EA - How the FTX crash damaged the Altruistic Agency by Markus Amalthea Magnuson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How the FTX crash damaged the Altruistic Agency, published by Markus Amalthea Magnuson on November 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionFirst, I’d like to express my deepest sympathies to everyone affected by the FTX breakdown. A lot of people have lost their life savings and are suffering terribly, something I do not wish to diminish in any way. Many are affected in far worse ways than I can even imagine, and I hope as many of those as possible will be able to find the support they need to get through these challenging times.I got confirmation this week on Wednesday (Nov 9) that payouts from the FTX Future Fund had stopped. Since I had an outstanding grant with them, this was of great concern to me personally. The days following that, and what is still unravelling minute by minute, it seems, was the complete meltdown of FTX and all related entities, including the Future Fund. You are all following these events in other places, so I won’t go into that much, but I wanted to offer a perspective from a Future Fund grantee and the specific ways something like this can do damage.This post is also a call for support since all funding for my next year of operations has suddenly evaporated entirely. Specifically, if you or someone you know is a grantmaker or donor to EA meta/infrastructure/operations projects and would be interested in funding a new organisation with a good track record, please get in touch. I’d be happy to share much more details and data on the proven value so far, my grant application to the Future Fund, and anything else that might be of interest.I will also mention the benefits of being vigilant about organisational structure and how it can save your organisation in the long run, even though it might be an upfront and ongoing cost of time and money.BackgroundI founded the Altruistic Agency in January this year. The idea was to apply my knowledge and experience from 15+ years as a full-stack developer to help organisations and others in the EA community with tech expertise. I hypothesised that the kind of work I had done mostly in a commercial context for most of my professional life is also highly valuable to nonprofits/charities and others doing high-impact work within EA cause areas. I have always been fond of meta projects, and this seemed like something that could greatly increase productivity (like technology does), especially by saving people lots of time that they could instead spend on their core mission.Thanks to a grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund, I was able to test this hypothesis full-time and spent the first half of this year providing free tech support to many EA organisations and individuals. During that time, I worked with around 45 of them in areas such as existential risk, animal advocacy, climate, legal research, mental health, and effective fundraising. The work ranged from small tasks, such as improving email deliverability, fixing website bugs, and making software recommendations, to larger tasks, such as building websites, doing security audits, and software integration.The response from the community was overwhelmingly positive, and the data from the January–June pilot phase of the Altruistic Agency indicates high value. I solved issues (on median) in a fifth of the time it would have taken organisations themselves. The data indicates just one person doing this work for six months saved EA organisations at least 900 hours of work. Additionally, many respondents said they learned a lot from working with me, both about their own systems and setups and about tech in general. Not least, increased awareness of security issues in code and systems, which will only become more crucial over time, and can be significantly harmful if not dealt with properly.Insights from the pilot phase told me two important t...