Science and Tech Ideas Need Philanthropic Support. A New Eric and Wendy Schmidt-Backed Advisory Aims to Help.

“There is still, on average, a large gap between what philanthropists are currently doing and what they’re capable of doing,” Kalil says. “One reason is that philanthropists have made money when they’re still professionally active and therefore, it’s difficult for them to carve out the time that would be required to figure out, ‘what do I care about?’”

The name of the advisory illustrates its ambitions for reaching these potential donors. 

“In the same way that Italian families supported the Italian Renaissance by backing the Michelangelos and the da Vincis of the world, today’s philanthropists have the opportunity to support a 21st-century Renaissance that is fueled by science, technology, and innovation,” he says. 

To meet that opportunity requires specialized expertise that working donors don’t have. 

“For example, if you care about cancer there are tens of thousands of cancer researchers in the U.S., and figuring out what philanthropy could do that would have an outsized impact is a non-trivial exercise,” Kalil says. 

“Either you have to say, ‘well I’m going to try to learn that myself,’ or you have to say, ‘I’m going to create an organization and I’m going to go recruit a bunch of subject matter experts, and I’m going to provide overall guidance and oversight of this team,” he says. 

Particularly in science and technology, potential donors have limited capacity to source, evaluate, select, and manage projects and programs, Kalil says. “We want to help philanthropists do that.”

The advisory also aims “to motivate and inspire philanthropists to give in a way that is more creative and ambitious,” he says. 

That begins for a donor by setting a legacy-defining goal, and seeking a project where something happening in the world makes a solution to an intractable problem suddenly within reach, Kalil says. 

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For example, the development of Crispr gene-editing combined with novel drug-delivery technologies, such as nano lipids—used to make the mRNA vaccines against the virus that causes Covid—could allow for the delivery of Crispr-based therapies to patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Kalil says. Now that some ALS patients “are interested in having their body used for science,” researchers could potentially begin drug discovery in humans as opposed to mice, he says. 

Kalil spoke to philanthropists interested in tackling ALS about these recent developments—not because they are definitely going to work—but to say, “there’s a bunch of new capabilities that we have that give us a fighting chance to make progress in this area that five or 10 years ago would have been impossible.” 

More broadly, he says, “I’m interested in the question of how do we create more of these positive self-fulfilling prophecies where an idea is compelling, not just because the goal isn’t manifestly important, but something has changed about the world that makes the previously impossible now within reach.”

Financing these ideas is “creative and ambitious” because few other types of funding are available, either because it’s too risky for even a venture capitalist to consider it or the project won’t realize a market return for any type of traditional investor.

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Consider the creation of large, open data sets that are allowing artificial intelligence to accelerate the pace of science today, Kalil says. 

“If you went to a venture capitalist and said, ‘I want US$50 million to create a high-quality data set and then I’m going to put it in the public domain,’ that would be a very short meeting because the VC would say, ‘How am going to get my money back if you’re giving away the intellectual property,’” Kalil says. 

Throughout science, there are also many researchers who don’t get the funding they need to pursue their ideas until they are well into their careers. Philanthropists can step in if they view the research as important to the public or private sector, providing funding that, ideally, catalyzes future investments from investors or governments, he says. 

“That is the type of agenda setting that my team and I are interested in doing,” Kalil says. 

The firm will focus on establishing or fostering multi-donor, or collaborative, funds that include philanthropists and foundations that recognize the problems they are addressing won’t be solved by one foundation. 

Kalil currently is chairman of a Schmidt Futures-founded group called Convergent Research, which identifies, selects, and launches focused nonprofit research startups pursuing science “moonshots,” pulling in funding from a variety of foundations and individual philanthropists for specific projects. 

Projects underway include lowering the cost of “mapping the brain by a factor of 100,” and “transforming our ability to do ocean-based carbon dioxide removal,” he says. Hearst Foundations, Ken Griffin, and the ClimateWorks Foundation are among several backing these and other initiatives.

Part of Renaissance Philanthropy’s job will be guiding donors on what role they want to play. 

“There are some philanthropists who are very attracted to the idea that there’s something that already works and what we should do is scale it up,” he says. “Other philanthropists are more excited about figuring out how to make progress on something we don’t know how to solve.”

Whichever approach these donors take, the goal is not just for them to provide funding, Kahlil says, but to establish partnerships with the private sector or the public sector or with other philanthropists to ensure “the program or the set of the projects that you support, actually has an impact in the world.”