Philanthropists aren’t on LinkedIn

Here’s the thing: you won’t meet a billionaire online.

You, sitting in your 2007 Nissan Altima, in the McDonalds drive-through at 7am, are closer to meeting a billionaire than you are on a social media platform (Fig. 1).

But that doesn’t mean they’re completely out of reach. Like VC, there’s a real, tangible world that you can access, in theory. After a year of trying to raise impact philanthropy funding, I’ve learned the game operates on rules that are rarely written down. This is a field guide describing philanthropic fundraising when you don’t have a last name, a platform, or a Giving Pledge dinner invite.

Fundraising in philanthropy is similar to venture: you need to learn the game. Which narratives are hot, who the funders are, how the ecosystem works, and executing with imperfect information. Teachers are rare, and most people learn by doing. One key difference between philanthropy and venture, though, are the timescales.

Impact philanthropy fundraising requires the breakneck execution speed of a startup founder while operating on funding timescales of enterprise sales:

• Timelines for philanthropic giving can take 6 months to 2 years, or 6 days.

One month you might have two to three calls with someone, and the next month they may go silent. There’s limited signal you can reliably extract upfront about decision speed. There often isn’t a forcing function, so you have to operate under this massive uncertainty.

• One day funders are giving, the next day they’re not.

Yes, there are patterns like end-of-year giving or last-minute opportunities. But they rarely repeat cleanly year over year, and past giving in the public domain is a terrible predictor of what they will do next. Often for reasons you will never have access to. When timing is unpredictable, your narrative is the only thing that compounds. I think it’s best to focus on this and craft it very intentionally.

• There’s no free money.

Even in philanthropy, funders want returns on investment within a specific timescale. Not financial returns in ten years like VC, but societal returns on a timeline that matches their life and identity. This makes alignment quite difficult, since two funders can both be “interested in health” and still be misaligned because one wants impact in 18 months and the other is fine waiting five years.

Given that you cannot control timing, the thing you can control best is the clarity of what you are building toward and whether a funder can see themselves in that future. If possible, be “stubborn on vision and flexible on details.” Chance favours the prepared mind, as they say.

The most important thing to prepare for impact philanthropy isn’t a pitch deck or a beautiful document—it’s a narrative that compels people to literally pull money out of their pocket for you.

Your narrative should be designed for the specific funders you want to attract. A broad narrative that appeals to many is harder to land than a narrow one that resonates deeply with a few.

For example, “a new philanthropic fund for heart disease in the UK” is a tough sell when the British Heart Foundation already exists. You might have a genuinely new approach—but the narrative has to be sharper than “curing heart disease faster.”

Instead, a focused thesis on microvascular disease (INOCA & CMD) that disproportionately affects millions of undiagnosed women would be a narrative that appeals to specific funders. In this case, it’s specific enough to differentiate from incumbents, yet large enough to be tangible and fundable. Even if the underlying science is simple, identifying the right framing is very hard to do.

Compelling narratives are aimed at the world and at funders, not at scientists. This distinction matters, especially for exceptional technical scientists like yourself.

Scientists are predisposed to think chloroplast → forest. You start with a niche mechanism and pathway, then you push the bounds of human knowledge outwards to eventually find a use case for why anyone should care. This is how scientific discovery is done, but it’s not how you paint a vision of the future.

As a scientist with a technological product or solution, you have to flip your narrative from the “chloroplast → forest” to “forest → chloroplast”. Start with the forest: why the world is broken, what changes if you win, and why now. Then zoom in: the trees, the leaves, and only then the chloroplasts. Another framing is the pyramid principle.

Remember: the people you’ll talk to are smart, PhD-level people who have absolutely no idea about the topic you’re talking about.

The narrative therefore isn’t just “packaging,” it’s the filter that determines whether your idea registers with the person at all. So obsessively think about the first 30sec of your pitch, and imagine what the funder will remember when they only read the first three lines of your 1-3 pager.

At least, no list that’s readily accessible to me or you reading this.

Nowadays in VC, there are “fund tier lists” with emails and lists of angels who openly say they want to hear from you. Though I’m not sure if they actually take unsolicited pitches, at least that resource exists in the public domain. They might even have a public email address you can write to, though I think those inboxes have a script that auto-sorts everything to Junk.

But that’s not the case for philanthropy. Most philanthropies openly state they do not take unsolicited proposals. They don’t publish reports on their giving patterns, and there are very few lists that openly disclose the “top organisations for [blank] giving.” Frankly, even if such lists existed, they wouldn’t be very helpful because you can’t even access the people there in the end.

Congratulations, you played yourself.

You are not Dario Amodei. You’re a broke, 24-year-old on a Fr. 50 shuttle an hour out of town, gripping a hard copy of Machines of Loving Grace, seeking refuge in the Anthropic House at 7PM because you didn’t get invited to any of the dinners.

Sasha de Marigny@sashadem

Anthropic House bringing some Claude-ish cozy to the otherwise frosty Davos climes 😊

9:23 PM · Jan 21, 2026 · 36.5K Views

21 Replies · 8 Reposts · 537 Likes

Being invited to the conferences is not enough. If you’ve been to JPM in San Francisco, you know that the entirety of the conference happens outside of the conference. These meetings are no different—the most catalytic conversations are a culmination of months of online meetings, finally converging in rooms that you haven’t even priced into your mind. If there are high profile people on an “attendee list”, it’s likely that you won’t even see them on the conference floor.

“Lists” are only helpful if you can actually meet those people. Otherwise, it’s just FOMO fuel.

For those who fortunately don’t know what JPM is, another way to think about it is through the “efficient-market hypothesis.” Though philanthropy isn’t actually an efficient market, if you imagine for a second that it is, more things start to make sense.

In the public markets, all available information is accurately reflected in the share price, aka “priced in”. Apple’s share price already accurately reflects this year’s new iPhone release. But people still make money. They just know what everyone else knows, and then starts looking where no one else is looking.

In philanthropy, the equivalent of “alpha” is not “a list of past gifts.” Past performance doesn’t predict future giving. The real alpha is in the why.

If building philanthropic funds in women’s health for example, you might want to figure out why the Gates Foundation started a $2.5B fund for women’s health, why Nuttall published their interesting RFP, and why Pivotal gifted $100M to Wellcome Leap. If you’re trying to create new metascience institutions like the Arc Institute, it helps to know why it was established, which similar efforts never got off the ground, and what transferable lessons remain.

All this isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to raise large philanthropic gifts, and it’s far from the only thing you need. But this level of understanding will be an asset when you’re searching for the right philanthropic funder in real time. At the very least, it’ll help you separate noise from signal to find unique opportunities that potentially only you can find.

Like startup fundraising, philanthropic fundraising requires the founder to have multiple moving pieces in place. You need:

• an excellent narrative

• forest → chloroplasts communication

• a lot of patience

• “tacit knowledge” to find “alpha” where no one else is looking

• and the ability to get into the right rooms at the right moments

Fundraising feels like a series of pitches, but for many people it is more like an apprenticeship in understanding what funders actually care about. Once you understand which funders care about what, the timing, scope, and narrative start to snap into place.

If I did a good job, I’ve now taught you that “the game” cannot be taught, only learned. So go learn it, then go play it. How you play it with your narrative, in what direction, with which funders, is on you to figure out. It’s bespoke, confusing, painful, and long.

But I believe it’s worth it.

Philanthropists aren’t on LinkedIn. But sometimes, honestly, they’re on X. So, you know, there’s that.