You may not recognize the acronym yet — CZI — but you’ve probably heard of the founders.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative at the end of 2015 — in a letter on Facebook to their newborn daughter. CZI counts education among its early top priorities, and has started to make investments that shed light on the approach CZI will take.
Chan and Zuckerberg have brought on leaders whose expertise they value and perspective they trust to take big risks in advancing the issues they care about. Jim Shelton, the head of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s education efforts, spoke Thursday at Social Capital Markets in San Francisco, California. Here are three takeaways from his talk, which offered some insight into how this new and much-discussed philanthropic venture thinks about education investments: