80,000 Hours two-year review: 2021 and 2022

By · Published March 8th, 2023 ·

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

We’ve released our review of our programmes for the years 2021 and 2022. The full document is available for the public, and we’re sharing the summary below.

You can find our previous evaluations here. We have also updated our mistakes page.

80,000 Hours delivers four programmes: website, job board, podcast, and one-on-one. We also have a marketing team that attracts users to these programmes, primarily by getting them to visit the website.

Over the past two years, three of four programmes grew their engagement 2-3x:

  • Podcast listening time in 2022 was 2x higher than in 2020
  • Job board vacancy clicks in 2022 were 3x higher than in 2020
  • The number of one-on-one team calls in 2022 was 3x higher than in 2020

Web engagement hours fell by 20% in 2021, then grew by 38% in 2022 after we increased investment in our marketing.

From December 2020 to December 2022, the core team grew by 78% from 14 FTEs to 25 FTEs.

Ben Todd stepped down as CEO in May 2022 and was replaced by Howie Lempel.

The collapse of FTX in November 2022 caused significant disruption. As a result, Howie went on leave from 80,000 Hours to be Interim CEO of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK). Brenton Mayer took over as Interim CEO of 80,000 Hours. We are also spending substantially more time liaising with management across the Effective Ventures group, as we are a project of the group.

We had previously held up Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of one of our highly rated career paths, a decision we now regret and feel humbled by. We are updating some aspects of our advice in light of our reflections on the FTX collapse and the lessons the wider community is learning from these events.

In 2023, we will make improving our advice a key focus of our work. As part of this, we’re aiming to hire for a senior research role.

We plan to continue growing our main four programmes and will experiment with additional projects, such as relaunching our headhunting service and creating a new, scripted podcast with a different host. We plan to grow the team by roughly 50% in 2023, adding an additional 12 people.

Our baseline non-marketing budget is $8.8m for 2023 and $13.7m for 2024. We’re keen to fundraise above our baseline budget and also interested in expanding our runway – though expect that the amount we raise in practice will be heavily affected by the funding landscape.

We would like to increase the number of people and organisations donating to 80,000 Hours, so if you would consider donating, please contact [email protected].