The founders of Silicon Valley’s technology companies, many of whom have amassed huge fortunes at a young age, tend to look at their philanthropic giving much as they do their companies: They study a problem, explore a number of ways to attack it and eventually invest heavily to scale up the ideas they think will be winners…
When Kendra Brooks left her low-income neighborhood in north Philadelphia last month and flew to the Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she did so on the dime of a Facebook Inc. co-founder.
In the private sector, no one thinks that great investments are easy to find. A 2010 study found that the median private equity or venture capital fund requires more than three investment team members reviewing 80 companies for a year to close a single transaction. For-profit investors who find one truly great deal per year are considered stars in the field. Recently, I spent the day with the team at Battery Ventures.
Sitting behind a laptop affixed with a decal of a child reaching for an apple, an illustration from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Cari Tuna quips about endowing a Tuna Room in the Bass Library at Yale University, her alma mater. But it’s unlikely any of the fortune that she and her husband, Facebook co- founder Dustin Moskovitz, command — estimated by Forbes at more than $9 billion — will ever be used to name a building.
In a video interview, Cari Tuna tells Stephen Foley she is looking for philanthropic causes that others have overlooked.
Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth. They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes. The question was how.
Effective altruism is still a niche movement, made up primarily of a small number of philosophers, techies, and financiers who structure their work or their giving—or both—to achieve the most good possible. But it’s a niche that happens to include a young couple who may eventually give away billions of dollars. Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife, Cari Tuna, are organizing their foundation, Good Ventures, to adopt the principles of effective altruism.
Some advice for nonprofits that want a piece of the Facebook fortune: Get yourself on GiveWell‘s list of effective charities. Good Ventures, the new foundation started by the 27-year-old Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, is beginning to give away its money to nonprofits recommended by the charity-evaluation group.
When you pair America’s richest man, world-famous Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, with America’s youngest billionaire, little-known Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, affinities quickly emerge. Both went to Harvard. Both dropped out to start tech companies. Both found fabulous success early in life. And both spend a lot of time pondering how to give their fortunes away.
