Unintuitive things about impact philanthropy fundraising

Some lessons I've learned along the way

I’ve been fundraising for a philanthropic startup (FRO) for the past year or so and learned lots of lessons along the way. Most of these were relatively obvious in hindsight, but I didn’t realise them until I experienced it myself. This is probably not going to be very helpful for experienced fundraisers in the private or public sector. But this might be helpful if you’re a founder who’s starting to think about raising philanthropic funding for similarly ambitious efforts for transformative social change through technology. I think it’s a worthwhile thing to do, and an incredible experience that has certainly given me new perspectives on how the world can be changed through technology.

1. Most philanthropists simply aren’t wealthy enough

Specifically for impact science philanthropy projects that cost +$20-100M, most philanthropists are simply not wealthy enough to support them individually. Even if they’ve signed the Giving Pledge and are worth +$1B, not all of that is necessarily liquid. Most other philanthropists are often below the $1B mark, making a $20M gift much larger proportion of their wealth. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. Just that it requires you to help them build that conviction.

2. Effective philanthropy is really, really hard

Like investing or social entrepreneurship, philanthropy is a skill you build over time. A lot of wealthy folks don’t want to spend the time to get great at it, which is fair. I too would rather think about how I’m gonna make it to F1 in Dubai the Monday after Carnival in Rio, than the next Advanced Market Commitment to end the common cold.

To solve nuanced, big problems, you need expertise. Expertise that’s very hard to find even with millions of dollars to spend, since you’re fundamentally trying to solve a problem that no one else has been successful at before. This is why effective philanthropy is less about the project itself or even the money behind it, but more about the leader (you) who can bring many resources together (people, policy, technology, money) to move the big mountain. Effective philanthropy is a talent discovery problem. Maybe organisations like Schmidt Futures saw that too.

Another difficulty is really the sheer amount of money philanthropists have. If you’re a billionaire and you give out $100,000 every day, it still takes 10,000 days, more than 27 years, to give away $1 billion. And that’s assuming you don’t even put your money in a SoFi high-yield savings account. It’s also why people like MacKenzie Scott are such incredible outliers. She gave more than $2 billion in 2024 to roughly 200 nonprofits.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, funders often cannot understand complex scientific problems in the short interactions that you have with them. Many billionaires made their money in finance or tech. Even if they care about the environment or cancer research, they might not know how to do serious good there. No one wants to throw money at something that doesn’t help, or worse, makes a problem bigger. That makes it tricky for both funder and founder, especially when the archetypes are a technical, verbose founder and a billionaire deciding whether to take the new A350 to Monaco instead of the old one. This is where brokers, traditionally the billionaire’s friends, aka philanthropic advisors, are helpful for deep technical expertise for due diligence. So the main advice here is to practice telling your story from the forest, down to the trees, and the plants if possible.

3. If you’re asking for $3M, you might as well ask for $30M

It’s about as hard to get $3 million as $30 million. A big reason is that the people you ask for $3 million aren’t the same people you ask for $30 million. Just like you wouldn’t go to Blackstone for a $10,000 angel check, billionaires aren’t excited about a $3 million gift, roughly 0.1 percent of $3 billion. Getting 50 emails a day like that is like 50 people asking you for a $50 donation to their “super important cause” everyday.

If you want to create transformative change for people around the world, you might as well think big. Of course, the pitch has to be good. And you need to have a plan for what you could do with $30k, $300k, and $3M, before the final $30M gift. But if you’ve thought deeply around your impact thesis and you’ve identified the rough order of magnitude of funds required, the exact dollar amount in the beginning doesn’t matter as much as in venture/startups.

4. Philanthropists who fund systems are rare.

Most philanthropists give where they have personal connection or interest. A tech founder might have spent most of life in front of a computer and found peace in nature, so that’s where they give. Some have faced cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or seen inequality up close and want to use the resource they have most, money. Very few dig into a problem at a PhD level to understand root causes and then deploy capital to fix the system. They usually don’t want to fund system wide changes, they want tangible, category specific impact.

So even if your solution is systemic or technical, zoom out and frame it in a way that’s emotionally compelling and categorical. Most importantly, always try to deeply understand the philanthropist’s personal interests and who they really are as people. Because you cannot convince them to fund something that they’re not interested in. FOMO, to a large extent, does not work here. You cannot tempt them with an ever-increasing valuation on a term sheet.

5. There is a power law in philanthropy too

As a fundraiser, you might often spend time on philanthropic org websites and looking for people you could reach out to or get introductions to. But the thing is, most philanthropies don’t actually have as much money as you think. It’s often very difficult to tell how much money a philanthropy has by their website. For example, can you tell that this foundation actually has a lot of money? Don’t know about you, but I couldn’t tell. You can look at ProPublica or IRS tax return forms, but often that information is 2-5yrs behind, and a lot could happen financially during that time. And often, the money is distributed across multiple accounts and assets, so those tax forms aren’t an accurate representation of the foundation’s gifting ability. Frankly my best advice is trial and error—research foundations, try to get in touch, and try to pattern match and train your own muscle to sense how much money a foundation has.

6. Past performance does not predict future giving

Philanthropy has a stereotype to be very unstable because you can be made obsolete at the whims of how just one person is feeling that day. And while this is not entirely false, the most unintuitive thing is that there often isn’t a clear pattern to a foundation’s or donor’s giving. In 2021 they may fund COVID fast grants and anchor the creation of a new $600M research institute near Stanford, and the next year they may not fund much science research at all. And that reason could be simply that their interests and theory of change having shifted, or some more complex reason that we may never understand. Conversely, someone you’ve never heard of before may suddenly start gifting large amounts of money because they made a lot of money off the new 50x leverage feature on Coinbase. You never really know.

7. There’s founder-funder asymmetry in philanthropy too

Finding the right funder for your initiative feels like you’re trying to control entropy. You often need to be at the right time, right place, with the right idea, with the right pitch. It’s sort of like raising a platform biotech during Q2 2025, except there’s no Pitchbook for philanthropists. You have to identify different nodes where there’s a high density of impact-oriented people and capital. And yes, San Francisco is certainly one of those nodes. At some level, it’s a numbers game. But mostly, it’s about deep connections with individual people, and realizing that you cannot convince philanthropists to give you money. There has to be a natural relationship or thesis fit that’s taken to the next stage through giving. Your role as a founder on a philanthropic impact initiative is to guide your partners (funders) towards transformative change that they cannot attain on their own.

8. Founders/fundraisers aren’t “recipients” of gifts, they’re guides toward transformational change

The image of the founder/fundraiser on their knees asking for money not only discourages deep long-term relationships, but it fundamentally misrepresents the role of the fundraiser. As a fundraiser, you are the leader—the guide to show how one can combine the many resources in the world to create dramatic change that no one person can do alone. Money is essential to your mission, but executing these big missions is incredibly difficult and impossible to do alone. It will never be a straight shot, so it’s best to treat the relationship with funders as a two-way partnership rather than a one-way receiver-giver relationship.

9. Funders need you more than you need them. They want to meet and talk to you.

If you’re reading this far, you’re probably a founder/fundraiser yourself. So this one’s for you:

Philanthropists want to meet you just as much as you want to meet them. Just like you, they don’t have the right resources to do it. You’re frustrated you can’t meet them, and they’re wondering whether anyone can actually deliver on their dream, whether it be preventing catastrophic climate events or ending lead exposure in developing nations. They’re looking for you. They want to hear your big idea and how you’re going to do it. So don’t give up.

Unintuitively, cold emails sometimes work. Deep research can find contact information. You might meet them at Art Basel or on the street in Singapore. The transformative connections can truly happen anywhere. Keep expanding your surface area of luck. Just remember: you’re not selling anything. You’re giving people an opportunity to become your partner to attain each other’s dreams to make the world a better place, together. Your job isn’t to convince them your idea is worth funding, it’s to show you can lead people toward transformational change through the work. They don’t want to just write you a check and see the returns on their balance sheet. They want to leave a mark on the world that wasn’t just bigger number on their balance sheet. Your job is to make that mark with them.

10. There are books to help navigate this, specifically for philanthropy.

I feel like I highlighted many pain points but not as many solutions. So my one hopefully helpful recommendation is honestly to read The Generosity Network by Jennifer McCrea. It’s the best book I’ve read on philanthropic fundraising, and many colleagues and friends agree.

Good luck!