I started my career as a management consultant at Bain, drawn to the intellectual challenge of tackling different problems every few months. However, I quickly realized that I wasn't motivated by helping already-wealthy companies make millions more. Now I'm the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism, where I help to steward a community of people using their time and resources to make the world measurably better.
Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, I had a different race, religion, and sexual orientation than most of my local community, which contributed to me questioning why we care about others based on seemingly arbitrary factors like geography or appearance. The idea that someone born near me was inherently more valuable than someone born across the world never made sense to me. I was also troubled by how we treat animals and became a vegetarian at age 11. But despite caring about animals and people all over the world, I hadn't thought deeply about what it would mean to actually work toward a world that reflects these values.
"I don't believe that the luck of where we are born should determine questions like life or death."
When a friend from college pitched me on a research job at
Open Philanthropy, I found the suggestion surprising — I didn’t think of myself as a researcher and I knew nothing about global health and development. But he saw something in my skills that I didn’t realize myself and helped me identify that my skills from consulting and working at a startup could be valuable even in this very different field. I’ve since realized that having the encouragement of a friend is often a key step in motivating people to take steps toward having a bigger impact.
As I learned more about effective altruism, what resonated wasn't any specific cause, but finding people who believed the same things I believed: that we should care about people and animals regardless of where they are, that we should want to save more lives rather than fewer, and that we should question our assumptions with humility.
I ended up landing the Open Philanthropy job, where I helped to identify new priorities for charitable giving such as South Asian air quality, a problem that affects over a billion people but receives little attention. Later, as Chief of Staff, I built and led teams who directed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, always asking: how can we make our resources go as far as possible to help others?
Effective altruism gave me tools to figure out how to live according to my values. There are many people out there who have the skills and motivation to make a difference, but don’t know how to channel them effectively. To them, I’d say: You don't have to take for granted your current job or the current way you relate to the world. You can choose to be part of the solution to problems that matter to you.
