Our Mission
We bet early on exceptional people making the world better.
We connect the brightest minds everywhere with opportunities to solve the world's hardest problems, together
- People with new insight to solve hard problems in science and society
- People who need new opportunities for their ideas to be heard, or to access modern tools and technology
- People who want to join together in a network of the sharpest minds to make more of a difference to more people, in more places
Exceptional people make the world better
The market for talent is broken. If we want to solve the hardest problems in science and society, we must change the way in which the most exceptional people everywhere prove out their ideas.
Through the power of example we inspire others with more resources, including government and business, to scale efforts that improve people’s lives. In this sense, we are engineering possibility.
Our method aims to overcome three of the biggest failures that keep the brightest minds today from solving the hardest problems together and at scale:
People
Today, many brilliant people with promising ideas are never found or not given a chance in the first place. We are working to create the best, largest, and most persistent network of exceptional talent globally and to match it to opportunity to serve others.
Focus
We aren’t going to prove our breakthrough ideas by leaving brilliant people to work alone and to build all their tools from scratch. To increase the chances of success, we crowd in talent from our network toward specific problems and help them to work across fields and organizations for better results—building teams and institutions that are often both virtual and interdisciplinary.
Scale
With basic R&D spending at historic lows, there are few effective scaling platforms to help the best ideas and research efforts to grow and replicate. We are advancing “common goods for common good”—open-source data, systems, equipment, and partnerships to help everyone.
Our people are our greatest asset
We are a diverse team of people who are unafraid of new ideas. We imagine and we build. We work every day to unlock personal passion, deliver a sense of purpose, and make the world better in new and meaningful ways.
Engineering possibility
Our method makes us unique. As a venture facility for public benefit founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, we create public value from private philanthropy through risk transfer—enabling brilliant people in networks to solve hard problems in science and society by connecting across fields, competing and challenging ideas, bringing multiple types of capital to bear, and applying science and technology thoughtfully through tools such as AI.
Through the power of example we inspire others with more resources, including government and business, to scale efforts that improve people’s lives. In this sense, we are engineering possibility.
How we work
