3 formulae for venture philanthropy

3 formulae for venture philanthropy TL; DR – This piece proposes 3 formulae for anyone allocating capital for social return: how much impact to expect, how likely you are to get it, and whether it would have happened anyway. Use the formulae to stretch and deepen your thinking, rather than replacing it. Two things are true about the world right now: There’s more money around than ever before (albeit unevenly distributed). There’s a lot of things that need fixing. We urgently need to direct all that capital effectively, to fix problems and make the world a better place. How do we do it? One approach is funding new ideas — basically treating philanthropic capital like venture capital to seed novel, impactful solutions (sometimes called ‘venture philanthropy’ or ‘catalytic capital’. I’m biased towards this, as I’ve been doing it for almost a decade. But it’s hard work. There’s deep technical complexity in introducing new ideas to new places, where uncertainty is high. This piece proposes…