Founders seem especially undervalued if you think in counterfactual terms. For an existing org, the right question is usually “what’s this person’s marginal value over a reasonably good replacement hire?” For a founder, the question is often “would this organization with this theory of change and all the roles it creates exist at all without them?” That’s a qualitatively different kind of contribution.
In a field as nascent as AI safety, new orgs don’t just scale existing work; they create net-new surface area for people to do safety-motivated work at all, including people with more operational, policy, or domain backgrounds who don’t fit neatly into the current research-centric pipeline. That seems like a strong structural reason to place more weight on founder/field‑builder impact, not less, especially when a new org is doing something meaningfully distinct from existing approaches.
Founders seem especially undervalued if you think in counterfactual terms. For an existing org, the right question is usually “what’s this person’s marginal value over a reasonably good replacement hire?” For a founder, the question is often “would this organization with this theory of change and all the roles it creates exist at all without them?” That’s a qualitatively different kind of contribution.
In a field as nascent as AI safety, new orgs don’t just scale existing work; they create net-new surface area for people to do safety-motivated work at all, including people with more operational, policy, or domain backgrounds who don’t fit neatly into the current research-centric pipeline. That seems like a strong structural reason to place more weight on founder/field‑builder impact, not less, especially when a new org is doing something meaningfully distinct from existing approaches.