Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

And so in this conversation, we try to get to the bottom of this question: What Legos should you still be giving away, and what Legos should you keep? If you're not familiar with Molly, she has spent 20-plus years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change.

She's held leadership roles at Google and Facebook and Quip and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

These days, she hosts TED's Work Life podcast, which she took over from Adam Grant.

She also runs an incredibly important leadership community called Glue Club and writes a newsletter called Lessons.

Yeah.

I mean, I, when I lived in California before this, I had a neighbor who worked for the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, and, um, which was, like, trying to solve all disease or whatever by 2030 was, like, or 2050, whatever.

They were trying to do this.

And, um, she talked about how her office was, like, full of frozen snakes and spiders and stuff, and I guess I hadn't really put it together that that's why she worked in an office that was full of [laughs] venomous animals.

I'm so glad you're here.

Y'all, Molly has spent almost two decades inside of vast growing companies like Facebook, Quip, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, helping them through messy, high-stakes moments, where every single thing about the organization has to change or evolve.

She's also the person behind Give Away Your Legos, which is a very sharp metaphor for the identity shifts that come with growth and change and maturation as leaders.

These days, Molly is focused on building community and sharing her wisdom through the Glue Club and weekly conversations on her podcast, Work Life with Molly Graham.

Awesome.

Kristen, in your bio, you've had tons of experience, but you've been a key member of the team with this renaissance over at Learning Commons, formerly CZI, and really bringing open source tooling to EdTech.

Can you tell us a little bit of what sparked that insight that the education space needed it and a little bit of your journey?

Yeah, sure.

They got some foundation and endowment money as well.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Balmer Group, Walton Family Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, but mostly from government.

Okay.

Well, no one would know more about

Technology has been the through line in Osi's multi-sector career across for-profit, nonprofit, philanthropic, and political organizations.

Before joining Kode With Klossy, Osi worked in philanthropy as a vice president of technology and head of justice and opportunity at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Prior to CZI, Osi was the chief product officer for the Hillary for America presidential campaign from launch to election day.

Before pursuing philanthropic and nonprofit work, Osi spent 15-plus years as a product leader in startup, mid-size, and large for-profit software organizations.

in practice it appears eric lobbies states to sign a contract that requires the disclosure of the private data of individuals who are not registered to vote and therefore certainly could not be in need of a voter list maintenance that feels disclosed include social security numbers and driver's license numbers this is great they're talking about eric right now i know we've talked about this on the show probably not as much as we should have but anyway prior to the 2020 election this is the part we've talked about in the past Eric shared that sensitive protected motor vehicle data with at least one other private organization.

The Center for Election Innovation and Research received over $70 million from the Chan Zuckerberg 501c3 organization, which was used to provide grants to state election officials who agreed to turn over sensitive private data to Sierra.

Sierra, I don't know how you say that.

The sharing and resharing of motor vehicle agency data among NGOs may not qualify as permissible use of the vehicle data identified in the DPPA.

And we see there's various different examples of that happening across the world.

You can take Learning Commons as an example, philanthropically funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to ensure that state standards, the sort of state curricula, are available uh in a digital format machine readable format to uh to models so that they know that they've got alignment to that now that's not necessarily like there's not something that um the market or the commercial market has provided and the philanthropic philanthropy in the us is stepping in and we're thinking about well what does that look like in uh in england in particular and And that's some of the sorts of things that we have been thinking about around, you know, like supporting the Department for Education on the digital national curriculum.

And then there's also the, well, thinking again about the kind of misconceptions data that we talked about earlier or, you know, the other data sets that can enrich that, you know, they are all part of potentially public digital goods or public digital infrastructure that can support some of that layer of interoperability or layer of infrastructure.

So that's what I think about a lot more.

But 10X Genomics is a provider of products and services for biology research, think drug research, research labs for academia, private research institutions.

You know, there's stuff like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who actually I

think I

maybe mentioned here, I think I read that they were a customer or, you know, big bot, big pharmaceutical makers.

because of its huge data set on tissues, genomics, etc., that can be used for virtual drug and cell development.

It already has partnerships with many researchers regarding this already.

I think that's where the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative comes in, but that's not the only partner.

There's many, many out there.