PAN here → it’s grokked
Instead, it’d be useful to clarify why I’d like to work for them
Why would I like to work for PAN?
1. Want to be ~CoS → ExA is a good path
North-star → “I want to be a high-impact leader”
COO/Chief-of-Staff (probably not CEO)
ExA role is a good path to CoS → CoS at Longview was an ExA for 2 years and then became a CoS
Also, being an ExA = immediate access to high
Eloise Todd
Aggrey Aluso
2. Want to work in a high-impact cause area
Pandemic PPR is super important
3. Biosecurity & my background
Worked at Alvea (biotech startup) for a year, so some exposure to this space
Biomedical Sciences undergrad and Bioengineering Master’s degree
Would be great to be in this space again, dust off this knowledge!
Vs pivoting to something like AI
Because of this, biosecurity/pandemic preparedness feels like it could be the most reasonable or natural cause area for me
I feel pretty cause area agnostic w/r/t EA → would happily work in an AI safety org, a biosecurity org, global health (less so re: animal welfare, although for sure I could imagine spending a few days thinking about this and have some strong updates)
4. Their mission/theory of change is insane
It really does feel like they’re the adults in the room, operating at the highest echelon (re: Mundanity of Excellence)
Working with WHO, Pandemic Fund, 400+ orgs in a network, profound spoke-and-hub (hub-and-wheel?), absurd impact
Part of leading the charge re: moving to a resilient rather than panic-and-neglect system, moving to global stewardship and One Health approach, post-nationalism, united front, countering the systemic/systems-thinking-like problems of lack of resilience, disease surveillance… anyway this doesn’t feel well articulated right now (ACTION ITEM) but yeah this is so congruent with other stuff I’m interested in like the poly-crisis and global stewardship (they even mention the polycrisis somewhere, on my miro at least…)
🚨 ACTION → write up my thoughts re: how PAN’s vision connects to ~spiral dynamics, systems thinking, Charles Perrow’s Normal Accident’s Theory
Concerns
Concern 1 → overweighting how much learning will happen
Summary
An exciting thing about being an ExA at a very high-excellence org is the “Mundanity of Excellence” thing (from Daniel Chambliss) of “I will get to be around highly effective and impactful people and learn through osmosis”
BUT, maybe I’m being over-optimistic re: how much I’ll learn about the cause area and about how to be a high-impact executive from the role?
Answer feels like → don’t expect Eloise and Aggrey to educate me, BUT it does feel true that to get a job, even remote, at a highly impactful org, will rapidly increase my own learning about the space because of
a) unlocked motivation & care (I’ll want to know more)
b) unlocked expert peers (suddenly I exist in this world and have experts to answer questions)
Would be the same at Longview → secondary project (after helping the CEO and CoS) of my own education & orientation
I might not see the two executives actually going about their days, at all
Like, will I attend meetings? I wouldn’t like to just have the two of them as like, black boxes…
Brain dump
Remote ExA = far less tacit learning?
Vs Longview → in-person, in the office, with the CoS and the CEO
Culture of “you literally can’t ask too many questions”
Model of getting to “hive-mind”
Vs at PAN, they may actually not really care about hive-mind
OODA → observation, orient, decision, act
With the hive-mind, you can go from a new observation immediately (essentially) to action
You’re so deeply oriented, and have such a deep understanding of the decision-making criteria, that you can just immediately act
John Boyd refers to this as “fingerspitzengefühl” & “auftragstaktik”
“I’ll get a really deep understanding from them” → maybe not, maybe that’s actually not that vital, it’s more something that I’d like, vs they just someone who’s really good at handling the logistics and calendar and agenda and stuff
Part of me would love to be a researcher and go deep into a cause area, be it AI safety or biosecurity or global health… deep expertise, enneagram 3w4, “the professional”/“the expert”
(I actually don’t think I’d like to be a pure researcher. I think doing solo research seems lonely and isolated, vs being clearly useful in a more internal operations-type way, unblocking others, high leverage)
The question is → what is the path to expertise, and is there one?
I think I’d be in charge of my own learning and curriculum → the two executives aren’t going to be proactively teaching me about the cause area, they’ll be busy doing their executive stuff
My model is that in my free time, I can get a deeper orientation to the space, and then use that in a kind of hermeneutic circle/spiral-type way, which will over time get me to that deep orientation place
🚨 Key thing → I’m currently really excited about my whole learning stack, making this website and making these twitch videos as a way to make my learning passion/skill more legible
And as such, as this is currently very top of mind for me, there’s an impulse to lead with this, or talk about it a bunch, in the job application/interview
BUT, I think I need to model the two executives/think about it from their POV more
Leading with stuff that they’re more explicitly looking for, like executive function, organisation, etc
I’ve never been an ExA, so I don’t have identical examples from work
BUT I do have isomorphic examples
Sure, I’ve never done ExA tasks at work like organising calendars, etc, email for other people
BUT, isomorphic stuff from my own life
In addition, I clearly have a lot of passion and agency and side projects etc
Concern 2 → sounds like it could be insanely busy
Being an ExA for two executives, different time zones?
Brussels = 1 hour ahead, Nairobi = 2 hours again, so actually no, time zones aren’t signficantly different
(May need to start work early)
Vs at Longview, would be the ExA to the CEO, with the potential for managing the CoS’s inbox at a later date
Thrown in at the deep end, needing to orient to two people immediately
🚨 So, if I were to get to the interview stage, would definitely want to talk to them about their model of the workload
Concern 3 → the reason Longview didn’t hire me
The other person had ExA experience
So they were like “she’s got proven experience re: emailing, calendar stuff”, in a way that’s somewhat surprising to me b/c it seems like I could do a very solid 80/20 job on this stuff immediately (competent generalist, attention to detail, isomorphic stuff from my own life, high level of care, etc)
So I guess the concern is that the same thing will happen here → “we think you’re excellent, but this other person has the email etc experience”
Are there ways I can mitigate this?
One way is by naming it explicitly as a concern, and naming that Longview didn’t hire me for this reason (although they recommended me to other orgs)
Were Longview correct?
CoS said to me “if what you take from this is that you’re not good enough then that’s incorrect” → “we thought, ‘oh, this guy is excellent!‘” → “we wouldn’t have recommended you to CEA and 80,000 Hours if we didn’t think you were really good”
So actually, the conclusion isn’t “hm, maybe I can’t get hired as an ExA” but “Longview would have loved to hire me but there was one other person who just had a skillset that was more what they were after”
It does seem like PAN are also after that other skillset (email, calendar)
BUT, I really do feel like I can do a great job on that stuff. It wasn’t the case that I discovered that I suck at that stuff, just that the other person had years of experience doing it
🚨 Hypothesis here → I can be good at this stuff in an 80/20 way immediately
I need to make this case
🚨 Also important to consider the opposite side →
p(tacit knowledge re: ExA that I don’t have and won’t gain for ~6 months)
p(I’ll have growing pains re: learning the ExA skillset)
Another thing that makes me a wildcard re: not having done ExA stuff is → I can’t guarantee that I’ll like it. I have strong isomorphic evidence that this stuff is very congruent with my skillset/values (e.g. helping, being a high-leverage force multiplier), BUT, I can’t say with 100% certainty that I love being an ExA
Nat at EAG who said like 30% of the stuff is kinda tedious, but he really likes the Exec, and etc
But, remember, this was a concern I had re: Longview, that “hm, is email management, inbox triage, kind of dull and low skill and stuff”, to which the CoS said “currently me and the CEO spend a bunch of time on this, which is strong signal (or really, proof) that this stuff is actually very important”
E.g., aunty who keeps asking why I’m applying for “secretary” jobs → actually, it’s high-context, high leverage, deeply useful → sure, moving stuff around on a calendar doesn’t sound like someone’s calling, but that’s only the surface level read of what you’re doing → you’re actually freeing up capacity, guarding time, ensuring things get done, at literally the highest level of impact/achievement (WHO, Pandemic Fund, PPE, 400+ network advocacy model, policy)
Concern 4 → do I want to be an ExA?
Copy-pasting this from above just for easier navigation/parsing:
“Nat at EAG who said like 30% of the stuff is kinda tedious, but he really likes the Exec, and etc”
But, remember, this was a concern I had re: Longview, that “hm, is email management, inbox triage, kind of dull and low skill and stuff”, to which the CoS said “currently me and the CEO spend a bunch of time on this, which is strong signal (or really, proof) that this stuff is actually very important”
E.g., aunty who keeps asking why I’m applying for “secretary” jobs →
actually, it’s high-context, high leverage, deeply useful → sure, moving stuff around on a calendar doesn’t sound like someone’s calling, but that’s only the surface level read of what you’re doing → you’re actually freeing up capacity, guarding time, ensuring things get done, at literally the highest level of impact/achievement (WHO, Pandemic Fund, PPE, 400+ network advocacy model, policy)