A tighter focus means a bigger impact
Our approach is based on three basic values: people, focus, and scale.
Our principles
Principles are more important than rules to guide culture. We operate by a series of principles written by our team in 2020 and first published in early 2021. We start by finding the right people, bringing them together into networks, and focusing their talent on specific challenges. Then we help them access the tools and resources they need to prove out and scale ideas that make the world better.
People
We bet on human ingenuity, taking risks others can’t.
When faced with a choice between supporting what’s already been tried or placing a bet on brilliant people, we take the risk and take it early.
We put others’ interests ahead of our own.
Service is our business, and people are our purpose. Public benefit is our north star.
We can and must support both equity and exceptionality at the same time.
We favor supporting people who have experimental ideas, who have been overlooked or excluded, or who do not have a track record—from any background, anywhere in the world.
Everything we do outside, we also do inside.
All our principles also apply to ourselves; people are ends, not means.
Focus
We must always balance between helping people more and helping people now.
Every bet must be clear on the goal. As we grow, we will work on a smaller number of larger initiatives to achieve those goals.
We drive excellence by challenging everything.
We compete everything, often in multiple rounds—programs to launch, initiatives to fund, people to hire, partners to engage.
We celebrate learning no matter what the lesson.
We reward information and insight—whether from success or failure—to improve our work and others’.
Scale
We design for substantial growth from the outset and double down on what works.
Scale is a plan, not only a result.
We favor working together with others and building partnerships even at the “cost” of credit.
Credit is free, infinite, and less important than significant impact.
We use all our tools to help solve a problem.
Speed and flexibility matter—so we prize agility and make diverse types of capital available to the efforts we support in order to maximize the potential for bigger and faster results.
Our method
We don’t believe there’s only one solution to every problem, we believe there are three:
Building networks of talent
We are working to create the best, largest, and most persistent network of exceptional people ready to make the world better together. Too many brilliant people with breakthrough ideas are never found, recognized, or given a voice. We aim to change that.
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Mobilizing talent to solve hard problems
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. We aren’t going to prove out breakthrough ideas by leaving brilliant people to work alone and build all their tools from scratch.
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Creating platforms for scale
We are advancing “common goods for common good” -- open-source data, systems, equipment, and partnerships to help everyone be better. With basic R&D spending at historic lows, now more than ever we need investment in effective scaling platforms to help the best ideas and research efforts to grow and replicate.
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