Joey/AIM transition announcement

After ~7 years I am stepping away from being the CEO of AIM and will transition to a board member. My current planned last day is December 1st. As is true for most times a CEO or co-founder leaves an organisation, this is for a pretty large variety of reasons. I think the below three are the largest contributors though:

AIM is in a stable place

The transition is only possible because AIM is in a strong place, both in terms of leadership, strategic direction and financial stability. I believe the organisation is at a point where the culture, values, and quality of work across teams can be preserved without me taking a day-to-day role.

My Counterfactual impact

Relatedly, since AIM is in such a good place I feel proportionally less counterfactually important, which is the main driver in which career I pursue. My current models now show multiple career paths, especially founding a new project, have higher expected value in terms of impact. Of course, it’s not clear that if I founded a new project it would be in the same ballpark of impact as AIM but the competition is really my marginal addition to AIM at this point.

Founder vs CEO roles

I have worn both the hat of a co-founder and a CEO over the last (~12 years) and now feel pretty confident I perform better as a cofounder. The aspects required for cofounding (creativity, ability to deal with blank sheets, generalism, risk tolerance) I feel I am both good at and love to do. In contrast, although I do not dislike/am bad at all aspects of being a CEO (management, HR, Leadership, fundraising) I think the fit is considerably weaker. Although I am not clear on the exact details of my next career path I put a high chance it will be in founding something new.

Timeline

Thankfully there is no rush for this transition although I am confident it's the right call and I am excited for my next role. I have set a pretty long timeline to allow AIM to adapt to these changes. My current planned last day is December 1st, giving us a full 9 months from this announcement to plan and prepare to function as a high-impact organisation without me. Over these 9 months, I plan to focus on stabilising the relatively new programs (e.g. grantmaking) and building up the capacity of the leadership team (e.g. running a hiring round for another C-staff). After that, I will transition to the board but keep open-hour flexibility (e.g. 5-10 hours a week dedicated to AIM) to continue to smooth the transition and support strategically for ~6 months after that.

Closing and Thanks

AIM has been one of the most meaningful parts of my life and that’s in no small part due to working with such driven and aligned people. When I first set out to create CE many years ago, I never could have envisioned we’d get to where we are today and I have no doubt AIM will continue to scale its impact over the next 9 months and beyond. If you're interested in what I will be doing next you can follow my career optimization substack to find out!