About Seb
I’ve been excited about talent development since 2016 and have co-founded two non-profits and have worked as a coach. Prior to that, I was a medical doctor and did research at Stanford.
I decided to become a coach because I’ve been fortunate to have some great coaches myself, I love coaching, and I found the evidence compelling.
I live in London and when I’m not working, I love meeting friends, meditating, and, more recently, doing contact improvisation.
Coaching experience
To broaden my horizon and skills and avoid getting stuck in a narrow approach, I’ve experimented with six different coaches.
With mentors and peers that have enabled me to hone my strategies, models, intuitions, and skills.
Client Experience:
I have worked with impact-driven founders/CEOs, researchers (global priorities research, machine learning, and AI policy), community builders and leaders, software developers, project managers, coaches, and people in transitions.
Heroic Coach Class IV:
A 300-day coach program for people who want to become their most heroic selves that has some decent impact evaluation. Good for personal development but disappointing as a coach training program (see my feedback here).
Effective Altruism Infrastructure Grant:
I received a grant from EAIF to work with those who otherwise couldn’t afford it in 2021.
Professional (non-coaching) contributions and decisions:
2018-2020
Biosecurity researcher
I conducted biosecurity at Stanford University, SSI, and the US CDC for 2 years. My research was on mortality monitoring using EuroMOMO because I predicted it’d be useful in pandemics (pre-covid). EuroMOMO became pivotal during Covid-19 – providing authorities like WHO with real-time mortality data (Our publication).
2017-now
Talent development
Next to medical school, I co-founded Effective Altruism Denmark in 2017 and have pursued talent development since
2015-2017
Author and lecturer
During my undergrad, I wrote a book on how to study effectively together with the former memory champion and best-selling author (Oddbjørn By) and was hired to create and teach a course for all medical students at my university. I decided to pivot away because I believed effective altruism and global health were more important (not an easy decision!).
2013-2020
Medical doctor
I got my MD from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Southern Denmark. I originally decided to do medicine as I thought it was the most promising way of understanding and helping people – especially those who needed it the most.
Effective altruism - impartial long-term
altruism and truth-seeking
Effective altruism drastically changed my life (too drastic at first). My worldview, relationships, and professional path changed significantly after encountering Peter Singer in 2015. By effective altruism, I mean both the project (doing the most good for team sentience) and the community and its norms (which is great but has room for improvement). I try to extend my morality, love, and altruism towards people close to us and on the other side of the globe. To humans as well as non-human animals. To those alive today and to the rest of our intergenerational family who has yet to be born (see the Precipice). I spent hundreds of hours (likely overthought some of my decisions, lol) strategizing about my career based on 80,000hours’ admirable advice and cause prioritization – although I think they’ve been too confident and unaware of how much naive and validation-seeking people (like my younger self) over-update on their advice. I try to cultivate excellent truth-seeking standards In myself in particular by cultivating a Scout Mindset: the motivation to see things as they are – not as I wish for them to be. I do weird things like indicating probabilities in my beliefs, practice Bayesian reasoning, and steelman the opposite view. With that said, I still do stupid shit to protect my ego. Additionally, I’ve come to realize that my intuitions and passions are incredibly important (“reason without emotions is impotent”) and I eagerly learn from sources that aren’t related to effective altruism (e..g, secular Buddhism).