Support for the fund includes a $60 million investment from Moskovitz and Tuna’s Good Ventures foundation, with matching support from Stripe founder Patrick Collison and other donors. Good Ventures activities are closely associated with the effective altruism movement, which advocates for a cost-benefit approach to philanthropy in order to produce the greatest good. Open Philanthropy—which supports the Yes In My Backyard housing development movement—identifies governmental regulation and “institutional sclerosis” as the key drivers of scarcity, rising costs, slow economic growth, and stifled innovation.
A GiveDirectly cash transfer recipient. Good Ventures will match up to $5 million in donations to GiveDirectly this giving season. (Photo courtesy of GiveDirectly)
FOR RELEASE: December 3, 2013
Media Contact, Good Ventures: Kirk Brown, 415.577.3561, [email protected]
Media Contact, GiveDirectly: Joy Sun, 617.669.9977, [email protected]
Media Contact, GiveWell: Elie Hassenfeld, 646.233.2035, [email protected]
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Good Ventures today announced $5 million in matching funds for donations made to GiveDirectly from December 3, 2013 through January 31, 2014. All donations to GiveDirectly during the period, up to $100,000 per donor, will be counted toward the match. The funds are intended to help GiveDirectly attract new donors and reach its goal of transferring tens of millions of dollars to extremely poor households in developing countries over the next few years.
“Supporting GiveDirectly is an excellent opportunity to help empower extremely poor people to improve their lives,” said Good Ventures President Cari Tuna. “The GiveDirectly team is outstanding, and their tool — unrestricted cash transfers — has the potential to become a new standard of comparison for efforts to help the global poor.”
“We’re building a platform to work at massive scale,” said GiveDirectly Co-Founder and President Paul Niehaus. “This matching grant is an opportunity to push that platform to the next level, while giving thousands of poor families the resources to transform their lives in the process. It also underscores the value of rigorous and transparent evaluation of impact.”
The matching funds for GiveDirectly are part of a series of grants made by Good Ventures in recognition of GiveWell’s charity recommendations for 2013. Other grants included $2 million in unrestricted support to GiveDirectly (in addition to the matching funds), $1.5 million to the Deworm the World Initiative, and $750,000 to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. Detailed reviews of the charities can be found at www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities.
About Good Ventures
Good Ventures (www.goodventures.org) is a philanthropic foundation whose mission is to help humanity thrive. The foundation was created by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz in 2011, and its initial grantmaking has focused on global health and development and increasing the impact of philanthropy by encouraging effectiveness and transparency across the social sector.
About GiveDirectly
GiveDirectly (www.givedirectly.org) allows governments, foundations and individual donors to make direct cash transfers to the extreme poor — securely, efficiently and transparently. GiveDirectly’s platform uses the latest technology to locate recipients, integrate them into electronic payments systems and monitor transfers end-to-end. GiveDirectly charges the full cost of delivering this service and nothing more.
GiveWell (www.givewell.org) is a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of its analysis to help donors decide where to give. For most of its history, GiveWell has focused on identifying charities with strong evidence of impact and quantifiable cost-effectiveness. Now, GiveWell is exploring the full range of ways that a major philanthropist can have an impact.
Image from a Vicarious software visualizer. (Image courtesy of Vicarious)
UNION CITY, CA — August 21, 2012 — Vicarious, an artificial intelligence research company, today announced a $15M Series A round of financing led by Good Ventures LLC, a for-profit investment firm founded by Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz that will donate all of its earnings to the Good Ventures Foundation. Also participating in the round are veteran institutional investors Founders Fund and Open Field Capital, as well as Vicarious angel investors Steve Brown and Zarco Investment Group.
Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Since its launch in February 2011, the company has developed a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is Vicarious’ key innovation: a new computational paradigm called the Recursive Cortical Network™. The research at Vicarious is expected to have broad implications for robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search, and many other fields.
“The technology that Vicarious is developing has the potential to improve all lives and revolutionize every industry. Even the intermediate technologies Vicarious creates en route to artificial intelligence will be immensely impactful,” said Mr. Moskovitz, who will be joining Vicarious’s board of directors. “It’s essential that the right people bring this technology into the world,” added Cari Tuna, president of the Good Ventures Foundation and Mr. Moskovitz’s fiancée. “Scott and Dileep share our mission to help humanity thrive, and we’re deeply grateful for their efforts.”
“Building machine intelligence is one of the most important and challenging problems humanity has ever faced. Advancements in neuroscience, probabilistic models, and computing power are enabling new strategies for AI research,” said Vicarious co-founder Dr. Dileep George. “We are honored to pursue this long term goal with the support of investors who share our deepest values,” added Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix.
“Vicarious is bringing us closer to a future where computers perceive, imagine, and reason just like humans. We are proud to support Vicarious in its quest,” said Peter Thiel, partner at Founders Fund.
About Vicarious
Vicarious FPC Inc is an artificial intelligence company that uses the computational principles of the brain to build software that can think and learn like a human. The company was founded in 2010 by D. Scott Phoenix and Dr. Dileep George. Before co-founding Vicarious, Mr. Phoenix was Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund and CEO of Frogmetrics, a touchscreen analytics company he co-founded through the Y Combinator incubator program. Previously Dr. George was Chief Technology Officer at Numeta, a company he co-founded with Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky (PALM, HAND) while completing his PhD at Stanford University. For more information about Vicarious, please visit www.vicarious.com.
About Good Ventures
Good Ventures LLC is a for-profit investment firm founded by Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz that will donate all of its earnings to the Good Ventures Foundation. The Good Ventures Foundation is a philanthropic foundation created by Mr. Moskovitz and led by his fiancée Cari Tuna. Its mission is to help humanity thrive. For more information about the foundation’s activities, please visit www.goodventures.org.
