Ben Todd: belief

Transcript context

…You mentioned people coming from entrepreneurial roles. And that reminds me of a conversation I recently had where somebody said they're trying to help staff certain roles in the government and we're looking for people with an entrepreneurial background. And I was kind of like, that's an interesting juxtaposition. I'm not sure how many entrepreneurs are going to want to go join the government, actually, because I think that personality type is often one that started a company in the 1st place because they didn't want to work at a big company. And in some ways, the government is the even bigger, more bureaucratic, more frustrating environment to work in for people like that. Do you have a taxonomy of backgrounds or personality types that you think map particularly well onto the problems that are most important or the different organization types? I'm interested in also who should go into government, maybe it should be entrepreneurs, but if it's not going to be entrepreneurs, who should we be looking for to take on these governmental roles. Yeah, I've also heard that entrepreneurial thing. I think just basically the entrepreneurial skill set, it's like making difficult things happen and like building coalitions of people and like setting up systems. And these are just super valuable skills everywhere. And yeah, I think the key filter would just be like, could you actually hack this or would you find it too frustrating? But if in doubt, I would say to try it. You might, I think people have a lot of misconceptions about, they see careers in a very picture book vision of it. Maybe they picture the DMV or something when they think of like the government like, but there's so many different organizations and teams and maybe you find some that you are really aligned with and it's a very different experience working with them. But yeah, also in government there's a lot of need for more just like analysis, technical expert type roles, which again, can fit people who are a bit more like nerdy or researchery type people who want to do something more applied where they can actually see the effects of their actions compared to academia. That can also be a really good profile for that type of person. And then, yeah, the kind of just like operational, getting stuff done skills as well, really, I think as far as I can tell, really needed there as well. And also all the other orgs as well also need that skill set. How do you think about joining versus starting? Obviously, this is somewhat of a timeline question, but I've heard both points of view recently, both being like, we still have a lot of gaps where we need somebody to step up and start a new organization. And so if that could be you, should do it. And then on the other hand, I've also heard there's a lot of orgs that are trying to hire and there's not enough talent to go around. I would say my subjective sense right now of the AI nonprofit space is, and obviously there will be exceptions to this, I don't mean to pay with too broad of a rush, and you can also feel free to disagree. But it seems to me like there's a lot of funding available for organizations that can demonstrate that they're executing reasonably well and have any capacity to scale. So what are your thoughts or how would you talk people through the starting versus joining decision point.…

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