Intro
Brian Hooks is the CEO of Stand Together, President of Charles Koch Foundation and co-author of “Believe in People” with Charles Koch. He has scaled Stand Together to a network of 1,000 partner organizations and has deployed over $1B using a framework he called “venture philanthropy”. They are driven by problems and don’t get restricted by whether the vehicle through which they fund the problem is a donation or an investment. Which is a very interesting approach.
He also described some of his work as backing “social entrepreneurs”. My career actually started in social entrepreneurship and I thought that the experiment doesn’t always work but my biases come from a completely different set of circumstances and structure. Setting up a million dollar prize of teams of student entrepreneurs might be a great way to catalyze more high agency college students and build a community of these people but might be a misdirected approach to solve the problem at hand. I shared this concern with him to get his thoughts on what he has seen work based on their work so far.
We talked about the parallels of backing talent in venture capital and philanthropy. I was particularly interested in this question because Brian’s career started at Mercatus Centre at the George Mason University where he got a chance to work alongside Tyler Cowen who has written an incredible book called “Talent” with Daniel Gross, I was curious about his lessons from his time there.
This is a special edition of our interview from Reagan National Economic Forum, I hope to have Brian back on for a longer wide-ranging conversation. Hope you enjoy the show!
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Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
03:46 - Thesis behind backing Trust Ventures
07:13 - Learning insatiable curiosity from Tyler Cowen
10:29 - Discarding what works to achieve real scale
13:41 - Pooling the minds of a thousand business leaders
20:03 - Reforming a one-size-fits-all school system
23:32 - Using a venture capital model to fund classrooms
26:53 - Why higher education is completely broken
30:38 - Changing how modern companies look at talent
34:42 - The skills of the future
38:19 - Trying something different after a thousand years
41:34 - Closing
