Google's Culture Clash

Recently The New York Times reported on DotOrg, a philanthropy founded in 2004 by Google and endowed with tens of millions of dollars. Its mission: to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases. DotOrg would be unconventional. It would operate as a business, free of the constraints placed on other nonprofits. Seven years later, DotOrg is now involved only in engineering-related projects that are often the outgrowth of Google products. What happened?

A clash of cultures. A confrontation of two minds: non-profit humanism vs. engineering meritocracy. Simply put, the engineers at Google could not fathom that African health problems could not be resolved once and for all by applying a health algorithm derived from analysis of Google data.

The ambitions of DotOrg were vast: "to completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find by aggregating information." In short, Google engineers thought they had the solution to the world's problems, if only these problems would hew to their data analysis.

DotOrg is now a one-project philanthropy and most of its budget has been re-purposed. In the clash between engineers and development professionals, the engineers, who now have given up on the project because it no longer interests them, are the victors.

Gates Foundation Equity Partnerships Multiply

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reports that they are investing $2 million in a California education group called Inigral, a startup that uses Facebook to help college students avoid dropping out of school. This may be a new strategy by the Foundation to show that social networks and social media can have an impact on post-secondary success, according to Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral.

The news could be significant for socially motivated entrep0reneurs who work in the same areas as the Foundation. In 2009, it said it would invest $400 million out of its $35 billion endowment in companies working in the fields of health, development and education.

An interesting aspect of the deal is that it may be the first time the Foundation has used a portfolio company to collect data that will be used to improve its charitable work.