The Nonlinear Library EA - [Podcast + Transcript] AMA: Founder and CEO of AMF, Rob Mather by tobytrem
Jan 9, 2024
42:54
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Podcast + Transcript] AMA: Founder and CEO of AMF, Rob Mather, published by tobytrem on January 9, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a transcript for the AMA with Rob Mather, CEO of AMF, which I recorded live on the 19th of December. To listen to a recording of the live AMA as a podcast, follow the link above for the RSS feed, or:
Use these links to listen to the podcast on Spotify, Pocketcasts, or Apple Music.
Click the speaker icon above to listen to the recording without leaving this page.
The questions for the AMA, which were edited and supplemented to, can be found on the original AMA post.
Hosting an AMA as a live event, followed by a podcast and a transcript, is a bit of an experiment for us, so please do comment or Forum dm me with any feedback you might have.
All of your (and my) questions to Rob are in bold, so you can skim them quickly.
Thanks to Rob Mather for his time, and Dane Magaway for her help with this transcript.
AMA with Rob Mather, recorded 19th December '23
Toby Tremlett: Welcome to this live AMA with Rob Mather, CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation. I'm Toby Tremlett, the EA Forum's content manager. If you're interested in effective altruism, you've probably heard of Rob's charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. For almost two decades, they've been doing crucial work to protect people, especially children, from malaria.
To date, around 450 million people have been protected with malaria bed nets from this charity. Once all of their currently funded nets have been distributed, AMF estimates it would have prevented 185,000 deaths. And it's not just AMF saying this, they've been a GiveWell Top Charity since 2009.
So to get straight into the AMA, we're going to keep the answers pretty short and snappy. I think Rob said he's going to stick to two minutes per answer. And yeah, Rob, thank you for making the time for coming along for this.
Rob Mather: Pleasure.
Toby Tremlett: On the theme of making the time, somebody said that they've organized two small fundraisers with AMF, and in both cases, you were incredibly proactive and helpful, taking time to immediately respond to emails and hop onto calls. They say many thanks, but a question remains, where do you find the time and which time management strategies do you use? You have two minutes of time.
Rob Mather: I don't use any particular strategies, I'm afraid. I think what I would say is we certainly leverage technology here, so that a lot of the things that I perhaps would normally do as a CEO of a charity I don't do because technology takes over. And perhaps I can give a couple of examples.
One of the things that we have to do as a charity is we have to file our accounts. We have to do that, in our case, in 14 countries and there are typically between 10 and 15 documents we have to prepare for each country. Lots of documents, lots of information that would normally take months of a number of people probably putting that together.
And we broadly have that content all available to us within nine hours of the end of our financial year because at the end of the day, finances are just ones and zeros so we can automate the living daylights out of it. And therefore a whole series of effort that would otherwise go into admin that would take my time effectively is struck down to just a sliver of time. I think that's one element [that] allows me to put my time in [another] direction.
The second thing I would say is that the structure of AMF is very streamlined. We're very focused on what we do. There is a lot of complexity in many ways around distributing nets, particularly around the operations. That's the bit that really requires an awful lot of very careful attention to make sure nets get to people. And because we have a very simple series of steps, if you like, that we go through when we'r...
This is a transcript for the AMA with Rob Mather, CEO of AMF, which I recorded live on the 19th of December. To listen to a recording of the live AMA as a podcast, follow the link above for the RSS feed, or:
Use these links to listen to the podcast on Spotify, Pocketcasts, or Apple Music.
Click the speaker icon above to listen to the recording without leaving this page.
The questions for the AMA, which were edited and supplemented to, can be found on the original AMA post.
Hosting an AMA as a live event, followed by a podcast and a transcript, is a bit of an experiment for us, so please do comment or Forum dm me with any feedback you might have.
All of your (and my) questions to Rob are in bold, so you can skim them quickly.
Thanks to Rob Mather for his time, and Dane Magaway for her help with this transcript.
AMA with Rob Mather, recorded 19th December '23
Toby Tremlett: Welcome to this live AMA with Rob Mather, CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation. I'm Toby Tremlett, the EA Forum's content manager. If you're interested in effective altruism, you've probably heard of Rob's charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. For almost two decades, they've been doing crucial work to protect people, especially children, from malaria.
To date, around 450 million people have been protected with malaria bed nets from this charity. Once all of their currently funded nets have been distributed, AMF estimates it would have prevented 185,000 deaths. And it's not just AMF saying this, they've been a GiveWell Top Charity since 2009.
So to get straight into the AMA, we're going to keep the answers pretty short and snappy. I think Rob said he's going to stick to two minutes per answer. And yeah, Rob, thank you for making the time for coming along for this.
Rob Mather: Pleasure.
Toby Tremlett: On the theme of making the time, somebody said that they've organized two small fundraisers with AMF, and in both cases, you were incredibly proactive and helpful, taking time to immediately respond to emails and hop onto calls. They say many thanks, but a question remains, where do you find the time and which time management strategies do you use? You have two minutes of time.
Rob Mather: I don't use any particular strategies, I'm afraid. I think what I would say is we certainly leverage technology here, so that a lot of the things that I perhaps would normally do as a CEO of a charity I don't do because technology takes over. And perhaps I can give a couple of examples.
One of the things that we have to do as a charity is we have to file our accounts. We have to do that, in our case, in 14 countries and there are typically between 10 and 15 documents we have to prepare for each country. Lots of documents, lots of information that would normally take months of a number of people probably putting that together.
And we broadly have that content all available to us within nine hours of the end of our financial year because at the end of the day, finances are just ones and zeros so we can automate the living daylights out of it. And therefore a whole series of effort that would otherwise go into admin that would take my time effectively is struck down to just a sliver of time. I think that's one element [that] allows me to put my time in [another] direction.
The second thing I would say is that the structure of AMF is very streamlined. We're very focused on what we do. There is a lot of complexity in many ways around distributing nets, particularly around the operations. That's the bit that really requires an awful lot of very careful attention to make sure nets get to people. And because we have a very simple series of steps, if you like, that we go through when we'r...