Founders Pledge Interview

[00:00:04] Welcome to Great.com talks with the Founder’s Pledge, and if you haven’t heard of them before, they are a community of entrepreneurs who are finding and funding solutions to global challenges. And it’s a special organization because all of their members have a skin in the game by committing a part of their personal proceeds to charitable causes. And Founders Pledge is also a special organization to great outcome because we have recently committed to making a one hundred thousand dollars donation to fund the organization. And I am here today with David Goldberg, the founder of Founders Pledge. How are you doing today, David?

[00:00:54] I’m great, thanks. We’re really looking forward to chatting and digging into a bit more about what we do. How about for you?

[00:01:01] Beautiful. I am relaxed and excited. And if you’re new here and to this podcast, the purpose of these dialogues is to introduce you to exciting charities and explain what they do in a way that is easy to understand. But since this is a special organization for us, we’re going to dig a little bit deeper and do a longer episode that is going to be in four parts. In part one, you’re going to get an introduction to Founders Pledge and to David’s story in part two, we’re going to look at what is Founders Pledge approach to the covid-19 crisis. And in part three, we are going to going to look at what is Founder’s Pledge strategy for reducing the effects of climate change, and then the fourth and final part, we are going to look at why the Founders Pledge to become the charity of choice for great, what makes them an outstanding giving opportunity. So I say let’s dive into it. David, I made a short introduction of Founders Pledge. Would you be willing to elaborate a little bit on what is it your organization is doing?

[00:02:13] Sure. So Founders Pledge, at its heart is a community, and we know the world is full of communities, they’re a dime a dozen these days. But I wanted Founders Pledge to be a little bit different and I wanted it to be a community that had meaning for all of the members who are part of it. So to join Founders Pledge as a community, you have to be an entrepreneur or an investor, and you have to sign a pledge that says, when I sell my business or receive some liquidity as a result of a secondary sale or some other event, I’m going to donate a percentage of what I make to charities and good social causes. So our community is unique in that it has skin in the game. So it’s a community of entrepreneurs that have all committed to give and are gathering and convening around this notion that we can give effectively an impactful when we make decisions using data and better evidence and more rationality. The Founders Pledged us three things at its core. We have this pledge mechanism that all members have to do to join. Then we have a community program where we convene our members now. Fourteen hundred of them throughout the course of the year. In the time of pandemic, we’ve moved all of our events to digital events, which has been an interesting transition, but it’s been quite, quite a seamless one. And then finally, we provide what I call infrastructure for impact. This is in the first instance, the actual financial infrastructure to donate money anywhere on the planet, regardless of where you’re a tax resident. So we provide sort of the plumbing to move money globally to where the charities are in most need. And then perhaps most important for for our members and perhaps the listeners as well. We have a research team that does charity sourcing, charity betting and due diligence to find the best opportunities for giving at this point in time in the world.

[00:04:11] So if you want to know how to get most effectively to climate change or animal welfare, our research team is always on the hunt for the really best organizations.

[00:04:23] And we’re using data and quantitative metrics and methodologies to really suss out what are the best opportunities. So that’s sort of the encapsulation of it all.

[00:04:32] That was very clear to me when I read on your website that, yes, you have fourteen hundred members, but they have pledged two billion dollars to charities and so far you have fulfilled over four hundred million of those dollars. And you mentioned a couple of things that made this pledge stick out. You have the community building aspect to providing research aspect. What do you think is the most?

[00:05:00] The biggest reason why.

[00:05:03] You have been successful as a charity adviser compared to maybe other organizations.

[00:05:08] It’s a good question. So the number on our website is actually a little bit out of date. So it’s now about two point four billion as of as of last count, as of the latest number of pledges.

[00:05:22] But what makes us really unique is the value proposition is how we approach giving.

[00:05:27] So any any individual be that an entrepreneur or someone who works as an electrician or someone who works as an analyst at a bank approaches their own personal wealth with some measure of rationality, I’d expect. So when you invest your money as an individual, you try to find the best opportunities for return on investment, and that carries through most parts of the average person’s life and even in some cases, the exceptional person’s life. They take the same approach. It’s quite rational, but almost across the board when that one rational person who behaves in a certain way with their own money, in their own returns when it comes to charity, often that rationality goes right out the window and they behave really bizarrely. They behave like an emotional creature as opposed to one that preferences sort of evidence and data and better decision making processes. So we as an organization, our whole goal is to help entrepreneurs do immense good in the world. We’re optimizing in all instances for our members, giving and helping them to make better decisions, ones that are potentially less emotionally driven and whom to give to them, but emotionally centered in that.

[00:06:45] From my perspective, the heart brings us to charity and the head should guide how it actually happens. And so we take the head and we try to give it better data to make better decisions and therefore have more impact in the world. So I would say members join us because they care about maximizing the good that they do. They want it. They want to do great as opposed to just some amount of good. If that makes sense.

[00:07:08] That makes a lot of sense. And that was a very clear and succinct description of giving with the mind or giving with the heart.

[00:07:18] Now.

[00:07:20] I guess the one who is giving one the research, but they also want to feel something and I guess where the community feeling becomes very useful.

[00:07:31] Yeah, so the community is it’s like I said, it’s quite unique so often when you go to an event or you go to a mixer, you’ll show up and there’ll be a bunch of random people. They’re like, OK, who are you? It’s nice to meet you. And maybe you’ll find some interesting people.

[00:07:46] But the thing about Founders Pledge events is every time a person goes to it, they’re in the room. They’re sitting next to another member, another person who’s also pledged they have this this sort of tie that binds. It’s sort of goes more than just surface level. It cuts quite deep. So every person who comes to Founders Pledge event has the same set of values and the same commitment to doing good, even if they’re doing vastly different things with their time in their lives. And so and I guess the other interesting thing about the heart is that the heart and the head needing to be separate, they can be one in the same thing. But the head should guide better decision making processes. So there’s some quite staggering statistics that appeal to our sort of how we process things as quantitative beings, but also really affect how we feel in the center of our chest. They need to be disconnected. But often we’ve seen at least charities really focus on one thing to the exclusion of data, to the exclusion of a more rational approach. And this has led to a shift in the way people think about charity as a purely emotional thing where we don’t want to see any benefit or we don’t want to see any outcomes. My perspective and that of Founders Pledges that we can bring these two things together. We can have an emotionally satisfying and cathartic experience when we give really effectively, because we can understand that giving effectively allows us to do so

much more good for for many more people. It’s the difference between seeing a five percent return on your investment portfolio and perhaps seeing a 50 percent return on your investment portfolio. It’s really like an order of magnitude difference in many cases.

[00:09:25] So not only kind of hard to undermine work together to actually amplify each other. That’s right. I think that’s the recipe you have succeeded with there. So let’s switch a bit and talk about the story of Founders pitch. What made you. Want to start this project in the first place?

[00:09:44] It’s a good question, and I’m going to give you the Founders Pledge stories a little bit my story. So all sort of I’ll try to skim through some of the details. So I will I’m I’m from California, but I live in the U.K. You might be able to tell from my accent that I’m not from Europe. And I was born to a very working class family and decided quite young that money was a really important thing for my life.

[00:10:13] But I’ll sort of skip that piece and sort of focus on in two thousand six, sort of by accident, I started a business in my bedroom and two and a half years later I sold that business and I and I did quite well out of it. And I mentioned that I was I was born and raised in California because this is a really important thing in terms of my journey. So I might take for granted that I was born in California. But if you look at the history of people that have ever been alive, I’m I’m one of the luckiest people ever to have lived because I was born a white man in California, and that is me winning the life lottery without and without any sort of I didn’t deserve it. It was just luck of the draw. And if you look at history and you look at sort of the distribution of people across the planet being born a white man, Western economy is a huge leg up and a huge privilege that we often, as white men of privilege, take for granted.

[00:11:11] And so I always I’m curious to always feel that way. Or did you kind of learn the perspective that you were privileged?

[00:11:18] I learned the perspective. And so the bigger part of the story is I thought I was poor growing up. And I guess we were to an extent compared to the people around me. My parents were working class parents and and we were poor in comparison to the people that I went to school with, elementary school with, but not poor in comparison to the world. And it was only when I sort of traveled and started to see more of what the world actually was like. Did I understand the advantages that I had that were bestowed upon me by no. Right, but by chance, by luck.

[00:11:51] And and it was pure luck that led me to be born a white man and then and then start a business in my bedroom that I sold. So I’m now twenty five. So I didn’t go to university straight out of high school. I decided I wanted to go see a bit of the world. And so I in twenty six I was living in Berlin and this is sort of my path where I sort of got a bit more perspective. I was living in Europe. I was seeing what life was like. I had traveled to Asia and and I sort of realized that I had won the life lottery twice. Now I was born this white guy in California, and I started this business by accident in my bedroom that I sold. And I made I made money out of it.

[00:12:30] And I felt a sense of, I think, a bit of obligation and also a bit of opportunity that I’ve been I’ve been quite lucky. And there’s I believe that there’s a karmic balance in the world, and I probably have some responsibility to do something good with this yuckiness that I’ve been given. And so I thought, I’m going to give it to charity and I’m going to give away a meaningful amount of my of my money to charity. And I thought it was a smart guy. I think I am still. But I found the process of trying to understand and unpick the charity sector to be really frustrating. So I found organizations that were telling me stories when I wanted data and they were giving me broad generalities. When I wanted specifics, they were talking to me about how many people they’ve engaged with or sort of the reach of their social media or how many people have viewed their stories. And it really didn’t tell me anything about what I wanted to understand, which was given my input of money. What is the outcome going to be in the world? What has happened is the result of my input that we wouldn’t have otherwise happened. And there wasn’t an organization that I talked to that could tell me this. And that to me was worrying because I tried really hard to find it. They were giving me stories and narratives when I wanted data in numbers.

[00:13:47] And so I thought I shouldn’t rush to a decision and waste money. I shouldn’t like a pile of cash on fire and hope that the smoke does something good for the world. I should be more strategic with it. And so I decided at this point I would go to university. So that set me on a path that took me to the UK where I was working on a PhD. I was about a year and a half in and I got quite a feat. Is that as the saying goes, it’s like I didn’t want to sit and think for another four or five years. I wanted to go do. And this is sort of how the Founders story starts. I was I joined a foundation that was aimed at supporting social entrepreneurs and helping them to be more commercially viable. And it was a really beautiful idea that I still think is that I still think has merit. But at the time this is in twenty twelve, it just didn’t work. She doesn’t she doesn’t end of 2012, the beginning of 2013. It just didn’t work. So we were trying to help these socially minded. Entrepreneurs better commercially, and I thought we’re approaching this

backwards, so if you flip the equation on its head, maybe I can help really great commercial entrepreneurs to be more social. And maybe I could build the thing that I wanted when I sold my business, which was data for better decision making when it comes to charity, and then at the same time, the thing that I that I turns out that I really needed when I was growing my business, which is a community of people who are on the same path, on the same journey.

[00:15:13] And so for me at least, and I think for many of the people that I’ve talked to, being an entrepreneur is like a really scary thing. It’s very lonely. It’s really hard. I mean, I know it’s a very sexy thing to do these days. And everyone wants to start the next billion dollar business to have the next unicorn. But really, entrepreneurs are magicians. And and most of the time, the magic doesn’t work. Right. So it’s starting something out of nothing. It’s a very lonely journey and occasionally works. And ninety five percent of the time that it doesn’t. But the five percent of the time that it does, it works well and in some cases really well. You become really wealthy. And so my thinking was, I’ll build this community around purpose, around values, and I’ll help. I’ll help the members make better decisions using data. And so that’s how Founders Pledge started. And that was in. Two thousand I started thinking about in twenty fourteen, and I launched it in twenty fifteen.

[00:16:14] It’s very interesting to hear a story where I guess the idea built up and gained momentum over years and years and years, and what I also hear and can imagine what it’s like in this community is that you’re not only helping each other doing vice chaired investments, you’re also creating an environment where people can really trust each other and collaborate. I guess no one wants to screw another community member over or and I guess they really want to help each other out in the business as well.

[00:16:44] That’s right. Yeah. I mean, so it’s a safe space for people to be their true selves and and share issues, some of which are related to their personal lives, some of which are related to their business struggles. I mean, we’ve seen covid really sort of meaningfully affects the startup sector at the same time meaningfully affect the nonprofit sector. So it’s been a really interesting conversation over the course of the last months to see how entrepreneurs have really leaned into these exceptional times to be better leaders, better CEOs, builds different companies and be vulnerable with each other, which I think is really heartening to see.

[00:17:26] I wish we had more time to dive into that statement, but this was such a perfect bridge to part two of this podcast, which is founder’s Pledge approach to covid-19. Do you have kind of a unified idea? I know you have a covid-19 Global Impact and Innovation Fund. Would you please tell me about the fund?

[00:17:48] Yes, I want to start by telling you about something that’s not the fun, though, but it sort of has a very obvious bearing on on it. So our research team, their job is to find the best giving opportunities that exists, given what the world actually looks like at any one point in time. So often when we do research, we’re trying to find organizations that are affecting a really large number of people, the organizations that are working in areas that have tractable solutions and organizations that are working in areas that have historically been neglected. So it’s a really important point, this neglected piece, because impact isn’t zero sum. And so what I mean by that is impact. If you do impact on me personally, it increases the global the global impact that happens. It’s not removing the impact that I can do. So it’s it’s positive sum rather than zero sum. And when it comes to investing, if you make an investment in a startup, it prevents me from making an investment. It is zero sum. So it’s not it’s not additional. So for the charity sector, we’re trying to find on the margin.

[00:19:00] So given what everyone else is already doing, the best funding opportunities for that for our next dollar or pound or euro. So when we recommend charities, we’re often not recommending the best charities in the world because the best charities in the world are often already fully funded. But we’re recommending the best charities in the world, given what the rest of the funding situation already looks like. So it matters because on the margin, how people fund things sort of affects the nature of the whole. So I say that because when you think about covid in this pandemic, that is really stops the world in its tracks. The quantum of capital at play is almost hard to wrap a normal brain around. And so the US government, as has allocated two trillion dollars to covid response trillion with a T and it’s a it’s a huge amount of money. And philanthropists in the run up or so since Cofidis unfolded have have committed nine and a half billion dollars. So given given this these vast sums of capital at play, how can any one person or even an organization like ours have an impact?

[00:20:15] So I want to go back again a little further and say that our research team’s job is to find great opportunities. And in January of 2013, we published a research report on existential risks. We put it on our website and it’s quite a long report and we tend to to write more than as opposed to less. And one of the areas that we explored, one of the recommendations was pandemic preparedness. So in January of 2013, Splodge Research Team published a research report that highlighted pandemic preparedness as an area in need of more philanthropic investment by by

by our community of philanthropists, namely because of supply chain bottlenecks and issues with dealing with. A type of event like this one, so we’ve been talking about pandemics and pandemic preparedness and sort of preparing for these big potentially low risk or low probability, high risk events for a long time. So our approach has been we’ve leaned into our expertise in this area. We’ve been thinking about it for two years. And we have been funding organizations working on pandemic preparedness since January of twenty nineteen historically. And we’ve approached charities, sort of charity analysis and sort of charity betting with a top down approach. I mentioned we look for scale, we look for tractability, and then we look for neglected this. And this makes sense in a normal situation. But when we’re dealing with covid, our strategy has been a little bit different. It’s been different because of the quantum of capital that I mentioned and the space is very large. So there’s an enormous number of funding opportunities to consider that spanned the entire planet. And it’s also moving really quickly such that if we were like the first money into something, it’s likely that we would be displacing someone else who otherwise would have given. So we’ve taken a let’s sort of go a little bit slower than normal and understand what the funding landscape is before we start to deploy capital.

[00:22:28] So we have.

[00:22:32] We’ve looked into organizations that haven’t received funding, given the first sort of allocations of capital, and then we’ve tried to find the ones that are going to have the biggest leverage points that are going to affect the way policies or governments or hospitals or medical responses deal with issues. So we’re looking at really sort of time sensitive, potentially impactful funding opportunities that are being neglected by other givers and governments. And then we’re funding those. Does that make sense, yes.

[00:23:03] So an example of that then could be an organization that is doing something a little bit different, a little bit more risky. So a government wouldn’t want to fund them, and they are.

[00:23:15] Not maybe the most attractive cost to the everyday donor, so the one that they’re not going to be very they’re not going to be very sexy, so it’s not so sexy providing not providing PPE because that’s something that the public is really happy to give to. So our money can be smarter than than just sort of giving to things that are really obvious.

[00:23:37] And then what remains is only private philanthropists that are willing to take this maybe more high risk, high reward courses that are not so sexy because they really want the impact.

[00:23:50] So so we’ve been funding for a long time, the Johns Hopkins Center for the Center for Health Security, which is, as you might know from the Johns Hopkins University, they have got the coronavirus tracker dashboard and they’re really sort of at the cutting edge of research into pandemic preparedness. We’ve been funding the Stanford Biosecurity Initiative.

[00:24:13] We’ve been funding the Center for Global Development, which is doing economic research and policy around how do we deal with, along the long run ramifications of covid on on on the economies of the world. And more recently, we’ve started to shift our focus away from a high income context and have instead been focusing on low and middle income countries that are going to be sort of disproportionately affected by this pandemic compared to sort of the global north and high income countries that have social safety nets that have really well functioning medical systems. And the same sort of problems that we faced in in Western Europe and in North America are going to be faced by countries in sub-Saharan Africa, in South and Central America, except they’re going to be much more severe because of the sort of.

[00:25:05] Perhaps less sophisticated infrastructure or.

[00:25:11] Or less funding that’s being put out there by the government, so there’s a host of reasons why it makes sense to focus on low and middle income countries at this point, low and middle income countries.

[00:25:23] Now, sometimes a course gets donations in proportion to how much to cost us in the media. Everything I hear in media is covid-19 to me as a giver might then be concerned. But OK, is this discourse already receiving so much funding that maybe I shouldn’t put any money at all into it? Maybe I should keep focusing on malaria or whatever the regular recommendations are? What would you say to someone having those thoughts?

[00:25:51] I feel like you’re you’re teasing up for like a home run answer here. So I think that. So thank you. We did we didn’t

plan this. By the way, I think that that’s a really smart perspective. So we’ve also been as we’ve been encouraging people to give into our fund rather than give directly themselves to organizations that are emotionally appealing to them. We’ve also been encouraging people to double down on the causes that they’ve been supporting and that they really care about, because that is absorbing all of the oxygen in the room right now. And if all and if the majority of global philanthropy is now going to covid response, it means it’s being displaced from other other places.

[00:26:35] So the nine and a half billion dollars that I mentioned earlier that’s being that’s being committed by philanthropists is a displacement from their existing programmatic work, which means that organizations that had historically been funded with that nine and a half billion dollar allocation are perhaps no longer going to be funded. So here we see this is, again, a zero sum situation. So most foundations and philanthropists allocate an amount of money and then deploy that over the course of the year if their allocation changes, i.e., it’s going away from the things that they have historically done and going towards something else. It means that what they’ve historically funded goes is sort of left out in the cold. So if you’re a donor that has been funding something really high impact and really meaningful to you for a while, I would really encourage you to continue funding that and and sort of and not shy away from it. Many of our many of our sort of our members who have some liquidity and money to give away have asked us what they think, what we think they should do.

[00:27:42] And and often it’s been some allocation towards covid because we see some opportunities that are quite good. But on the whole, let’s stay the course and not allow ourselves to become distracted by the really pressing issues that we’ll still continue to face. I mean, namely climate change. Right. So there’s been a lot of interesting social media, at least on my feeds, about maybe this is Mother Earth sort of pressing pause on humanity’s expansion and sort of greenhouse gas emissions. And we’ve seen nature returning to places that it hasn’t previously been. And we’ve seen air pollution index is the best that they’ve been in measurable record.

[00:28:24] But what you wouldn’t know is that despite all of the slowdown in sort of emissions and people out in the world, the change to the.

[00:28:38] The output we have, so I’m just pulling up a statistic.

[00:28:44] Right.

[00:28:45] I’m going to read it because it’s really important, even in a situation that we have today, where economic activity comes to a near standstill, as it has, you can consider this like a really ideal time to see what would happen if we just stopped doing most of what we were doing.

[00:29:02] Day to day, emissions have only gone down by less than 10 percent. Wow, isn’t that crazy? So despite the fact that the world has come to a stop, emissions have only gone down by less than 10 percent. And what that tells me is that. Despite this unprecedented moment in history, it’s still not enough to deal with the problem that we have on our doorstep. It’s like we have a big wave.

[00:29:29] There’s a big wave. And we’re out in the water surfing and covid big. It’s like a big it’s a big Hawaii wave. Right. And it’s hard to surf, but right behind it is a tsunami. And the tsunami is going to wipe out everything. And that tsunami is climate change. It’s not going away. It’s just gotten more and more important. And in the same token, so we can think about that in terms of climate change, but we can also think about it in terms of malaria and and how the disease burden in low and middle income countries is not actually going to shift. It’s going to increase as a result of cocaine related complications. So funding the stuff that’s really high impact like malaria and bed nets is more important than ever. Continuing to have a commitment to climate change is more important than ever.

[00:30:11] And so at Founders Pledge, we take that. We take a perspective that we should aim to do the most good that we can. Given given the hand that we’re dealt and the people that we support and the most good is not necessarily getting distracted by the sort of the near-term issues that we face, addressing them proportionally with an eye to, here’s what the rest of the world looks like and what the future is going to hold for us.

[00:30:39] I see, and this is such a, again, helpful Segway into the next segment of climate change, and I have to ask if it’s been reduced by only 10 percent, how is that possible when people don’t fly, where people don’t take cars? I would have guessed that number to be bigger. Am I having a misconception of where all the pollution is? Yes. Emissions is coming from.

[00:31:04] Yes, in essence, that’s correct. So travel represents a portion of it. But there’s you know, there’s huge industries that have not necessarily slowed down. Energy consumption is markedly different. We still are eating food in the same way that we were previously, perhaps more so in some cases, because we’re not, you know, work home. And there’s just there’s food in the other room and you can eat it whenever you want.

[00:31:33] So.

[00:31:36] We wrote a research report on this. It’s on our website, you can go there and look at it, it gets into some specifics about how sort of emissions breakdown and even more recently than our our long term than our big report on climate change. We’ve done a lifestyle report on sort of how individuals behaviors have a bearing on climate change or emissions. And that’s quite interesting as well. I won’t spoil it. Maybe maybe we’ll get there. But it’s worth it’s worth looking at.

[00:32:03] Maybe we’ll get there. So what I take with them is that the very hope I’ve had that the coroner will slow down climate change was. Too optimistic, and that makes me even more eager to go into part three of this podcast where we’re going to talk about the Fed’s approach to climate change, because now I really want to do something about this. So what is your approach to combating climate change?

[00:32:30] So our goal is basically to accelerate and strengthen climate action by identifying, promoting and funding really high impact charities, making a quantifiable difference on climate. So our research has been featured in a lot of fun news outlets and of course, great follows it as well. And it’s a sort of maybe all sort of talk through the approach we looked at to different potential paths. The first was advocacy for energy innovation in neglected technologies, and the second was advocacy for setting up mechanisms to protect the world’s tropical rainforest. So you can think about climate change as a balance between our sort of emissions, like our output as a society, and then the planet’s sort of caring capacity and ability to absorb those outputs such that it doesn’t go into the atmosphere. And that sort of that’s that that’s what potentially causes climate change. So you have outputs on one hand and sort of inputs on the other. The inputs like what you can absorb from the atmosphere are carbon sinks. So that’s in most cases what you consider trees. So there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of the role of planting new trees. I think that’s probably right. Trees are pretty, pretty important in planting trees is, of course, a good thing to do, but perhaps more importantly, is just not destroying the existing rainforest that we currently have. So I think we should plant trees, but we should also stop deforestation at the rate in which we’re doing, because the hardwood rainforests of the planet are huge carbon sinks that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. And so they’re offsetting in some respect. What what are the emissions coming out of humanity on the other end as we seek to offset, we should also seek not to release more carbon into the atmosphere by defaulting and reducing our planet’s carrying capacity for carbon carbon sinks. So that’s sort of the second approach. And the first approaches, like how do we how do we think about our emissions and our outputs differently?

[00:34:39] And so that’s how we generate and how we distribute energy in a meaningful respect.

[00:34:47] So our two organizations that that we think are really exceptional, MySpace, are focusing, on one hand, advocacy for energy, innovation and policy and the other on protecting the world’s tropical rainforests.

[00:35:02] Beautiful, and we have made a longer interview with one of those organizations called the Clean Air Task Force, and if you haven’t seen that, I highly recommend that you will check it out.

[00:35:14] There are top charity in the space, by the way.

[00:35:16] We think they’re the top charity. OK, so if you had 100 hundred dollars to donate to any climate change course, where would you put that and how would you divide us?

[00:35:25] Clean Air Task Force one hundred percent of the Clean Air Task Force.

[00:35:28] All right. Interesting. Now, if you had 100 hundred dollars to put in any course, just not climate change, how would you divide that one hundred dollars?

[00:35:40] That’s a really good question. So. I’ll tell you what I would do and then I’ll and then I’ll sort of sort of layer on

another set of considerations, the amount of money matters. What do you think about distribution? So for one hundred dollars, I would probably give to. Yeah, I probably give it to the Clean Air Task Force still, if you increase that amount of money and you say I have a thousand dollars or one hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars, then the allocations change. One hundred dollars can do something, but a million dollars can do potentially something much larger. And as a result, then I would probably break it down into different buckets. And within those buckets I would optimize for different things. And it’s different again. Yet if you go another layer up or another sort of two orders of magnitude and go from a million dollars to one hundred nine dollars. It changes again, so every sort of order of magnitude difference and you’re giving. A different set of considerations comes into play.

[00:36:48] And.

[00:36:49] That differentiation highlights what I suspect the members of your community see as the value that you’re providing here, because this research would be nearly impossible to do by them alone.

[00:37:01] Yeah, it would be impossible for them to do by them alone. And it also would be really difficult to balance all of the things that people. So the lived experience of a person. Right. So your lived experience is different than mine. It’s different than anyone else who’s listening. They all have their own lived experience. And I think what we do quite well is understand who people are and not just people, but also their partners and their families, and then help them to make better decisions, given the values that they hold as individuals and given the sort of quantum of capital at play.

[00:37:32] And if someone is giving a million dollars and they have a set of values that are X, Y and Z, it’s going to be different than different than how we advise someone who has one hundred million dollars and whose values are A, B and C..

[00:37:47] So like at every stage, it’s this really interesting interplay in the same way that, like your asset manager, when you have an investment strategy, says, we’re going to put a little bit here, we’re going to do a little bit here. We’re going to do a big chunk there, and we’re going to do another piece there. And then we’re going to do something that’s really high risk. But if it works, then it’s going to make a lot of money. So it’s a diversified portfolio.

[00:38:09] And in the same way that you have a diversified portfolio with your investments, you should have a diversified portfolio with your charity because it’s the same thing. You have an input of money and you have an output of something that happens in the world. As a result, when you invest for returns, it’s you get more money. That’s good. When you invest for charity, it’s not more money, but it’s saving people’s lives, which is maybe the more important thing.

[00:38:34] But yet we we often think about it in totally different terms and optimize for totally different things. So it’s an interesting balance and one that we are, I think, quite good at helping people to navigate.

[00:38:46] I love how you say that it’s helping to save people’s lives and. My guess is that some people, including myself in the past, have thought of making money, something I do with utmost seriousness and giving money is something that is more like a hobby. And I hope the one listening to this episode takes with them that there should be a similar approach to charity and investments.

[00:39:13] Absolutely. And I’ll tell you why we should have a similar approach because so I’ll give you an example of a charity that is really well evidenced and really well proven.

[00:39:22] And we know factually and counter factually that what this charity does for an amount of money.

[00:39:32] So the Against Malaria Foundation provides bed nets to to the ultra poor who living across the global south, low and middle income countries, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Malaria is a is a pretty nasty mosquito borne virus that that is the largest killer of children under five on the planet. And and we know that giving to the Against Malaria Foundation or the Malaria Consortium will save the life of a child for about two thousand dollars. So there’s a lot of media that you can save. It can save a child for five pounds, give five pounds and provide food for a year. It’s really misleading advertising. So like what we think is the best charity in the world if you want to save people’s lives today is the Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium. It’s about two thousand dollars to save a life.

[00:40:23] So here’s the difference. If you are giving away a percentage of your salary, 10 percent of your salary every year,

and let’s assume someone has a median income of fifty thousand dollars, fifty thousand pounds, that means they’re going to give away five thousand dollars per year. If you approach this as a hobby, as a way to have fun, you’re making decisions that are potentially saving people’s lives or not saving.

[00:40:49] So if you take that five thousand dollars and you give it to something that makes you feel really good but doesn’t really, you know, we think do a huge amount, maybe maybe you see some people sort of, you know, have some benefit. But you’re also making a decision not to fund something else. And if not, not something else is the Against Malaria Foundation you’re preventing to people.

[00:41:11] So you’re deciding to allow two people to die, die that you would otherwise be able to save for five thousand dollars.

[00:41:17] And that’s that’s a big tradeoff. And it’s something that we don’t think about when we when we think about charity. And because and it’s a really uncomfortable thing to consider, it is uncomfortable.

[00:41:27] I think many people don’t want to think of it that way.

[00:41:31] And the desires of people I totally respect and maybe someone’s values, I don’t. Saving lives isn’t super important to me. I’d rather improve the quality of people’s lives. And that’s an equally fair statement or in world view to have.

[00:41:46] But if you saw a child drowning in a lake and you were walking along that lake with your dog, without question, I know that you and almost everyone who’s listening here on this on this podcast would drop let it go.

[00:41:59] The dogs drop what they were doing and jump into the lake and swim to save this child, unless they, of course, didn’t know how to swim and they’d call someone to go do it. But if given the choice between saving someone’s life and not saving it by taking action, you would save a life. I know that to be the fact with almost all the people that I’ve ever encountered in my entire life, I would expect probably similarly for you. So if you’re willing to jump into a lake and ruin your your iPhone, if it’s not waterproof and ruin your clothes and potentially, like, you know, all of the all of the costs associated with destroyed clothes and maybe your watch isn’t waterproof, but you’d save that life without thinking because it’s the right thing to do.

[00:42:42] And yet we make decisions about how we give in ways that don’t actually consider the full nature of the trade offs because it’s uncomfortable, it being uncomfortable does not prevent you from jumping in the lake and being uncomfortable should not prevent you from considering the implications of your decisions on changing the world in a meaningful way. And that’s a really important thing that I think people should really it’s uncomfortable, but it’s worth listening into to really understand. What is your philosophy of what’s your worldview, how do you approach things because it matters ultimately.

[00:43:14] I appreciate.

[00:43:16] That stories like the one you just described is being shared, because I think it’s important to make those decisions more visual and more real. Now, let’s switch to the fourth and final part of this podcast, that is how we because I asked what you would do with 100 dollars and Great has donated 100000 dollars to the Founders Pledge. So in this last hour, you’re welcome. And in this final part, I would like to know what is Founders Pledge going to do with this money?

[00:43:53] Yeah, it’s a good question.

[00:43:55] So Founders Pledge is funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and philanthropists and foundations and a couple of corporate partners as well. So we’re really thrilled that GREAT has decided to fund us. And you’re quite good company. Some of our other corporate Founders include organizations like Coulis, which are a great global law firm that support us, and organizations like Silicon Valley Bank. But we’re unique in the world and that we’ve decided to set the right set of incentives for our members and for ourselves. So you might expect an organization like us to charge for what we do. So if someone wants to sort of take advantage of Founders Pledge research and sort of go through this whole process with us, you might expect us to say, OK, we’re going to do this for you, but we’re going to charge you a fee because we’re providing service and for service. We want feedback. And we’ve decided not to

not to sort of undertake this type of funding model. And instead, we operate what’s called one hundred percent model. So our members, when they utilize us one hundred percent of what they end up giving, goes through to the charities of their choice. We don’t charge any we’re entirely free or we’re entirely zero cost for them.

[00:45:10] It doesn’t mean that we’re free and we can do this because we have really generous operational supporters like great and like our other donors who believe that it’s really important to fund the plumbing and the infrastructure of this sector. And it’s really important that the people who are making decisions about how to allocate, in some cases, really large quantities of resources to be to be as as effectively distributed as possible. So by not charging people, we have a different relationship with them. We’re optimizing for one thing and one thing only, we’re not optimizing for their their happiness or optimizing for their impact, and because we don’t charge anything, we’re able to approach this really objectively and we’re able to tell people when we think they’re making bad decisions or when we think they should maybe consider something else. You know how the saying goes. The customer is always right. That’s not really true in our case. The customer is often is often wrong. And it’s our job to point out how they’re wrong and help them to make better decisions. So because we’re not taking money from them, we can we can play a much more objective and a much more helpful role for them and how they make decisions about the allocation of wealth.

[00:46:23] Now, it’s not always comfortable, as we’ve just sort of we’ve highlighted this interesting sort of tradeoff that you make when you decide to do one thing as opposed to something else. This is the same thing when we’re dealing with our members, except it’s orders larger. So when you’re deciding how to give away half a million dollars, you’re talking about a meaningful number of people you could save or a meaningful amount of good. You can do more harm. You could reduce or greenhouse gases. You can prevent it from being emitted. So it’s tough tradeoffs. And why great for us is because we’re on sort of an impact multiplier on that dollar. So compared to the costs that we that we cost us as an organization to run, we are doing sort of orders of magnitude more good in helping people to give better as a result. So we’re quite a high leverage opportunity to give to and sort of if you think about our operational costs to date, it’s like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total amount of money that’s been donated, sort of like something like 50 times more money has been donated than we’ve cost to run.

[00:47:34] That is quite a good ratio. This whole conversation has been, for me, both inspiring and enlightening. I’ve learned a lot of things about a covid-19 approach and how to maybe still look into climate change to learn about your story and learn about the general approach to Founders Pledge have. And I might I suspect that someone having listened, been listening this far, feels quite excited about your course and the passion and energy that you have speaking about the course. And maybe they want to be involved somehow. Maybe they want to help out, maybe they want to do what they can do to do good in the world. What would you suggest that someone can do if they want to help you in some way?

[00:48:21] That’s a good question. So our website has a lot of resource. Specifically, our blog is being updated on a pretty regular basis with thoughts from our research team. We’re really so like I represent our research team. Their views, these aren’t these aren’t necessarily like they’re my words and and sort of.

[00:48:39] But but ultimately, the research is being done by a much smarter and more well informed group of people. And you can hear from them directly in hour on our blog. And you can read our longer research reports on our website, as well as the Founders Pledge dot com slash research. And then there’s also a tab for our blog there. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re growing a business and you want to get involved, we’d love to have you join us. It’s really easy. The only thing you need to do is pledge you can do that on our website as well, or by reaching out to me directly. And you can read my email address is pretty simple. It’s David at Founders Pledge dot com. And if you’re interested in in giving, maybe you’re not an entrepreneur, but you’re listening and you and you run a foundation or a corporate foundation or your family or philanthropists and you want to work with us. We’d love to chat with you. You should also email me again, David, underexploited dot com. And yeah, I think that’s I think that’s probably it. We’re currently not hiring, but volunteers are are sometimes really useful.

[00:49:43] I don’t know if there’s anything currently that we’re looking for at the moment, but there might be at some point in the future. So David at Founders by Dotcom were founderspledge.com. They’ll end up at the right place.

[00:49:57] Beautiful. Go and help out David at founderspledge.com or share this podcast to someone you think might help out. Dave David, the Founders Pledge dot com David. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I really enjoyed this conversation. I wish you a wonderful day and thanks email.

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