On Giving Tuesday, give a thought to the neediest commenters. It’s easy to forget those who have to subsist on one or two likes per day, never knowing when they’ll see their next “amen” or “preach it.” With your likes, you can lift them from despair. Or you can turn the page.
I'm a selfish loser who only gave $5. Don't care about the extra content (no shade Matt, I'm just not that parasocially into you), but wanted to contribute some small amount and help create a permission structure for other selfish losers to do the same. Cheers!
Well ... timing seems fortuitous. We sold our restaurant fire protection business yesterday and I really want Matt to answer my post-NAFTA factory closing question so this is just perfect. Matt -- thanks for the generous offer to match; outstanding work you're doing.
Definitely not. We don't even have an earnout. The wires fly and we're out of the business. They're far better operators than us anyway - so not much we could even add. I'd be shocked if they don't double revenue in 12-18 months. We would have had no chance to do anything like that.
Can I ask, how was the sale process? Did you use a business broker? I've heard horror stories about small or medium-size company acquisitions..... months of prep just for the buyer to back out literally at the closing table, fake buyers, exclusive offers but then after 6 months of paperwork the offer drops by a third at the last minute, etc.
Yeap. AMA. We sold to a strategic buyer that we've been working with for 2-3 years so we both new each other well and start to finish the process took ~ 3 months from when we signed the LOI. We were their 100th acquisition in like just six years so they have a very standard process and we didn't push back on really anything after we agreed to the sale price. We represented ourselves but that's also our day jobs - I've run corp. dev. for a public company in a prior role and my partner was a sell side I banker. If we didn't have the experience then we'd probably have worked with a broker - there's just a lot of documentation and I'd be surprised if a 1st time buyer / seller could work it efficiently. Overall -- I'm a huge fan of this ETA movement (entrepreneurship through acquisition) vs. a start-up. Way lower risk profile but still with a lot of upside (e.g., we landed at 23x cash on cash returns over 6 years).
Nice. Is there necessarily a liquid market for selling small to mid-sized companies? I.e. can you always cash out? I know the trend is PE rolling up small service companies these days
I'd say for small companies (i.e., less than $5M in revenue) there is *not* at all a liquid market. It's a bottom feeder market where all the buyers are just trying to steal businesses from depressed sellers. For example, two years ago we had an inbound request from a PE firm that seemed interested but after putting a bunch of work / docs together for them ... they offered us like $800k. We ended up selling it for $4.5M so the key is finding a strategic buyer that can pay up for some of the value they'll create. For mid-sized companies yeah ... that seems to be very liquid. But is also much more institutional where an individual will have a much tougher time playing.
Definitely don't let this stop you from giving, but I think we should get rid of the stigma where you can't admit that volunteering is partially for the benefit of the volunteer. I teach a weekly English class for immigrants and refugees and I absolutely love it. Could I do more good by spending that weekly three hours tutoring wealthy people and donating the pay to high impact charities? Probably, but if I'm being honest, my teaching is just as much for my benefit as a fun, community-building activity as it is for the benefit of the students, and as long as it is a net benefit for the students (which I believe it is because I take it seriously and put a lot of effort into it), I think it should be okay to admit that.
I agree that there is a weird stigma against talking about (and personally enjoying) volunteer work! I think acknowledging that it's something I do because I like it helps me take a "why not both" approach to volunteering my time as well as my money.
Matt, I want to thank you for giving me the nudge to starting donating again. I just set up a recurring $100 donation, which I had been meaning to do for awhile now but hadn't. The matching funds for this initial donation were a big motivator, and I also didn't realize my employer would match this donation, which is exciting!
Three years ago I was donating to Give Directly monthly, but then I had to stop as my finances became very tight due to inflation, a lack of real raises in my job at the time, and a break up leaving me to pay rent all on my own. However, my financial circumstances are much better now and I frankly have been putting off restarting my donations for vague and selfish reasons.
I don't know if thread hijacking is heavily frowned upon, but uh a coup/autogolpe attempt in South Korea seems like a big deal.....
" South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law in an unannounced late night address broadcast live on YTN television, claiming he would eradicate "shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces". He did not cite any specific threat from the nuclear-armed North, however, instead focusing on his domestic political opponents.
"I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free constitutional order," Yoon said."
Yeah, I was very, very surprised when I got into the elevator at work this morning and the little screen that runs approx. 25-word news blurbs said, "South Korean president declares martial law. Troops, police in streets of Seoul," which prompted me to literally say, "What the f***?!?" out loud, which was a little awkward because there was already some random woman in the elevator going to a different floor.
Here I sit at my desk making the money I make doing what I do. It's truly a blessed life that I have no idea how I stumbled into. I save plenty of money, and spend a lot on frivolous things, but I have plenty more to give. Only in the last few years has it really connected in my brain how lucky I am to do this and be here - time to give even just a bit of that back. Thanks for the motivation.
"a lot of people seem to prefer spending a Saturday afternoon knocking on strangers' doors to sending some money to professionals who can target well-tested messages to whomever needs to hear them."
If you knock on strangers' doors, you know that your time and effort has gone directly into contacting potential voters. If you donate to a campaign or its affiliated PACs, it's hard to tell how much of your money is going to actually making creatives and putting them on the air/online, versus how much is going to cover the salaries and semi-related expenses of people whose job it is to solicit donations that cover their salaries and semi-related expenses...
I'm guessing that your readers are fairly high income, so maybe mention that their $$ can go MUCH further if they donate appreciated stock rather than cash. E.g., if you have a stock that went from $10 to $110, selling it you'd pay $15 in taxes leaving only $85 to donate. If you instead donate the $110 stock directly, charities can sell it tax-free, and you even get a tax *deduction* (if you itemize) on the full $110, potentially netting you $40 or more if you're in the top tax bracket. Everyone wins! I donate to a donor advised fund to make it super easy (only downside is you can't participate in some matches like this one)
Thank you Matt, Kate, Ben and team; I will donate again this year.
A note on the overall pitch, if I may: I wonder if the (mildly) disparaging contrast to activism/volunteerism was unnecessary. First, within the SB community, it seems quite possible that folk could, on their way to knocking on doors, stop at a laptop and initiate a funds transfer.
Second, it may be true that direct involvement initially offers less efficiency than donating to professionals and their well-tested messages. But it seems the ranks of community and party builders have been hollowed out, leaving only online activism, and I think this allows rot to fester in our most important institutions. Meanwhile, direct involvement educates participants on the system itself, fostering informed supporters who hold accountable professionals who occasionally must speak for them.
Building connection, persuasion and impact is best done in person—and in communion; I can think of few groups better to be out there than the people who read this newsletter.
tl;dr — Why not heartily encourage both kinds of giving?
Again, thanks for this opportunity to make a difference. Would that we keep supporting such creative endeavors of all types.
Not to add a mercenary edge to volunteering, but it's also selfishly good to volunteer because it's good for morale, you make friends and deepen community connections, you learn new skills and you have a third space. I drive the Bloodmobile on weekends for the Red Cross to deliver platelets and I think I do it for myself as much as I do it for cancer patients.
(Also idk if this is happening to anyone else but my formatting on SB is junked. Not happening on other substacks, though.)
“Shall I, a socialist with a six-figure income, use some small fraction of my personal resources to help the world’s poorest people? Nay, the ethically correct course of action is to sneer at the people who do and posture as morally superior because one person associated with the movement did some bad stuff.”
Giving money to the poor now only prolongs their suffering by giving them false hope in the capitalist system. The best way to help is to allow their suffering to intensify so that they will be able to see capitalism's true colors and seek revolution.
Wait, are you saying that by moving to Africa and adopting subsistence, I can get in on the free money too? [edit: \S (better add this before I get a bunch of silly replies)]
What do you get out of saying this exactly? Apart from all the other reasons its asinine, GD are barely even connected to the wider EA movement anyway, beyond being recommended by GiveWell and funded by Moskowitz, both of whom had basically zero to do with SBF. What are they supposed to have done? Turned down an endorsement in the early 2010s because of events that would happen 10 years later, not even involving GiveWell in any way. Turn down a normal charitable donation from some rich dude because he shared some ideology with a then-yet-to-be-reach dude who later stole? If you're actual point is you hate GD because you see them as an expression of economic liberalism or libertarianism or individualism or whatever, just say that.
I think sometimes normal people miss the fact that at least some part of the left-wing antipathy for EA is not EA-specific but is grounded in a broader anti-philanthropy critique that argues that all philanthropy is like greenwashing in that it's designed to anesthetize people to capitalism's horrors. Anand Ghiridaradas had a whole shtick on this a few years back. (Though I suppose philanthropy that goes directly to left-wing advocacy groups is exempt.)
Yes, that's a coherent view that could be held in good faith*, but it has fuck-all to do with pretending you think GD somehow share responsibility for SBF because you'll stoop to saying stuff you know is bullshit so long as it annoys people you think are cringe.
*I have several responses, including that the world as a whole is not a democratic polity, so the people who GD help can't vote for an international welfare states instead.
2. Therefore, if you have the opportunity to highlight a philanthropist who was a crook, and thereby tarnish the reputation of philanthropy in general, then you are justified if not obliged to do it.
3. The philanthropists whose reputations most require tarnishing are the *most beneficial and admirable* philanthropists, since these are the philanthropists who are most responsible for causing people to believe that philanthropy is good, and that by extension capitalism is acceptable. So if you believe Give Directly is morally blameless and is doing the most important work out there, then *precisely for those reasons* you should allege that it shares responsibility for SBF.
Well, I’d rather have high taxes that everyone actually pays and a cradle-to-grave luxury welfare state in a one-world government (ruled by a few people who agree with me on everything). But that’s not on the table! So philanthropy has a place, and Give Directly is a metric fuckton better than a donation to Harvard!
Only 30%. Which is still a bargain considering the ROI you’re getting in <human welfare points>! Besides, don’t you know how expensive it is to run a League of Legends harem?
In all seriousness, at least on the subject of GiveWell, I know the Hassenfelds personally and I have quite a bit of confidence in Elie’s integrity. I’m just some random doofus on the internet, but that’s my n=1 vote of confidence in GiveWell.
Note that GiveWell has nothing to do with this; GiveDirectly is not currently a GiveWell top charity. Unless you're referring to GiveWell's research report, which does at least confirm that the program works and has room for more funding (and, implicitly, that there aren't any castles involved).
A rhetorical question for you (or rather, a series of them). Would you curb stomp a baby for the sake of The Revolution? Would you shoot your own mother? Would you push your best friend in this world into a vat of corrosive acid if it meant The Revolution would arrive tomorrow? I do not think you would.
You are a paper communist, comrade. Your hammer and sickle melt when they get wet.
Shut your mouth and open your wallet like the rest of us.
On Giving Tuesday, give a thought to the neediest commenters. It’s easy to forget those who have to subsist on one or two likes per day, never knowing when they’ll see their next “amen” or “preach it.” With your likes, you can lift them from despair. Or you can turn the page.
Amen
Preach it!
Just donated $1,200. Now Matt is gonna have to answer the zaniest mailbag question imaginable
Too bad, you were so close to a donation "larger than $1200". Better hope Matt isn't a stickler for the fine print.
Oh wow. That’s a burn. I’m getting my employer to do a partial match if that helps
What is that question, zanier than which no question can be imagined?
I just told my family to get out of the house for the next week so I can ponder this in solitude. They understood.
I'm a selfish loser who only gave $5. Don't care about the extra content (no shade Matt, I'm just not that parasocially into you), but wanted to contribute some small amount and help create a permission structure for other selfish losers to do the same. Cheers!
Perhaps?
Well ... timing seems fortuitous. We sold our restaurant fire protection business yesterday and I really want Matt to answer my post-NAFTA factory closing question so this is just perfect. Matt -- thanks for the generous offer to match; outstanding work you're doing.
A restaurant "fire protection business"... in CHICAGO...
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Sure they won't try to pull you back in (to that industry)?
Definitely not. We don't even have an earnout. The wires fly and we're out of the business. They're far better operators than us anyway - so not much we could even add. I'd be shocked if they don't double revenue in 12-18 months. We would have had no chance to do anything like that.
Can I ask, how was the sale process? Did you use a business broker? I've heard horror stories about small or medium-size company acquisitions..... months of prep just for the buyer to back out literally at the closing table, fake buyers, exclusive offers but then after 6 months of paperwork the offer drops by a third at the last minute, etc.
Yeap. AMA. We sold to a strategic buyer that we've been working with for 2-3 years so we both new each other well and start to finish the process took ~ 3 months from when we signed the LOI. We were their 100th acquisition in like just six years so they have a very standard process and we didn't push back on really anything after we agreed to the sale price. We represented ourselves but that's also our day jobs - I've run corp. dev. for a public company in a prior role and my partner was a sell side I banker. If we didn't have the experience then we'd probably have worked with a broker - there's just a lot of documentation and I'd be surprised if a 1st time buyer / seller could work it efficiently. Overall -- I'm a huge fan of this ETA movement (entrepreneurship through acquisition) vs. a start-up. Way lower risk profile but still with a lot of upside (e.g., we landed at 23x cash on cash returns over 6 years).
Nice. Is there necessarily a liquid market for selling small to mid-sized companies? I.e. can you always cash out? I know the trend is PE rolling up small service companies these days
I'd say for small companies (i.e., less than $5M in revenue) there is *not* at all a liquid market. It's a bottom feeder market where all the buyers are just trying to steal businesses from depressed sellers. For example, two years ago we had an inbound request from a PE firm that seemed interested but after putting a bunch of work / docs together for them ... they offered us like $800k. We ended up selling it for $4.5M so the key is finding a strategic buyer that can pay up for some of the value they'll create. For mid-sized companies yeah ... that seems to be very liquid. But is also much more institutional where an individual will have a much tougher time playing.
Definitely don't let this stop you from giving, but I think we should get rid of the stigma where you can't admit that volunteering is partially for the benefit of the volunteer. I teach a weekly English class for immigrants and refugees and I absolutely love it. Could I do more good by spending that weekly three hours tutoring wealthy people and donating the pay to high impact charities? Probably, but if I'm being honest, my teaching is just as much for my benefit as a fun, community-building activity as it is for the benefit of the students, and as long as it is a net benefit for the students (which I believe it is because I take it seriously and put a lot of effort into it), I think it should be okay to admit that.
I agree that there is a weird stigma against talking about (and personally enjoying) volunteer work! I think acknowledging that it's something I do because I like it helps me take a "why not both" approach to volunteering my time as well as my money.
I think maybe the ‘I enjoy it’ gets lumped into the ‘I take pictures with poor kids and post it on my Instagram’ thing, which is a separate issue
Matt, I want to thank you for giving me the nudge to starting donating again. I just set up a recurring $100 donation, which I had been meaning to do for awhile now but hadn't. The matching funds for this initial donation were a big motivator, and I also didn't realize my employer would match this donation, which is exciting!
Three years ago I was donating to Give Directly monthly, but then I had to stop as my finances became very tight due to inflation, a lack of real raises in my job at the time, and a break up leaving me to pay rent all on my own. However, my financial circumstances are much better now and I frankly have been putting off restarting my donations for vague and selfish reasons.
Seems like a good cause!!
I don't know if thread hijacking is heavily frowned upon, but uh a coup/autogolpe attempt in South Korea seems like a big deal.....
" South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law in an unannounced late night address broadcast live on YTN television, claiming he would eradicate "shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces". He did not cite any specific threat from the nuclear-armed North, however, instead focusing on his domestic political opponents.
"I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free constitutional order," Yoon said."
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-president-yoon-declares-martial-law-2024-12-03/
Yeah, I was very, very surprised when I got into the elevator at work this morning and the little screen that runs approx. 25-word news blurbs said, "South Korean president declares martial law. Troops, police in streets of Seoul," which prompted me to literally say, "What the f***?!?" out loud, which was a little awkward because there was already some random woman in the elevator going to a different floor.
That guy did always have strong "work, family, fatherland" vibes.
Here I sit at my desk making the money I make doing what I do. It's truly a blessed life that I have no idea how I stumbled into. I save plenty of money, and spend a lot on frivolous things, but I have plenty more to give. Only in the last few years has it really connected in my brain how lucky I am to do this and be here - time to give even just a bit of that back. Thanks for the motivation.
Liking the incentive design here! Props to whoever on the team came up with it!
Thanks for organizing this, Matt (& Kate, who told me about it!) Glad to be part of it.
Happy Giving Tuesday Matt - thank you for the opportunity to give back.
"a lot of people seem to prefer spending a Saturday afternoon knocking on strangers' doors to sending some money to professionals who can target well-tested messages to whomever needs to hear them."
If you knock on strangers' doors, you know that your time and effort has gone directly into contacting potential voters. If you donate to a campaign or its affiliated PACs, it's hard to tell how much of your money is going to actually making creatives and putting them on the air/online, versus how much is going to cover the salaries and semi-related expenses of people whose job it is to solicit donations that cover their salaries and semi-related expenses...
We need a new rallying call now that Sam Altman (and to a much much lesser extent, the weirdo AI Doomers) have tarnished Effective Altruism.
Consequentialist Do-gooders of the world, unite! Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Are you blaming the right Sam? SBF.
Uh right I meant SBF. Been a weird day don’t mind me.
I'm guessing that your readers are fairly high income, so maybe mention that their $$ can go MUCH further if they donate appreciated stock rather than cash. E.g., if you have a stock that went from $10 to $110, selling it you'd pay $15 in taxes leaving only $85 to donate. If you instead donate the $110 stock directly, charities can sell it tax-free, and you even get a tax *deduction* (if you itemize) on the full $110, potentially netting you $40 or more if you're in the top tax bracket. Everyone wins! I donate to a donor advised fund to make it super easy (only downside is you can't participate in some matches like this one)
Thank you Matt, Kate, Ben and team; I will donate again this year.
A note on the overall pitch, if I may: I wonder if the (mildly) disparaging contrast to activism/volunteerism was unnecessary. First, within the SB community, it seems quite possible that folk could, on their way to knocking on doors, stop at a laptop and initiate a funds transfer.
Second, it may be true that direct involvement initially offers less efficiency than donating to professionals and their well-tested messages. But it seems the ranks of community and party builders have been hollowed out, leaving only online activism, and I think this allows rot to fester in our most important institutions. Meanwhile, direct involvement educates participants on the system itself, fostering informed supporters who hold accountable professionals who occasionally must speak for them.
Building connection, persuasion and impact is best done in person—and in communion; I can think of few groups better to be out there than the people who read this newsletter.
tl;dr — Why not heartily encourage both kinds of giving?
Again, thanks for this opportunity to make a difference. Would that we keep supporting such creative endeavors of all types.
Not to add a mercenary edge to volunteering, but it's also selfishly good to volunteer because it's good for morale, you make friends and deepen community connections, you learn new skills and you have a third space. I drive the Bloodmobile on weekends for the Red Cross to deliver platelets and I think I do it for myself as much as I do it for cancer patients.
(Also idk if this is happening to anyone else but my formatting on SB is junked. Not happening on other substacks, though.)
How much of my donation goes to a castle where Sam Bankman Fried keeps a harem and plays World of Warcraft?
“Shall I, a socialist with a six-figure income, use some small fraction of my personal resources to help the world’s poorest people? Nay, the ethically correct course of action is to sneer at the people who do and posture as morally superior because one person associated with the movement did some bad stuff.”
Giving money to the poor now only prolongs their suffering by giving them false hope in the capitalist system. The best way to help is to allow their suffering to intensify so that they will be able to see capitalism's true colors and seek revolution.
I'm not usually one to defend him but this strikes me as just a goofy throwaway comment?
Seems like zero, unless he's living on $2 a day in a sub-Saharan village.
Wait, are you saying that by moving to Africa and adopting subsistence, I can get in on the free money too? [edit: \S (better add this before I get a bunch of silly replies)]
What do you get out of saying this exactly? Apart from all the other reasons its asinine, GD are barely even connected to the wider EA movement anyway, beyond being recommended by GiveWell and funded by Moskowitz, both of whom had basically zero to do with SBF. What are they supposed to have done? Turned down an endorsement in the early 2010s because of events that would happen 10 years later, not even involving GiveWell in any way. Turn down a normal charitable donation from some rich dude because he shared some ideology with a then-yet-to-be-reach dude who later stole? If you're actual point is you hate GD because you see them as an expression of economic liberalism or libertarianism or individualism or whatever, just say that.
I think sometimes normal people miss the fact that at least some part of the left-wing antipathy for EA is not EA-specific but is grounded in a broader anti-philanthropy critique that argues that all philanthropy is like greenwashing in that it's designed to anesthetize people to capitalism's horrors. Anand Ghiridaradas had a whole shtick on this a few years back. (Though I suppose philanthropy that goes directly to left-wing advocacy groups is exempt.)
Yes, that's a coherent view that could be held in good faith*, but it has fuck-all to do with pretending you think GD somehow share responsibility for SBF because you'll stoop to saying stuff you know is bullshit so long as it annoys people you think are cringe.
*I have several responses, including that the world as a whole is not a democratic polity, so the people who GD help can't vote for an international welfare states instead.
The thought process seems to be that:
1. All philanthropy is bad.
2. Therefore, if you have the opportunity to highlight a philanthropist who was a crook, and thereby tarnish the reputation of philanthropy in general, then you are justified if not obliged to do it.
3. The philanthropists whose reputations most require tarnishing are the *most beneficial and admirable* philanthropists, since these are the philanthropists who are most responsible for causing people to believe that philanthropy is good, and that by extension capitalism is acceptable. So if you believe Give Directly is morally blameless and is doing the most important work out there, then *precisely for those reasons* you should allege that it shares responsibility for SBF.
Well, I’d rather have high taxes that everyone actually pays and a cradle-to-grave luxury welfare state in a one-world government (ruled by a few people who agree with me on everything). But that’s not on the table! So philanthropy has a place, and Give Directly is a metric fuckton better than a donation to Harvard!
screw that I want the harem Castle
Well for one think I think FDB is joking!
Only 30%. Which is still a bargain considering the ROI you’re getting in <human welfare points>! Besides, don’t you know how expensive it is to run a League of Legends harem?
In all seriousness, at least on the subject of GiveWell, I know the Hassenfelds personally and I have quite a bit of confidence in Elie’s integrity. I’m just some random doofus on the internet, but that’s my n=1 vote of confidence in GiveWell.
Note that GiveWell has nothing to do with this; GiveDirectly is not currently a GiveWell top charity. Unless you're referring to GiveWell's research report, which does at least confirm that the program works and has room for more funding (and, implicitly, that there aren't any castles involved).
edit: okay, I've had my fun with this. Maybe it was just a joke, but with Freddie who knows.
A rhetorical question for you (or rather, a series of them). Would you curb stomp a baby for the sake of The Revolution? Would you shoot your own mother? Would you push your best friend in this world into a vat of corrosive acid if it meant The Revolution would arrive tomorrow? I do not think you would.
You are a paper communist, comrade. Your hammer and sickle melt when they get wet.
Shut your mouth and open your wallet like the rest of us.
Man, federal prison is nothing like I pictured it.
About a normal 20%: https://www.givedirectly.org/financials/