Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Recombinant philanthropy

I'm writing a new book. (Recombinant Philanthropy is NOT the working title, though I kinda like it so that might change)

One of the things I am writing about is all the ways the pieces of philanthropy can be (and are being) recombined to take advantage of new tools, global connections, multiple language capacities, diversity of traditions and so on.

Y Combinator is a group that invests in startup companies. It has recombined some of the standard elements of angel investing, venture funding, and business incubating into a new form of seed capitalization. Its a nice example of re-arranging the pieces, the firm's title is a nice play on a concept (scroll to the bottom of their FAQ - here - for their explanation of the metaphor), and it may have some useful parallels to philanthropy.

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