All of Drew Spartz's Comments + Replies

I've been trying to stay out of this, but I'm honestly shocked at this claim you're making.

You say:

We talked to dozens of other people working at the organization, extensively cross-checked the stories they told us

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:

My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).

Ben thinks we’ve only had 7 total team members, but we've ac... (read more)

Sorry, saying "worked at" is definitely not the right term, sorry about that. 

We talked to dozens of people who have either worked at Nonlinear, otherwise worked with people currently at Nonlinear, or have substantially engaged with Nonlinear in a professional capacity and so seem like they are in a good position to judge what happened. "Worked at" is definitely the wrong word. I should have said something like "have worked with people at Nonlinear". 

I don't particularly want to litigate the employee thing in this random thread. My best guess is ... (read more)

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. 

1wassname
Looking forward to the writeup!

Hi, thanks for saying you liked the idea, and also appreciate the chance to clear up some things here. As a reminder, we’re not making funding decisions. We’re just helping funders and applicants find each other. 

Some updates on that thread you might not have seen: the EA Forum moderators investigated and banned two users for creating ~8 fake sockpuppet accounts. This has possibly led to information cascades about things “lots of people are saying.”

Another thing you might not be aware of: the Glassdoor CEO rating of 0% was actually not Emers... (read more)

3orthonormal
Thanks for the info about sockpuppeting, will edit my first comment accordingly. Re: Glassdoor, the most devastating reviews were indeed after 2017, but it's still the case that nobody rated the CEO above average among the ~30 people who worked in the Spartz era.
6the gears to ascension
It's unclear to me whether there's a credible accusation against y'all. So, in the interest of wanting to not have to worry about such a thing when and if I apply to stuff through nonlinear - What are your plans for how to remove yourself from the equation by nature of providing a mechanically checkable tool that does not permit you to intervene on who can apply to who? In general, that's what I expect a good networking tool to do. I wouldn't want uncertainty about the validity of the nonlinear group to compromise an application, especially if this is at risk of turning out to be another scam like FTX turned out to be; I imagine it'd be a smaller issue than that, but of course you wouldn't want to promise it's not a scam, as that promise is vacuous, adding no information to the external view of whether it is one. The only way to verify such a thing is to design for mechanistic auditability, that is to say, processes that do not have a step on which a shaky reputationed person can exert influence, such as an open source application tool. With that in mind, I am in fact interested in applying to some sort of funding process. I just don't want to be accepting unreasonable reputational risk by depending on a challenged reputation with no mechanistic safeguarding against the hypothesized behaviors represented by reputational concern level. I'd ask others to do as much with any org I was at.

Yes, some funders are more interested in funding individuals and some are more interested in existing organizations.

If you apply here I'd also recommend applying to the Long Term Future Fund because they're always looking for more good applications.