Simon Newstead

Impact Investor / Co-Founder @ Better Bite Ventures (alt protein/climate), GoalsWon (accountability coaching, free for EAs)
209 karmaJoined Working (15+ years)Melbourne VIC, Australia
goalswon.com

Bio

Participation
2

Tech founder turned impact investor.

BetterBite.vc - Alt protein / climate VC in Asia
GoalsWon.com - accountability coaching app

How others can help me

Help with advice, support on any of the EA projects I'm working on

How I can help others

Any advice on entrepreneurship, seeking investment, building startups. Also free accountability coaching.

Comments
27

Inspired by an EA Melbourne planning event yesterday, we came up with concept of having a subtle but visible visual tag for posts/replies by folks who are in the same city as you (opt in option in your profile), to help build more in-person community and potential collaboration.
 

Great effort on the project, and appreciate the open sharing which helps everyone out 👏 

Perhaps another way to frame it might be to count the time and money outside of the your donation bucket? As in, donation budget is rational/effective, and everything else can be included as part of discretionary spending on personal/wellbeing? eg- same bucket as hobbies, travel etc.

Not sure if this might simplify things mentally and guard against motivated reasoning and slippery slope concerns

There are calculators out there, like this simple one from the UN for example: https://offset.climateneutralnow.org/footprintcalc 
(includes lifestyle factors like meat as well as travel)

Aim to finish up 2023 having donated:

  • 16k to AI safety / long term future 
  • 9k to animal suffering 
  • 4k to global health / well-being

This year wanted to shift more toward existential risk, vs last year which was mostly global health and well being - given the increased concerns and seemingly accelerating timelines.

Also put money into EA community side-projects:

  • 10k for accountability coaching app (pro-bono for EAs)
  • 3k for EA kids storybook project

Happy with the year - also took the GivingWhatWeCan pledge - better late than never!

ps - thanks for all the folks working hard in non-profits, fighting the good fight...

Thanks and likewise, got and continue to get a lot out of Toastmasters, and trying to extend that benefit to EA community, especially those who can't get to a local club in person. Please use the same form, organizing the next event shortly and will reach out to all the emails via the form to call for roles etc. Thanks

Thanks for sharing the experience, can resonate with the emotional rollercoaster - always the challenge to figure out how to soften the lows and maintain separation when the failures and setbacks inevitably happen but still be able to enjoy and celebrate the wins and little steps forward. 

Agreed about the increased need to to consciously plan for physical/mental health to help provide a strong foundation for taking on this type of role.

Sure, we self studied from an agenda that the two of us put together:

- those 3 books
- some clearer thinking modules (great resource)
- practicing forecasting on metaculus
- reading some other articles and interviews

Here's a doc with all the details (also contains book notes if it's of info)

Our venture capital fund (alt protein) recently did training into forecasting and decision making (based on approach from Superforecasting, How to Decide, The Scout mindset).

As a result, we're currently revamping our evaluation process to attempt to reduce bias and explicitly think in terms of scenarios, probabilities and expected value return multiples, rather than our old approach of guesstimating the likely outcome and scoring around that single scenario (we're also participating in some forecasting exercises to help us understand possible paths for the technology in more detail)

So far the key obstacles are to figure out how to adopt these new techniques without spending vastly more time in analysis, leaving us less time on generating dealflow and also making founders wait longer for feedback and go/no go decisions.

Another practical challenge is the actual nuts and bolts of how to take various expert inputs and then actually come up with the predictions (Superforecasting doesn't really go into the details).

Load more