Lightcone is looking to hire someone to manage Lighthaven, a campus located in Berkeley California. This includes managing our day-to-day maintenance, and running events. You’ll be managing a small team.
We will pay whichever is higher:
- 30% less than your equivalent industry salary
- $120,000
What is Lighthaven?
Lighthaven is a campus located in Berkeley, California. It’s run by Lightcone Infrastructure, and we hope to use this place to make the future of humanity go better than it would go otherwise. (Some major focus areas include “ensuring that AI doesn’t kill everyone this century” and “maintain a culture that can think clearly in a confusing world.”)
In practice, we rent out the place cheaply for projects we think will help the future go better. And, to help make ends meet, we may also rent it out for typical market rates to corporate clients.
Your job is to make sure Lighthaven runs smoothly, efficiently, and is delightful/intellectually-stimulating to event participants. We’re looking for someone who brings ambition and agency to the role.
The role: what will you do?
You would be responsible for:
- Leading event preparation, support ops, and teardown
- Supporting the experience of Lighthaven visitors and office users
- Initiating and overseeing ongoing building maintenance and repairs
- Initiating and overseeing building improvements and renovations
In addition, you would work on:
- Simplifying, optimizing, automating or deleting all the most annoying maintenance work.
- Proactively notice ways in which Lighthaven, and the work and community happening here, is not flourishing, and fix those
- Any other things that help with crafting an event running engine, that can gradually run more events, for less cost and team overhead, with happier and more productive participants.
Work culture
- Aim for the mission. Lighthaven exists to help humanity survive its most perilous century. You take deep pride in your work and in supporting this mission.
- Lead by example. You are willing to, and often do, any of the kinds of tasks you delegate. At Lighthaven no work is below anyone. It’s not unusual for the organization CEO to carry couches or plunge toilets at a major event.
- Don’t be stuffy. You shun bureaucracy and feel claustrophobic in the endless corridors of the blankfaced. You enjoy being around events that surprise you, entertain you, and challenge you. You enjoy debate and disagreement, and a culture that values goofing around and joking about anything.
- Be honest and hold your integrity highly. You can’t live with yourself if you don’t speak truth to power or walk the other way when everything around you is mindlessly walking off a cliff.
- Move fast. You get things done at a pace that leaves other orgs in disbelief. You can hustle, be scrappy and be resourceful.
- Question the requirements. You abhor lost purposes and seek clever ways to trim away cruft, and accomplish more with less effort.
Skills required
- Experience with event operations.
- Handy. You can use a drill, or figure out on your own why a door lock is broken, without needing to call in maintenance help.
- You can “lead a unit into battle”. You’re able to coordinate a large team in a fast-moving environment such as event operations.
- Comfortable with tech. We’re not asking you to be a programmer, but be comfortable enough to be the person who gets up to help in a presentation when the projector isn’t working, feel at home communicating over apps like Slack, and like automating your work using low-code or no-code tools like AirTable or Zapier.
- Conscientious. You see your responsibilities through until they’ve been completely handled.
- You are both detail-oriented and able to track a large range of tasks.
Can you tell me some details about Lighthaven Campus?
We have seven buildings, including rentable retreat centers, offices, and bedrooms.
Some of the things we’ve hosted in the past:
- Manifold Markets’ 350-person forecasting and prediction festival, “Manifest”, with Nate Silver, Zvi Movshowitz, and more. Talks, fairs, markets on everything and a median attendee rating of 10/10.
- Retreats from organizations including Topos Institute, Alignment Research Center (ARC Evals), Center for Humane Technology and others.
- Office space for independent alignment researchers like John Wentworth, and many visitors.
In the future, we hope to host more paid events, in order to build a stable revenue stream that allows Lighthaven the independence of thought and boldness of vision that comes from funding freedom. We also hope to host several subsidized events with the intent of aiding Lightcone and collaborating organizations in orienting to and navigating a gradually more chaotic world.
What’s working at Lightcone like?
We have a deliberately small and committed team, and the person taking on this role would both have the opportunity to make a major impact on Lighthaven’s operations, as well as increasing the focus Lightcone could dedicate to its other projects (like LessWrong.com).
You will be leading our existing venue maintenance team (approx 4 people), and during the events where it’s needed you will also be leading an expanded event operations team. We have an existing maintenance team that we’re pretty happy with and expect you will be too, but once you’ve settled into the role you’ll have the power to hire people you work well with.
How exactly you interface with the rest of the Lightcone team will depend a bit on your background. We’re a pretty high context culture. This includes things like generally being familiar with the LessWrong sequences, as well as some more specific organizational philosophy, orientation to existential risk, etc.
Depending on how well you fit into that context, we may end up integrating you into broader strategy meetings, or, may work out a role where you’re focused on the practicalities of running the campus, and interface primarily with our CEO. We’ll aim to be clear on how this is likely to work by the end of your work trial.
Other details
Team
Currently there are 7 people on the core Lightcone team, and 4-7 maintenance staff (including contractors we bring in when we need extra event capacity).
Location
Berkeley, CA. Housing onsite available during events or other periods of intense work.
Hours
On average 50 hr/week, though there will be many quieter weeks, and fair few much longer ones. You will regularly need to flexibly work evenings and weekends since that’s when many events take place; but in exchange you’d be able to take post-event weekdays off to rest.
Hiring process
Interview + potential work test + 2 weeks work trial + 3 months work trial.