Project summary

We provide research and support to help people move into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. We currently provide four main programmes to achieve this: 

1. Our website – We’ve written a career guide, dozens of cause area problem profiles, and reviews of impactful career paths. In 2023, we had just over 5.5 million visits to our website and our research newsletter went out to more than 400,000 subscribers.

2. Our podcast – We host in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and how people can use their careers to solve them. In 2023, we had over 290,000 hours of listening time on our podcast.

3. Our job board – We maintain a curated list of promising opportunities for impact and career capital on our job board. In 2023, we listed over 5,000 roles and had over 780,000 clickthroughs from our job board to job ads for open roles.

4. Our one-on-one service – In 2023, we had one-on-one calls with over 1,500 people to work through their career uncertainties and connect them with domain experts. Our headhunting service recommended promising candidates for more than 100 impactful roles in 2023.
   

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Our goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. We focus on problems that threaten the long-term future, including risks from artificial intelligence and catastrophic pandemics.

To achieve our goal, we:

1. Reach people who might be interested through marketing, engaging and user-friendly content, and word-of-mouth.

2. Introduce people to information, frameworks, and ideas which are useful for having a high-impact career and help them get excited about contributing to solving pressing global problems.

3. Support people in transitioning to careers that contribute to solving pressing global problems.

How will this funding be used?

We’re fundraising for our general budget, which covers all our spending except paid marketing and grantmaking. You can see our 2024 budget here. 

We’ve already filled our fundraising needs for H1 2024, so any funding received would go towards our fundraising efforts for H2 2024 and 2025. In this period, we expect to continue with the delivery of our programmes, explore how we can continue to improve and grow them, and consolidate our org strategy and future plans. We’re also exploring starting a new video programme. 

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

You can see our full team here. Niel Bowerman is our CEO. 

We recommend you check out our track record here – this covers measures of impact including plan changes, placements to impactful roles, and data from the EA survey and Open Philanthropy’s survey. 

You could also review our repository of historical organisation evaluations.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

80k is now in its 14th year. 

It seems like we’ll continue in our mission to provide research and support to help people move into high-impact careers in some form. 

There are many possible specific answers to the questions of causes and outcomes if this project fails, which would vary by programme. But in general terms: 

1. We might conclude the ways we’re pursuing our mission isn’t the best approach, in which case we’d decide to change how we direct our attention. 

2. We might learn that some part of our work isn’t justifying its costs (opportunity and financial), in which case we’d de-emphasise or economise that part of our approach. 

3. We might fail to fundraise, in which case we’d put much larger efforts into fundraising, deprioritise growth, and scale down. 

4. We might conclude that our approach to some issues could cause harm. There are many potential candidates for concern here. For a sense of these you could review our mistakes page, some of Ben Todd’s thoughts post-FTX, our article on working at frontier AI labs, surveys of our negative effects on our users (for example, see the Open Phil survey, the EA survey, or the 80k user surveys from 2020 and 2022), or consider your own concerns about how the worldview and communities that 80k introduces people to could lead them to cause harm. 

5. We could fail to act sufficiently quickly or effectively enough to make an important difference to pressing problems.
   

What other funding are you or your project getting?

You can see our donors here. 

Our largest donor is Open Philanthropy, but we value being able to support ourselves with a range of funding sources and are excited to grow our network of donors.