Jun 2, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 9 segments
**Coefficient Giving, one of the world’s largest effective-giving funders, is about to go even bigger.** **On the heels of its biggest…
Alexander BergerGuest
Michael IgoeHost
Um, but you also gave away more money than you ever have before, um, more than a billion dollars last year.
And in your annual letter, you talked about how the plan is to do, um, quite a bit of hiring this year and give, you know, even more money away in 2026, 2027, 2028.
Just by way of sort of an introduction, um, as to who and what Coefficient Giving is, you know, some folks might still know you as Open Philanthropy.
So, you know, when I look back on 2025, we did rebrand late in the year, and we used to be known as Open Philanthropy, and the key driver of that sort of choice to rebrand was because we're doing more and more work with other funders beyond the folks who we started with, um, this private foundation called Good Ventures, which was started by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, and Dustin's one of the co-founders of Facebook.
And so for, you know, most of our sort of first 10 years, we were really focused on trying to help them answer the question, like, how could they give away billions of dollars as cost effectively as possible to sort of spend down their resources in their lifespan, lifetime, which is their goal? And, um, that was sort of the vision that we started with way back in the day when they came to us when we were at GiveWell and said, "Hey, we love what you do at GiveWell, but instead of trying to write a sort of $1,000 check at the end of the year, um, to support sort of cost-effective global health charities like bed net distributions, we, we could give away billions of dollars in the realm of plausibly really cost-effective ways to open, to do that, opens up to include research or advocacy." And we said, "You know what? We totally agree.
Why don't we team up?" And so we started what was originally called GiveWell Labs and then became Open Philanthropy.
And the, the basic dynamic there was we always wanted to be a little bit separate from Good Ventures because really from the earliest days, Cari had a vision that, you know, other people are gonna want this kind of product, this kind of advice, um, sort of aimed at doing as much good as possible with your philanthropic dollars as opposed to sort of serving the donors as the prime decision-makers and sort of catering to their interests or their preferences.
And so we always wanted to be building something that could be bigger than Cari and Dustin or could be bigger than their private foundation.
Um, but because, you know, we are one of the, the biggest funders in the world and because, you know, we became known primarily for giving away their money, we thought a rebrand was a nice way to sort of mark this occasion as, like, we're doing more work with other donors.
That really started in 2024 with our Lead Exposure Action Fund, where we raised more than $100 million to try to tackle the scourd, scourge of lead poisoning globally.
Um, and that work's been really effective so far and is off to a great start.
Um, we more than doubled the amount of work with other donors last year, and so that sort of push to become multi-donor was the key driver of the rebrand and is one of the ma- main things that we're sort of thinking about and working on at Coefficient Giving these days.
Um, but you also gave away more money than you ever have before, um, more than a billion dollars last year.
And in your annual letter, you talked about how the plan is to do, um, quite a bit of hiring this year and give, you know, even more money away in 2026, 2027, 2028.
Just by way of sort of an introduction, um, as to who and what Coefficient Giving is, you know, some folks might still know you as Open Philanthropy.
So, you know, when I look back on 2025, we did rebrand late in the year, and we used to be known as Open Philanthropy, and the key driver of that sort of choice to rebrand was because we're doing more and more work with other funders beyond the folks who we started with, um, this private foundation called Good Ventures, which was started by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, and Dustin's one of the co-founders of Facebook.
And so for, you know, most of our sort of first 10 years, we were really focused on trying to help them answer the question, like, how could they give away billions of dollars as cost effectively as possible to sort of spend down their resources in their lifespan, lifetime, which is their goal? And, um, that was sort of the vision that we started with way back in the day when they came to us when we were at GiveWell and said, "Hey, we love what you do at GiveWell, but instead of trying to write a sort of $1,000 check at the end of the year, um, to support sort of cost-effective global health charities like bed net distributions, we, we could give away billions of dollars in the realm of plausibly really cost-effective ways to open, to do that, opens up to include research or advocacy." And we said, "You know what? We totally agree.
Why don't we team up?" And so we started what was originally called GiveWell Labs and then became Open Philanthropy.
And the, the basic dynamic there was we always wanted to be a little bit separate from Good Ventures because really from the earliest days, Cari had a vision that, you know, other people are gonna want this kind of product, this kind of advice, um, sort of aimed at doing as much good as possible with your philanthropic dollars as opposed to sort of serving the donors as the prime decision-makers and sort of catering to their interests or their preferences.
And so we always wanted to be building something that could be bigger than Cari and Dustin or could be bigger than their private foundation.
Um, but because, you know, we are one of the, the biggest funders in the world and because, you know, we became known primarily for giving away their money, we thought a rebrand was a nice way to sort of mark this occasion as, like, we're doing more work with other donors.
That really started in 2024 with our Lead Exposure Action Fund, where we raised more than $100 million to try to tackle the scourd, scourge of lead poisoning globally.
Um, and that work's been really effective so far and is off to a great start.
Um, we more than doubled the amount of work with other donors last year, and so that sort of push to become multi-donor was the key driver of the rebrand and is one of the ma- main things that we're sort of thinking about and working on at Coefficient Giving these days.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.