Who should we fund?
In its search for great social investments, one funding organisation is embracing subjectivity
Every year, a dozen carefully chosen people get a salary and a quarter of a million dollars to spend changing the world. Surprisingly, very few people know about it. That makes it, intriguingly, a semi-secret society of scientists, lawyers, programmers, engineers, journalists, social activists, and even musicians.
Every year, fewer than 500 people apply, even though you can be anywhere in the world, working on anything. Anything, that is, as long as you’re ready to share it with the world. Five years ago, I was one of those lucky people, and I’m still not sure how it happened.
So today I’m at the Cape Town office of the Shuttleworth Foundation, which gives out the money, to find out how they choose one person over another. It’s interviews week, and the team is in almost constant Skype calls with applicants. The first challenge, it seems, is just getting to know them, and to understand their big vision for the world.
“You know what’s surprising?” asks Karien Bezuidenhout, the Foundation’s COO. “People really struggle to talk about their big idea. They just talk about their tools, but not what they’re actually trying to change in the world. We want to know: sure, you’re going to build this neat technology, but when you’re done, how is the world going to be different?”
“Someone’s been telling you about their cool new software?” I ask. She nods slowly.
It’s a chilly autumn day. It’s quiet in the office, but the air is electric. Every hour or so a buzzed team member emerges from a meeting room, grabs a snack, and dives back onto a call with a social entrepreneur on the other side of the world.
“Yesterday was hard,” says a screen in the corner of the room. It’s Helen Turvey’s robot double. “Five interviews, and very little to show for it. But today we had two green lights, which is very exciting.” Turvey is the CEO of the Foundation. She works from home in a village in England, and from her desk she can wander the Cape Town offices as a screen on wheels, chatting to her colleagues. At first it’s disconcerting to have a robot sidle up and start a conversation; but soon Turvey’s robot feels like just another person in the room. Innovation may look like technology, but, once you get used to it, it’s personal, a natural extension of people doing their thing. And that’s where the magic happens: in the people.
This team is looking for a very particular kind of person. A “green light” is someone who blows the team away in the first call, and goes straight onto the funding shortlist: seven or eight names from which one or two will finally be chosen.
“One of them is growing meat in petri dishes. It’s really amazing.” Bezuidenhout pauses. “It’s also totally freaky.” She’s talking about Isha Datar, a biotechnologist and founder of New Harvest, which does ‘cellular agriculture’, also known among laypeople as meat in petri dishes. It is indeed freaky, and if she can pull it off, it could completely change the world’s protein supply. Healthier children. Less destructive farming. Even less methane in the atmosphere. “We’d love to fund her. We’ll see, lots of interviews to go.”
And then, even if she does get shortlisted, only a couple of people will be chosen from the shortlist. The stakes are high. Not a lot of places will give you free money to grow meat in petri dishes. At least, not without a host of strict conditions and intellectual-property controls. If a corporate investor funded the work, they’d lock it down behind patents and non-disclosure agreements. If it worked, they’d monopolise it. If it didn’t, everything Datar had learned might disappear, and the next person trying it would have to start from scratch. None of those outcomes is good for the world.
Which is why the Foundation is interested in funding it. “Everyone we fund has openness in their DNA,” explains Turvey. Sharing is the point of the Foundation’s mission in the world. While the Foundation funds individuals, their long-term impact will come from others building on and replicating what they do. “So we’re looking for an open-source philosophy that runs through the DNA of their very being, and also through any intellectual property they produce. But it’s in their being that it’s most important, because then we can trust the decisions that they make.”
In some fields, this can get complicated. Another biotech candidate is using tiny organisms to measure water pollution, and wants to take the tech to rural communities who depend on rivers for their water. “It’s an angle we hadn’t seen before”, says Bezuidenhout. But her device needs a GMO component that’s patented and strictly licensed. Right now, the patent owner lets the project use his tech for research, but could turn off that permission at any point, or make it unaffordable on a whim.
“Where would that leave the project?” asks Bezuidenhout. “It would be fascinating research, but it wouldn’t be replicable. We’d love to fund her, but this might not be our mission.”
What is and isn’t the Foundation’s mission makes for constant debate among the team. “The crux of what we do all day, every day, is debate,” says Turvey. Having sat in on some of those debates, I don’t envy the process. The team not only have to ask difficult questions about candidates they clearly admire, but about themselves and their own worldviews. It can take weeks to figure out, as a team, whether a candidate’s mission is also the Foundation’s mission. And then, rarely, the stars align: “When you find someone who can just flip it for you, and in your gut you know it’s right, it’s an easy decision.”
“Isn’t that quite subjective?” I ask. I’m looking the formula; some kind of equation that equals “fund this person.”
“Show me a funding process that’s not subjective,” Bezuidenhout argues. “From a home-loan to a research grant to a fellowship to charity giving. All funding is subjective, all of it. It’s impacted by the personal worldview and life experiences of the person making the decision. It’s impacted by the je ne sais quoi of the person asking for the money.”
“Philanthropic organisations try to proof-process that,” adds Turvey, describing how organisations with boards and subcommittees try to remove subjectivity from the decision-making process. In the end, objective-sounding processes can lead to a false sense of fairness, with no protections against deeper, unconscious biases. Instead, her team wades right into those waters, eyes open. “We’ve just pulled back, and said: the magic of the decision making is in the person.”
I’m beginning to understand something unusual about the Foundation’s application process: applicants have to submit not just a written motivation, but a five-minute video of themselves explaining their mission, and how they’d change the world given the chance. I watch several pitch videos from previous years, some from people who became fellows, and some from applicants who didn’t make it. In most videos, they simply talk into their webcams. Others are professionally produced mini-documentaries. But there seems to be no correlation between production quality and a successful application.
There also seems to be no correlation between their areas of work. “Two people could come with the exact same idea, and the person is going to make all the difference,” Bezuidenhout explains. “What we want is that person to be open to what other people are saying, to be interested in talking to other people, to make decisions from a place of openness, rather than only advancing their own thing.”
This is, after all, a fellowship. After several years funding people this way the team’s learned that, when they can really support each other, the fellows are greater than the sum of their parts. Social entrepreneurship is a tough, lonely place, and the fellows help one another get through it. The Foundation’s team protects that sense of fellowship fiercely, says Turvey. “There’s no way you’re allowed to be in the room if you’re an arsehole.” I look for a smile, but she’s not joking in the least.
A few weeks later I catch up with Bezuidenhout about the application process. Turvey is in Boston, meeting with Joi Ito, head of the MIT Media Lab. He’s this round’s honorary steward, and he’s making the final decision about who gets funded.
The team had decided against shortlisting the scientist who was measuring water pollution with patented GMOs. It was a long, hard debate. But Isha Datar did make it onto the shortlist. I’m rooting for her. As a former vegetarian, I want to see more petri-dish burgers in the world.
That evening, we get word from Boston: Datar’s in. Along with her, Ito’s chosen two others: Achal Prabhala, a lawyer with a track record of getting governments to legislate for cheaper medicines; and Ugo Vallauri, who runs programs that reduce electronic waste, fighting our addiction to new electronics. I feel safer just knowing these people are in the world.
Meanwhile, back at the office, applications are already coming in for the next round. There are videos that need watching, and people to get to know.
Arthur Attwell is a social entrepreneur and Shuttleworth Foundation alum. His publishing company, Fire and Lion, consults to the Foundation.
