User:Vipul/Good Ventures

Good Ventures is an impact-focused private foundation and philanthropic organization co-founded by Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and her fiance Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook.

History
Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, first learned about charity evaluator GiveWell and the movement for effective giving after reading The Life You Can Save, a book by ethicist and philosopher Peter Singer. This led her to become interested in high impact philanthropy. She formed Good Ventures along with her boyfriend Dustin Moskovitz, who is famous as one of the co-founders of social network Facebook and is currently working at Asana, another company he co-founded.

Tuna also joined GiveWell's board in April 2011.

Researching causes and charities
Good Ventures researches causes and charities in a variety of ways, including reading the relevant research and conversations with charity representatives and development experts. In June 2012, Good Ventures announced a partnership with charity evaluator GiveWell whereby the two organizations would share information and insights with each other in order to minimize duplication of effort.

Good Ventures does not solicit grants or applications and discourages charities from contacting it. Rather, they prefer to follow leads by themselves.

In the interests of transparency and to avoid duplication of effort, Good Ventures makes public, where, possible, the notes from all their conversations.

Grants
Good Ventures has announced two rounds of grants. At the end of 2011, Cari Tuna announced Good Ventures grants to GiveWell's top rated charities. In August 2012, Good Ventures announced further grants to GiveWell's stand out charities. The grants were for $50,000 to five of the stand-out charities (Nyaya Health, KIPP (Houston), Small Enterprise Foundation, Innovations for Poverty Action, and Pratham) and for $100,000 to GiveDirectly. The reason for the higher grant allocation to GiveDirectly was that Good Ventures staff felt that cash transfers were a particularly promising form of intervention and they were also impressed with the GiveDirectly team.

Media coverage
Good Ventures has been covered in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The Chronicle article contrasted Moskovitz's cautious approach to philanthropy with that of Facebook's principal founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who donated $100 million to the New Jersey public school system.

Good Ventures is also mentioned on Moskovitz's Forbes profile.

Blog coverage
Good Ventures was also covered in the blog of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). At the time of the blog post, IPA had not received any funding from Good Ventures, though it later received funds from Good Ventures.