A friend who inexplicably still reads Wired religiously pointed me to this interview with Larry Brilliant, who was recently put in charge of Google.org, the philanthropic foundation set up by the Google guys.
Brilliant’s quite a guy — check out the whole thing — but naturally this jumped out at me:
What’s your mandate?
We’ll have three big areas: climate crisis, global public heath, and global poverty, not necessarily in that order. I’m going to approach this the way a venture capitalist would — map out the industry to see what the gaps are. You fund an initiative, learn what works, and ask, "Will it scale?"
