Q&A with the head of Google.org: Taking big bets on bold ideas

“Hey geniuses — instead of just inventing the next pizza delivery app, let’s go finally eradicate polio,” says Jacquelline Fuller, president of Google.org. Speaking the languages of both Silicon Valley and global development, the head of the philanthropic arm of Google is in a unique position to bring the best of both to philanthropy. “Let’s join forces and do these big things together,” she says, explaining how global development professionals can engage technology companies and venture capital firms in problems as complex as the Sustainable Development Goals. This week, Google.org announced a $50 million commitment to support nonprofits working at the intersection of education and technology. Fuller, who worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for seven years before joining Google in 2007, spoke with Devex at the organization’s San Francisco offices. Here are highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity. You came to Google.org from the Gates Foundation. What did you learn there that you apply to your role today? Are there similarities between the two? It was a wonderful place for me to grow up in my career. When I started there it was fewer than a dozen people. It was a start-up, and we were learning, so it was a great environment to be in. As a young person, I think it’s good to go someplace where there is plenty of opportunity. I built and ran their first website and I had zero experience running a website. We were scrappy, scrappy, scrappy. But one of the things that attracted me there — and one of the things ingrained in me — was this reliance on data, evidence and rigor. Bill Gates was not a person you wanted to go into the room with having fuzzy data. You wanted to know your fact base thoroughly, and not just the dry facts, but really the entire theory of change behind why something was happening, and therefore what the best levers were for systemic change. I think there are some parallels between the Gates Foundation and Google.org in the sense that it is a technology mindset, so [there is] a willingness to take informed risk. There’s this leaning into data and evidence, and also this desire for more transparency and honesty around what’s working and what isn’t. If it’s not working, then fail fast, pivot, and move on. Google.org offers not only dollars but also the expertise of Google employees to support its grantees. Can you expand on that? What else makes Google’s approach to philanthropy unique? When I first came, we thought — let’s create our own engineering team, pull them away from Google, and have them isolated here in “dot org” to do good things. We realized over time that is silly. We’re an engineering company. Rather than have a separate team and pull it away from the mothership, we should embed in every single engineering and product group, and work with the teams around Google. Good philanthropy is when you do a thoughtful analysis about who you are and your unique skills, assets and resources. What can we bring to the table that is uniquely Google? How can we step in, roll up our sleeves and help in a way that is really unique to our skills? What we know about is innovation. Being of Silicon Valley, we have risk-taking in our blood. Where Google.org can play uniquely is in evidence-based grant-making, backing people with the huge ideas that can make systems-wide change. And when we help them, we step up with significant resources — 1 percent of our net profit, over $200 million a year — and then also thinking about the skills that are unique to our Googlers. When we were thinking about the refugee crisis last year, and how we would respond to this, we wanted to think about all of the arrows in our quiver as a company. We knew we wanted to give, but we also felt like this was an important moment to reaffirm that these are human values, or human rights, and that as a world we should respond together. So we did our first ever global matching campaign where we went out across our properties, reached over a billion people and said “let’s respond together.” We were able to raise $11 million in two and a half days to give to groups like the International Rescue Committee and UNHCR. We also wanted to think about what our employees could do: Is there a way we can be uniquely helpful? So we had Googlers set up WiFi in the refugee camps and along the migration route. The point is, it’s not just the resources, but how can we, as Google, use the best of who we are? I think that’s the message we have for other companies, and other high-net worth individuals, and other folks who are thinking about how they can step up. In the early days, there was this notion that we do have all these arrows in our quiver; we can reach out to users, we have grants, we have our product and engineering teams. It has taken us a while of trying different iterations and approaches to [understand] if you have all of these things that you can do, what is the best way to marshal those forces? You’re on the board of GiveDirectly, which specializes in unconditional cash transfers and is a great example of how Google.org has made “big bets on bold ideas,” as you’ve put it. How did the co-founders, Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus, convince you that this was an organization worth supporting? When they first came in, I was skeptical — wondering if it is just a cash giveaway. So your big idea on solving poverty is just give poor people money? What really impressed me was their rigor and their data and if you look at third-party randomized control trials, they show not just that these huge government programs have results, but also that this could be something that consumers — the general population — could engage in. This could be a way for people who want to help and want to get involved in development to send their dollars. I was blown away by the outcomes in their studies, not just on the kinds of things you think about — like a reduction in hunger and an increase in the number of business started — but even things like seeing reduced stress and reduced domestic violence. And just thinking about the dignity of giving money and being able to make your own choices about it, rather than someone saying, “You need a goat. Let me give you a goat.” So I was really blown away by their data, and then also the scalability of it. We talk to a lot of groups that have a really nice, niche solution to a given situation, but you can see that cash transfers are imminent and scalable, especially with the advent of technology. They show it through using M-Pesa in Kenya, but with mobile payment systems growing everywhere we thought, “Okay, this is an area that technology can help solve.” The other thing was their commitment to transparency. I’ve seen this as a board member. When there’s been fraud or cases that come up, they publish them and talk about it on their blog. That’s something we’ve been pushing toward as well at Google.org, and the development sector frankly needs to move toward it: greater transparency around outcomes and greater awareness of what the true return on investment is for these various approaches, and a much higher willingness to pivot and move based on data on what’s working and what’s not. And not being so territorial. Not being so entrenched in our own conventional wisdom about what works and what doesn’t, but being open to what the data shows. Read more international development news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive the latest from the world’s leading donors and decision-makers — emailed to you free every business day.