As my predecessor, Matt Bannick used to say, 100% guaranteed loss of principal investments, and the other 45% has been in the form of some kind of typically an early-stage equity investment in a startup company. Historically, about $1.4 billion since inception, about 53% to 55% of that has been as grants. Mike: Over time, and again this gets complicated because we’ve recently gone through a reorganization to stand up independently a number of our longest standing initiatives… which I’ll take you through if your listeners are interested. It’s been nice to see the movement in that direction where this is no longer a heretical thing to be doing.ĭenver: Since this origin, how much has the organization invested? What has the focus of those investments and grants been? Some foundations are now putting large chunks of their endowments aside for mission-oriented investing. Yes, that was new and controversial, and we’ve been gratified to see other people coming at it over time and doing the same thing through either forming an LLC…. How do you take that venture mindset and stamp it on to a philanthropy, and really see what kind of social impact you can drive by doing that? So, that was the origin of the thinking. Again, not saying that we have a monopoly on risk. That was a very high-risk set of (Program-Related Investments) PRIs for Ford and MacArthur and others to make as well. But applying it with a venture lens is something I think that we’ve historically done more of than most people how do you take that venture capital, sort of Silicon Valley lens on high-risk sets of things to do?Īgain, lots of things I once had the privilege of doing a brief summer internship at Shore Bank in Chicago. We would be loathe to take credit for something that started well before us. And they were funded generously by Ford and MacArthur with (program related investments) PRIs along the way. There were a lot of people, particularly in the US, in the (Community Development Financial Inclusion) CDFI movement for decades who had been… as with Yunus, had been doing in the ‘70s and in the US, the CDFI movement (Local Initiatives Support Corporation) LISC, Enterprise, all the (Community Development Corporations CDCs) who were doing low-income housing and job work, impact investing in that sense is not new. Mike: Right, and I don’t want to take undue credit. It just wasn’t embraced right away, was it? Mohammad Yunus and microfinance and commercial microfinance. I think many people wonder where did it ever get started? I recall back at that time too, there was a lot of pushback. As you just said a moment ago, we take all this for granted today - the LLCs and the 501(c)(4)s and the social enterprises. That was the origin of how we came to be in our current form.ĭenver: It’s hard to overstate how groundbreaking that was. That was the origin of it, and then the insight of a two-checkbook approach – that you can be under the same roof you can use both your grant-writing checkbook and your investing checkbook to drive social impact. On that insight, in about 2005, Pierre decided to convert to Omidyar Network, which was really the fundamental insight being the ability to do both commercial investing as a means of generating social impact at scale - which has now later got named impact investing - and making grants alongside. So, there are insights both in terms of the economic platform that eBay created at scale and the connection platform that eBay created at scale. Prior to eBay, the notion that you would agree to sell something to a perfect stranger across the country and connect was much more unheard of than it is that we now take for granted. What they realized after a couple of years is it wasn’t nearly able to reach the same scale of impact as the eBay platform was, where literally millions of people had become entrepreneurs and found a way to earn a living on the eBay platform, and a couple of other things which we now take for granted, which is ways to connect - ways for strangers to connect and transact with each other. That was a conventional foundation, 501(c)(3), grant-making entity. At first, they actually set up the Omidyar Family Foundation. He and Pam set out on a very intentional journey. Pierre is the founder and inventor of eBay found himself incredibly wealthy after the IPO at a very young age, and really a little before his time, committed to using the proceeds of that windfall for the purpose of social impact and social good. Mike: We were founded by Pierre and Pam Omidyar. Denver: Why don’t we start by you giving us the history of the Omidyar Network, the founders, and its mission?

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