Gates Family Foundation

Beyond Ventures is an investment and philanthropy advisory serving family offices, endowments, and foundations. Our clients include Pivotal, a group of organizations founded by Melinda French Gates to accelerate social progress for women and young people in the U.S. and around the world.

Angel City Advisors facilitates the flow of capital and expertise to expand opportunity, elevate community-generated ideas, and achieve equity. We place a premium on market-oriented solutions to social challenges, and take pride in executing our vision at the highest levels with integrity and humility. We provide a broad portfolio of services that help family offices, fund managers, foundations, municipalities and other market participants connect to social enterprises and emerging community voices. We identify, cultivate, and organize pipelines of enterprises, places, initiatives, and projects that merit strategic and programmatic partnership. We develop strategies and ecosystems, but also manage intermediaries, and lead individual pilots and ventures. Our experience is deepest in the following areas: STRATEGIC FUND ADVISING & DEVELOPMENT: We conceive, structure, capitalize, and manage strategic investment funds that make the world a better place. We also develop pipeline for existing funds and conduct due diligence on specific strategic investment opportunities. ENTERPRISE CONSULTING & MENTORSHIP: We prepare startup companies and social enterprises for launch, growth, and capital attraction. We are subject matter experts in certain sectors (such as food) and segments (like low-income and multicultural populations). Our advising spans financial, operational, market access, community engagement, racial equity, and other strategic issues. REAL ESTATE ADVISING & PROJECT MANAGEMENT: We assert that the physical transformation of communities can translate to improved health, happiness, and opportunity. We provide real estate strategy, entitlements, stakeholder engagement, financial structuring, and project management for inspiring community developers. COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING & ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT: We help communities evolve and prepare themselves for greater levels of investment and innovation. We design and execute place-based initiatives, and develop more robust ecosystems, in order to attract and channel market forces for economic development. RESEARCH, STRATEGY & THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: While we see ourselves as “doers” we understand that strategy fuels effective action and reflection drives innovation. We have been tapped to advise and publish across a number of subjects, including community banking, community development, diversity/equity/inclusion, food enterprise, food finance, placemaking, strategic investing, proximate leadership and mentoring, social enterprise, and more.

From early childhood, we each saw how our parents helped out in our local communities, and we were taught that anything is possible. Unfortunately, factors outside of anyone’s control make it hard for some people to reach their potential: things like when they were born, who their parents are, where they grew up, whether they are a boy or a girl. We wake up every day determined to use our resources to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to lead a healthy and productive life. Most importantly, we believe this: All lives have equal value. That’s why we made the decision to donate our wealth from Microsoft to help others. The challenge when we started out was how to do that in a meaningful and high-impact way. We were drawn to things that sprang from our experience, so we began donating PCs to public libraries across the United States to give everyone a chance to use one. As we read and traveled more, we also became curious about inequalities further from home. One day, we read a newspaper article about millions of children in poor countries who die from diseases, such as diarrhea and pneumonia, that were easily treated in wealthier countries. That blew our minds. As new parents it hit us especially hard. If there’s anything worse than the death of a child, we said to each other, then surely, it’s the preventable death of a child. We sent the article to Bill Sr. with a note: Dad, maybe we can do something about this. Those eight words changed the rest of our lives. We started consulting experts, learning from locals in the countries where we wanted to work, and researching disease and poverty more deeply. We tried to figure out how we might use our voices to raise the visibility of global health, and how our resources could start saving and transforming lives. We also expanded our work in the United States from providing access to computers and the Internet to making sure that every student had an equal opportunity to learn, graduate, and succeed. As our commitment to our work grew, we transferred $20 billion of Microsoft stock to our foundation, making it the largest of its kind in the world. We devoted more and more time to its work until we were both doing it full-time. And when our good friend Warren Buffett donated much of his fortune to our foundation, it allowed us to raise our ambitions about taking on the toughest, most important problems. Our foundation has spent $53.8 billion since 2000, and we think that’s helped our partners make a difference. How do we know? We are committed to measuring progress so we can see what’s working and what isn’t. We’d like to leave you with one chart we find most hopeful. It’s this. The number of children who die each year before their fifth birthday. It’s fallen by half since the year 2000. Millions more kids are surviving. That makes us optimistic.

The internet has revolutionised our world. We exist to ensure that the ongoing tech revolution delivers positive and equitable social impact: that when our lives are transformed by tech, they are transformed for the better. Established as the Corporate Foundation of Nominet in 2008, the Trust became independent and formed a new strategic partnership with Social Investment Business in May 2018. Now known as Social Tech Trust, the charity continues to provide grant funding and support to organisations that use tech to transform lives. Since 2008 the charity has supported over 750 socially motivated initiatives in the UK, providing more than £31m of funding to drive change with tech.

The Sorenson Impact Center helps organizations achieve their impact vision by connecting capital to social and environmental solutions, helping organizations measure, report, and improve impact, and integrating data science and people-centered storytelling into all that we do. Along with our clients and partners, we share a vision of an equitable and thriving world where everyone is valued, communities prosper, and the measured impact of our actions guides decision-making. As part of our mission to train future impact leaders, the Center integrates academic programming and experiential learning into each of its practice areas. The Center is proudly housed at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business.

Notley is an Austin-based band of relentless changemakers combating issues across multiple cause areas. Since 2015, Notley has provided the creative space and resources necessary to make the most impact in our communities. Through the use of magnetic risk capital, we work to bridge the gap of collaboration between for-profits and nonprofits to solve problems quicker. Our team of relentless changemakers’ work is inspired by our Core Values: Agility, Fearlessness, Integrative, Creativity, and Respect. Notley challenges the status quo with new models in communities across the nation, including Austin, Columbus, Denver, Philadelphia, and San Antonio. Together, we instigate outsized impacts. Part of Notley’s changemakers’ work includes for-profit investments that Notley makes directly through Notley Ventures along with Notley’s affiliation with Springdale Ventures. Springdale Ventures, founded in 2019, invests in and supports early-stage consumer product companies and manages relationships with hundreds of investors and industry partners. Its mission is to partner with passionate, resolute, founders to accelerate the growth of transformative consumer brands.