Prevail Fund makes billion - dollar giving powerful, possible and practical

1) Powerful

How Leadership Resources
Can Harness 10x and 100x Forces

The human race is capable of achieving great things, when ingenuity is matched by resources.

The history of amazing human achievements often follows a predictable pattern: 1) someone comes up with a great idea. 2) They get a little money to try it out. 3) They get a lot of money to grow it. 4) And then a “force” makes it really big and it changes the fabric of human experience.

In 2011, nobody had heard of “ride sharing.” Five years later, you could use your phone to summon a taxi to your door, nearly anywhere in the world. How did this happen? 1) Human ingenuity was certainly involved – but then resources took over. 2) In 2010, Uber raised about $2m in its first funding round to try out its idea. 3) Then from 2011-2013, investors gave Uber $4B to make it really big. 4) Today, the power of consumer spending (currently more than $80B annually on ride sharing) has made this service ubiquitous in nearly every country in the world.

Ride sharing is a fairly amazing human “achievement” if you think about it. What can’t we apply the same pattern of success that regularly leads to “amazing human achievements,” and instead apply it to goals in social equity? We are failing to do this! There are two missing ingredients:

1) There is no lack of human ingenuity in social change. Check.

2) It is also not hard to raise initial innovation funding. Check.

3) What is nearly impossible is “big” funding – specifically $1B+ type funding – to make something big.

4) And even $1B isn’t enough: the world has almost 8 billion people. We must then systematically harness forces like market spending, government spending, human behavioral norms, and science – to make a meaningful change in the whole world.

We looked through human history for examples where large funding ($1B+) was consciously used as a lever to systematically harness a much-larger force. We came up with four interesting prototype examples.

From 1886 to 1920, Andrew Carnegie gave today’s equivalent of $1B to start 2500 libraries. While a large sum of money, this wouldn’t have been a particularly exciting gift if the libraries ran out of funding after ten years. Instead, government saw the value. We estimate that approximately $300B+ in government funds have been spent to operate public libraries over the past 100 years in the US alone.

As this example illustrates: $1B alone is not enough to meaningfully change the human race – but it can harness a much larger force. An initial rivulet of water can cut a channel in the earth. If that channel is large enough, a torrent of water will follow it. Over time, we can create the Grand Canyon. Philanthropy can act as this initial rivulet of water. We believe there are four basic forces that philanthropy can help to direct. Here are four examples.

Possible

It is surprisingly possible to mobilize $1B gifts for social change

We think a billion dollars is a minimum mathematical floor to truly “change the world.” If this resource is multiplied 10x or even 100x through a major “force,” then one can plausibly hope to change a world of nearly 8 billion people.

Mobilizing $1B+ gifts is surprisingly Possible – especially when one considers that successfully spending $1B can take 10 or more years.

There are many potential sources for bolder funds. Citizen initiatives like the Rotary Club, the March of Dimes, United Way, and Giving Tuesday regularly mobilize sums of this size – and have achieved bold social aims in the past. You don’t have to be a Captain of Industry to have bold dreams for a more just and equitable world. Dozens of government innovation funds are also getting into the game, and beginning to dream big.

$1B+ gifts are particularly possible for more than 3,000 of the world’s wealthiest individuals and foundations. $1B gifts are surprisingly “affordable.” Imagine an example foundation holding $2 billion dollars: at first, giving $1 billion feels crazy. However, it probably takes at least ten years to give away $1B responsibly, and during that time, capital grows. Assuming only 5% annual growth, a $2B foundation can make a new $1B gift every ten years. This logic is even more compelling in aggregate – the world’s 3,000 wealthiest billionaires and foundations create an average of $900B in new wealth each year, and currently hold $13.1 Trillion (this is 1 billion-dollars 13,100 times over). Lastly, social change initiatives do not always need to rely on grants – and can instead involve socially-minded capital.

Practical

Easier said than done: how to actually execute $1B+ initiatives to change humanity

Successfully executing a billion+ dollar gift in social change is a lot harder than it looks. As three co-founders of this initiative, we collectively employ 10,000+ full-time staff across a dozen countries and we spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year with high effectiveness. Along the way, we have encountered challenges with refining new program models to combat some of the world’s most entrenched social problems, rigorous measurement of social outcomes, staying aligned and hearing host governments, and keeping HR/ finance/ tech/ logistics growing smoothly.

That is why we are starting Prevail, which seeks to help givers to quietly explore the possibility of world-changing gifts – and then eventually to help them execute in the field. Drawing from our collective experience, we offer five services to help deal with five major barriers to successful gift execution.

We do not take the execution of large social change initiatives lightly. However, collectively we have seen a reasonably complete playbook of every problem an organization might encounter while scaling up. We are keen to use that experience to support the execution of visionary philanthropic initiatives that seek to achieve global change.

If you are a serious giver or giving organization interested in changing the world: reach out! You can remain confidential if you wish, and we take that very seriously. We’d love a chance to have a zero-expectations introductory conversation, and hope at a minimum it would prove thought-provoking and fun. hello@one-5.hipdev.pro