Rob Wiblin

And instead, what I had a path to do was to stand up this thing, which I tried to do, but it just felt a bit tough going.

Yeah, I felt a bit on my own.

And I'm not a very entrepreneurial person, I think.

Or I'm ambitious in some ways, but I just really have a high need for constantly talking to other people.

And I tried to achieve that sense of team by like hiring people under me to help me with this vision.

But I think I was not very good at hiring and management.

Partly it was because this vision was like pretty nebulous.

And I think I like...

probably needed to spend more cycles working out the kinks in it by myself and really solidifying what it is and what's the realistic version of doing an understanding-oriented technical AI safety program.

So it was very hard to hire because you kind of had to hire for someone who really resonated with that off the bat, even though it wasn't a very well-defined thing.

So that took a lot of energy.

And then I think with people I was managing, I have always struggled and in this case still struggled with like perfectionism in management.

So I have this long history of like trying to get people to like serve as like writers who like write up my ideas and it never works for me because like they don't do it just the way I want it.

And I'm myself a pretty like fast writer.

And so like...

Working with a writer as their editor and like getting their writing output to be something I'm satisfied with often ends up taking more time than like doing it myself.

And I found the same happened to some extent with grantmakers where at one point we had a number of people sort of spent part of their time working on the benchmarks RFP.

And I think it's possible that I would have just moved through the grants faster if it were just me working on it, which is a bit tough.

I think this is a weakness or challenge a lot of new managers go through.

And I was sort of going through that at the same time as feeling like the feedback and engagement I got from above me was much less than it was before.