This lines up with our experience running our first Nonlinear Network round. We received ~500 applications, most of which did not apply to other EA funders like the LTFF. Full writeup coming soon.
If you’d like to help out, you can apply to be a funder for our next round in Oct/Nov.
I’ve been trying to stay out of this, but I’m honestly shocked at this claim you’re making.
You say:
But this is, just, wildly false? You did not speak to dozens of other people working at Nonlinear.
And Ben himself contradicts you. In Ben’s post, he says:
Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we’ve actually had 21 - extremely far off.
If you “extensively cross-checked the stories,” how did Ben get such a basic number so wrong? And why are you under the impression that you had talked to dozens of employees if Ben did not?
The fact that you spent 1000 hours on this and got such key details this wrong is surprising to me.
Ok, but why is this a big deal? Aside from showing egregiously bad fact checking, a large portion of Ben’s post was trying to make the case that there is a pattern of Nonlinear “chewing up and spitting out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world.” It would significantly weaken your case if it were 2 out of 21 team members [1]were unhappy instead of 2 out of 7.
Not only that, but to my knowledge, Ben did not talk to a single employee or intern since Alice and Chloe to see if these patterns were, in fact, patterns.
This seems like poor truth-seeking to me.
edit: changed “employees” to “team members”