Good Ventures

Good Ventures is a private philanthropic foundation established in 2011 by Facebook and Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, the former journalist Cari Tuna. Its partnership with the charity evaluator GiveWell produced Open Philanthropy (renamed Coefficient Giving in November 2025), and the foundation supplies nearly all of that organization's grant money, making the Moskovitz and Tuna fortune the dominant and most durable financial source behind the Effective Altruism movement, evidence-based global health and development, and AI-safety research.¹²

The 2011 Founding

Moskovitz, who retained roughly two percent of Facebook at its 2012 public offering and built a second fortune at the workplace-software company Asana, and Tuna, who had been a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, created Good Ventures in 2011 as the vehicle for giving away the bulk of their wealth. They were among the youngest signatories of the Giving Pledge, the Bill Gates and Warren Buffett commitment to donate the majority of one's fortune, signing in 2014 in their late twenties and early thirties. Tuna served as president of the foundation and became the public face of the operation, articulating a "give where it does the most good" framework that delegated cause selection to a professional research staff applying cost-effectiveness analysis rather than to the donors' personal sentiment.¹³

Almost immediately the new foundation oriented itself around GiveWell, the charity evaluator that Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld had founded in 2007 after working as investment analysts at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund. Good Ventures made its first grant, of 50,000 dollars, to GiveWell itself in 2011, and in the same year directed a further 1.1 million dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities. Tuna joined GiveWell's board in 2011, formalizing the relationship. In 2012 GiveWell relocated its office and five-person staff from New York to San Francisco to be closer to Tuna and other technology donors, and Good Ventures and GiveWell announced a close partnership that June.¹⁴

GiveWell Labs and Open Philanthropy

The partnership produced a joint research project called GiveWell Labs, launched in 2012 to look for giving opportunities beyond the direct-aid global-health charities that GiveWell already recommended. GiveWell Labs was renamed the Open Philanthropy Project in August 2014 and was spun off from GiveWell as a separate organization in June 2017, though the two retained overlapping boards and staff and shared office space in downtown San Francisco. The split divided two functions: GiveWell continued recommending a short list of proven, measurable charities for ordinary donors, while Open Philanthropy took on the larger, riskier, and harder-to-measure giving that Good Ventures' scale made possible, including pandemic preparedness, farm-animal welfare, scientific research, and the prevention of catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence.¹⁴

Good Ventures supplies nearly all of Open Philanthropy's grant money, a dependence both organizations have acknowledged. The longtermist and AI-risk portion of that giving flowed to the research community around the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Future of Humanity Institute, and Open Philanthropy made a 30-million-dollar grant to OpenAI in 2017 that came with a board seat for Karnofsky, and later became an early investor in the AI company Anthropic. Karnofsky, who served as co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, is married to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei. The FTX Future Fund of Sam Bankman-Fried briefly funded the same longtermist and AI-safety field in 2022 before evaporating when FTX collapsed that November.²⁵

The Dominant Funder

By the mid-2010s Good Ventures had become by far the largest single donor channeling money through GiveWell, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the estimated 375 million dollars GiveWell had moved to its favored organizations, with annual Good Ventures grants of 70.4 million dollars in 2015, 50.4 million in 2016, and 75.1 million in 2017. As of August 2022 the foundation reported having granted more than 1.7 billion dollars across global health and development, farmed-animal welfare, global catastrophic risks, and other cause areas. By 2025 Moskovitz and Tuna had directed more than 4 billion dollars in cumulative giving since 2011, including more than 600 million dollars in 2025 alone, with Good Ventures making 493 grants in 2024 at a median grant size of about 115,000 dollars.¹²⁶

The concentration of so much AI-safety and effective-altruism funding under a single foundation drew sustained criticism. Because Good Ventures funds much of the research community that examines the AI labs, and because Open Philanthropy was an early investor in Anthropic, observers argued that the field scrutinizing the AI companies depended financially on one donor couple who were also early backers of one of those companies. When Open Philanthropy rebranded as Coefficient Giving in November 2025 and began running multi-donor funds that other philanthropists could join, Good Ventures remained its founding and most significant ongoing partner and the source of the bulk of its capital.²⁷