Giving Money Away Can Be Harder Than Making It

Making money — gobs of it, all at once — can be a traumatic event.

Setting aside the obvious: for almost everyone in the history of humanity, achieving freedom from (financial, material) fear was punishing. People died trying! Gratitude moment.

ChatGPT’s one-shot watercolor take on this piece And still, you’ll have trouble figuring out what to do with the money. A few years ago, I helped organize a community of people in tech who were about to make money and wanted to learn how to give it away to make the world better — the First Principles Forum , which we housed at Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. I get calls from people in tech who are about to make money and want to talk about what to do. They usually have much more money than I do, so most of what I do is relay what I’ve heard from others. In Bloomberg Beta’s portfolio alone, 100 founders have gone on to make $1M or more, and 34 have made $10M or more, plus a handful with even more zeroes in their bank account.

I’ve probably sat through hundreds of hours of people with wealth talking about what to do with it. Those conversations are vulnerable. People talk about their childhoods, their families, their pride, their shame, and how to give money away without perpetuating the same systems that created the need for philanthropy in the first place ( cue MLK, who saw this ).

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Some of you may already know a lot about giving, some may want to know where to start. So I’m going to go from the top. This is what I’ve learned:

I wrote more about the questions to ask yourself to figure out how to actually give the money away — so I guess all this above is just part one! I’m sure I missed important people, orgs, ideas, so tell me!

Note: I’m not going to suggest what anyone should fund, or how much to give away. If people are curious to talk about that, it depends a lot on your interests.

In fact, one of the first disciplines of giving is noticing when your own preferences start masquerading as universal truths.

I originally posted this to X , and enough people no longer have accounts who asked for it somewhere more open. The follow-up piece is here, how to give the money away .