I was at the merger when I found out that I’d been murdered.

“Do you, Maria Klarner, take Damien Cartwright to be your lawful partner?”

It was a traditional ceremony, with a church and everything. Most people got hitched these days in a lawyer’s office, but the priest had a Masters in M&A, so supposedly it was all above-board.

In 2017 I made the following donations:

• £5000 to Charity Science: Health
• £5000 to Wild-animal Suffering Research

Here’s why.

Epistemic status: speculative

Choice is bad. I want to focus on one aspect of this badness: regret. I’m going to argue that increased choice predictably increases the amount of regret that an agent feels, even if they are actually better off, and that this is bad for humans in particular.

I read Kristen Roupenian’s excellent short story ‘Cat Person’, and had a really strong reaction to it - so here are some thoughts.

First, if you haven’t already, go read the story. Done? Good.

Introduction

This post owes a great deal to prior work and thought by Spencer Greenberg, Eric Gastfriend, and Peter Hartree.

This post is a summary of the object-level thought on what makes a startup high impact which we developed while working on the Good Technology Project.

A lot of this material is more-or-less obvious applications of EA thought to startup theory. Nonetheless, it managed to be surprising and useful to people, so perhaps it is less obvious than it seems. I’ve condensed the presentation given the intended audience of this post - there is a lot more to say on many of these points. This material might have eventually developed into a “guide” to effective entrepreneurship.

In addition, some of the material relates to how to manage a startup in later stages. We never really got a chance to try that out, so it is especially speculative.

What makes a startup high impact?

We’re interested in startups because we think that they might be a mechanism by which we can have a large positive impact on the world. But what are the qualities that we should look for in a startup?