Welcome to the confession booth.
This session was recorded at the first gathering of Stella Matutina, a philosophical R&D institute.
Sarah has funded responsible technology from inside a large foundation, and now writes first cheques from a fund of one. Across philanthropy and VC, we ask: what determines how the capital flows?
In this episode, we explore why you need a grant to get a grant, what venture capital understands about failure that philanthropy could learn from, and the difference between a philanthropist and a patron.
We talk about:
Capital as a tool
Fund size as a constraint on what can get funded, in venture and in philanthropy alike
A short history of patronage
The Medicis and the Victorian railroad titans, and what patronage has always bought
Omidyar and Chan Zuckerberg as the first wave of tech philanthropy, and what they inherited from Gates
The weakness in grant formats
How to make space for emergence in funding
How access to the largest funders actually works
Failure, and why philanthropy is afraid of it
What venture does with a failed company, and what the nonprofit world does instead
Philanthropy versus patronage
Where the line falls between the two
Philanthropy as soft power
Our favourite lines from this episode include:
“Remarkable people will produce remarkable things, but you must be open-ended about where that goes.”
“Making failure sexy is one of the most important things to do in philanthropy.”
“Trad philanthropy has often rested upon these really grand theories of change. But the world is so much more emergent than that.”
“Capital is a tool. We have so much more choice than we think.”
About Sarah: Sarah Drinkwater is solo General Partner at Common Magic, an early-stage fund investing in products where community is a core moat. She brings over 15 years of experience leading community and ecosystem efforts at companies like Google, where she led a large-scale physical space for founders, Campus London, as well as advising organizations such as Protocol Labs, Gitcoin, and The Design Museum. Before Common Magic, she led the Tech and Society Solutions Lab at the Omidyar Network, where she funded responsible technology projects.
If you want to go deeper, here are the references from this episode:
Essays:
Nan Ransohoff’s “The Third Wave of American Philanthropy”
Concepts:
Stewart Brand’s Pace layers
For more on “scenius”, check out secondrenaissance.now for a living archive of collective genius
Thank you to Stella Matutina for giving us the opportunity to confide in your space.
