Coefficient Giving

About Caleb Before joining Coefficient Giving, Caleb was the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress. Caleb managed IFP’s work on metascience, high-skilled immigration, and AI. We were an early supporter of IFP and think they have an incredible track record of counterfactual policy impact across the areas in which they work.

Most nonprofits start with a founder who has a cause they care about. Ambitious Impact (AIM) tries to found nonprofits in reverse: its staff research the most cost-effective interventions, then recruit entrepreneurs to launch organizations around them. Since 2018, AIM’s flagship program — Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) — has helped founders create nonprofits focused on everything from farm animal welfare to lead poisoning to premature infant mortality.

Saad Bhamla, an engineer at Georgia Tech, has been at the forefront of frugal innovation, a movement that seeks to build cheaper versions of existing scientific tools, like the $1 hearing aid. His latest innovation could well be another consequential contribution to global public health: a Raman spectroscopy device that can detect tuberculosis, all for under $100.

Coefficient Giving Launches $200 Million Strep A Vaccine Fund Initiative aims to accelerate development of vaccines by multiple years for a disease that kills more than 600,000 people annually Fund has raised just over $140 million at launch with backing from multiple major donors SAN FRANCISCO – Today, Coefficient Giving announced the launch of the Strep A Vaccine Fund, a multi-donor initiative to accelerate the development of vaccines against Strep A, which kills more than 600,000 people...

By Alexander Berger and Katharine Collins Most people in wealthy countries know Strep A as the cause of strep throat, an uncomfortable but easily treated childhood illness. But globally, Strep A is responsible for an estimated 639,000 deaths per year. That death toll rivals those of HIV/AIDS and malaria, but Strep A receives dramatically lower levels of funding and public attention.

Coefficient Giving has two main offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., coworking spaces in New York and London, and staff who work remotely from around a dozen countries. Some of us are in an office most days; others come in mainly for team weeks and retreats. We don’t think there’s one right answer on in-person vs. remote — we’ve tried to set up our policies so that both can work well, while being clear that we lean toward in-person where feasible.

Hello! I’m Chris Webster, Coefficient Giving’s AI Enablement Lead, a role that didn’t exist until just a few months ago. We’re a relatively small team trying to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Our staff’s time is a key bottleneck, so when AI tools got good enough to meaningfully speed up knowledge work, we invested in figuring out how to use them well. I’ve taken this on as my full-time job: training staff, implementing new tools, and building workflows.

George Rosenfeld is Deputy Director for Global Catastrophic Risks at Coefficient Giving, which covers our Navigating Transformative AI and Biosecurity funds. In April, he wrote a letter to his family and friends about why he thinks AI could transform the world in the coming years, and why the current trajectory worries him. It’s a personal letter, written for people who are encountering these arguments for the first time.

Coefficient Giving’s “Day in the Life” series showcases our staff’s wide-ranging work, spotlighting individual team members as they navigate a typical workday. We hope these posts provide an inside look into what working at Coefficient is really like. If you’re interested in joining our team, we encourage you to check out our open roles.

If one were to throw a dart at the Coefficient Giving org chart, odds are it would land on a grantmaker. After all, grantmakers make up a significant portion of our staff. Whether as Program Associates or Senior Program Officers, grantmakers at Coefficient are tasked with researching, identifying, and funding work aimed at the biggest, hardest problems we try to address. In this post, we dig into what that work actually looks like: What is open on their screens? Whom do they speak with regularly?