Interview
#35 - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
- Tara McCauley, currently earning to give via entrepreneurship, previously served as CEO and former Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA).
- At age 15–16, as a high school student, she joined a fast-food chain (Aporto) and implemented data-driven optimizations that reduced staff costs by 30% and saved approximately two-thirds of stores facing closure.
- Her initial optimization involved timing tasks with a stopwatch, creating a predictive ordering system using weather forecasts and demographics, and altering staffing policies to eliminate overtime-based work culture, thereby forcing collaboration.
- At St. Vincent's Hospital (age 20), she saved an estimated $8 million by analyzing dispensing data to predict drug needs, preventing millions in waste and avoiding $2 million in government fines for missed emergency department benchmarks.
- Her hospital improvements included linking admission data to pharmacy systems to optimize stocking, reducing the 30% of pharmacist time wasted on ad hoc restocking, and integrating siloed data from pathology and medical departments to improve rare disease treatment.
- McCauley encountered significant political resistance in healthcare, noting that success required modeling decision-makers' KPIs and negotiating buy-in from departments like nursing and IT who were protective of data access.
- While working for the Red Cross in Indonesia, she advocated for purchasing a slightly more expensive, water-based scabies cream (costing nearly double) which significantly increased treatment success rates by overcoming patient adherence barriers in a humid climate.
- In Bhutan, she discovered a Red Cross cancer treatment center was producing net-negative outcomes, with chemotherapy survival rates lower than no treatment due to clerical errors, poor arithmetic skills among clinicians, and a culture forbidding the questioning of senior doctors.
- She attempted to mitigate the Bhutan tragedy by establishing an international advisory network of US oncologists, introducing mandatory double-check checklists, and physically destroying a fatal dosage of chemotherapy for a six-year-old patient.
- McCauley left the Bhutan project after six months, citing the emotional toll of witnessing preventable deaths and the difficulty of implementing systemic change against a rigid hierarchical culture, despite eventual post-departure restructures improving safety.
- She transitioned to the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) to learn operations in the Effective Altruism (EA) sector before joining CEA as an Operations Specialist, eventually becoming COO and later CEO.
- At CEA, she focused on building "invisible" infrastructure to prevent scaling bottlenecks, including automated grant application tracking (handling 700+ applications), integrating Google Sheets and Zapier, and establishing a strong organizational culture based on shared values.
- McCauley advocates for the "best argument wins" value at CEA, where project merit is debated on its own merits regardless of the proponent's seniority, a practice she notes is common but often under-implemented in other EA organizations.
- She disagrees with the narrative that operations roles are merely "multipliers" for researchers, arguing that ops is a distinct skill set essential for executing qualitatively difficult tasks (e.g., running EA Global) that would otherwise be impossible or too risky.
- McCauley emphasizes that EA organizations must hire "EA-embedded" staff for operations to navigate unique cultural contexts and risk tolerances, noting a previous failure where outsourcing financial work to a traditional firm resulted in poor alignment with EA goals.
- She asserts that operations roles provide exceptional "career capital," offering transferable skills in organizational management, crisis mitigation, and systems design that are highly valued by startups and future entrepreneurs.
- McCauley counters the misconception that operations requires being "super organized," stating that the role actually demands high creativity, initiative, problem-solving, and the ability to model human behavior rather than just following checklists.
- She advises aspiring ops professionals to start by optimizing their current workflows without waiting for permission, using small successes to build confidence and demonstrate the value of systems thinking.
- The Centre for Effective Altruism is currently hiring for an Events Specialist, UK Operations Specialist, US Operations Specialist, and Project Manager for the Office of the CEO, with applications closing on July 6th.