“Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
Seems like other people besides Ruby are confused about this too, maybe also because Ben sometimes says “the Nonlinear cofounders” and Emerson/Kat/Drew
A source of terminological confusion here is that Lightcone team often internally uses the word cofounder to mean ‘person with a very strong investment and generalist skill set, who takes responsibility in a particular way’. Ie have used it to refer to multiple people on the Lightcone team who didn’t literally found the org but are pretty deeply involved.
The crux for me with Drew, and I assume with Ruby/Ben, is ‘does he have that kind of relationship with the org?’, rather than ‘did he literally cofound the org’.
I do think this terminology is probably confusing for other readers, and seems good to correct, although I would guess not actually misleading in an way that’s particularly relevant for most people’s assessment of the situation.
I think it is not correct to refer to a person of a “cofounder” of an org because they seem to be a generalist taking responsibility for the org, if they did not actually co-found the org and are not referred to as a cofounder by the org.
This seems like a simple error / oversight, rather than a deliberate choice.
But I definitely don’t feel like the assessment of “this person was in a defacto cofounder role, in practice, so it’s not a big deal if we call them a cofounder” holds water.
FWIW, I also don’t think this holds water, and at least I don’t use co-founder this way these days (though maybe Ray does). The LessWrong/Lightcone team developed very gradually, and I think it’s reasonable to call the people who came on board in like the first 1-2 years of existence of the project co-founders, since it grew gradually and as a fiscally sponsored nonprofit we never went through a formal incorporation step that would have formalized equity shares in the same clear way, but I think while it might make sense to call anyone coming on later than that some title that emphasizes that they have a lot of responsibility and stake in the organization, it doesn’t IMO make sense to refer to them as a “co-founder”.
I’m not arguing that this usage is good, I just think it’s the usage Ben and Ruby were implicitly using. I’m guessing Drew is in a role that is closer to me, Jim or Ruby, which was a time period you were explicitly calling us cofounders. Which it sounds like you still endorse?
(To be clear I agree the word is misleading here, and Ben should probably edit the word to something clearer. I also don’t really think it made sense for the Lightcone team to talk about itself having 5 cofounders, which I think we explicitly did at the time. I was just noting the language-usage-difference.
But also this doesn’t seem cruxy to me about the substance of the claim that “Drew was involved enough that he had some obligation to notice if fishy things were going on, even if they weren’t explicitly his responsibility”)
I don’t think I would call Jim or Ruby cofounders, especially in any public setting. I do think to set expectations for what it’s like to work with me on LessWrong, back then, I would frequently say something like “cofounder level stake and responsibility”, though I think that has definitely shifted over time.
Just FYI Drew is not a cofounder of Nonlinear. That is another inaccurate claim from the article. He did not join full time until April 2022.
Which part of the post claims that? The post seems to say the opposite:
There might be another part that does refer to Drew as a co-founder, but I can’t find anything of that sort.
“Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days.”
Seems like other people besides Ruby are confused about this too, maybe also because Ben sometimes says “the Nonlinear cofounders” and Emerson/Kat/Drew
A source of terminological confusion here is that Lightcone team often internally uses the word cofounder to mean ‘person with a very strong investment and generalist skill set, who takes responsibility in a particular way’. Ie have used it to refer to multiple people on the Lightcone team who didn’t literally found the org but are pretty deeply involved.
The crux for me with Drew, and I assume with Ruby/Ben, is ‘does he have that kind of relationship with the org?’, rather than ‘did he literally cofound the org’.
I do think this terminology is probably confusing for other readers, and seems good to correct, although I would guess not actually misleading in an way that’s particularly relevant for most people’s assessment of the situation.
I think it is not correct to refer to a person of a “cofounder” of an org because they seem to be a generalist taking responsibility for the org, if they did not actually co-found the org and are not referred to as a cofounder by the org.
This seems like a simple error / oversight, rather than a deliberate choice.
But I definitely don’t feel like the assessment of “this person was in a defacto cofounder role, in practice, so it’s not a big deal if we call them a cofounder” holds water.
FWIW, I also don’t think this holds water, and at least I don’t use co-founder this way these days (though maybe Ray does). The LessWrong/Lightcone team developed very gradually, and I think it’s reasonable to call the people who came on board in like the first 1-2 years of existence of the project co-founders, since it grew gradually and as a fiscally sponsored nonprofit we never went through a formal incorporation step that would have formalized equity shares in the same clear way, but I think while it might make sense to call anyone coming on later than that some title that emphasizes that they have a lot of responsibility and stake in the organization, it doesn’t IMO make sense to refer to them as a “co-founder”.
I’m not arguing that this usage is good, I just think it’s the usage Ben and Ruby were implicitly using. I’m guessing Drew is in a role that is closer to me, Jim or Ruby, which was a time period you were explicitly calling us cofounders. Which it sounds like you still endorse?
(To be clear I agree the word is misleading here, and Ben should probably edit the word to something clearer. I also don’t really think it made sense for the Lightcone team to talk about itself having 5 cofounders, which I think we explicitly did at the time. I was just noting the language-usage-difference.
But also this doesn’t seem cruxy to me about the substance of the claim that “Drew was involved enough that he had some obligation to notice if fishy things were going on, even if they weren’t explicitly his responsibility”)
I don’t think I would call Jim or Ruby cofounders, especially in any public setting. I do think to set expectations for what it’s like to work with me on LessWrong, back then, I would frequently say something like “cofounder level stake and responsibility”, though I think that has definitely shifted over time.
In practice I don’t think there was any pump against linguistic drift to abbreviate ‘cofounder level responsibility’ to ‘cofounder’.
e.g.