Kumar Garg Funds Ideas That Are “Big, if True”
On Science Policy IRL, we talk to people in science policy about what they do and how they got there. In this installment, we’re exploring how science policy works from both inside and outside the government.
Host Monya Baker is joined by Kumar Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy, an organization that helps philanthropists support science, technology and innovation. Prior to joining Renaissance Philanthropy, Garg trained as a lawyer and served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He shares how he has spent his career finding, funding, and implementing ideas both within the government and outside it via philanthropy, which is uniquely positioned to pilot “big, if true” ideas.
Resources
- Learn more about Renaissance Philanthropy by visiting their website and listening to Garg’s interview on how philanthropy can fuel scientific innovation.
- Visit the NIH Brain Initiative website for more information on the initiative.
- See Team Kalil’s white board with more advice on how to get things done
Transcript
Monya Baker: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
My name is Monya Baker, senior editor at Issues. On this installment of Science Policy IRL, we’re exploring science policy from inside and outside the government. I’m very excited to talk to Kumar Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy, whose mission is to help philanthropists support science, technology, and innovation. Prior to joining Renaissance Philanthropy, Kumar trained as a lawyer and served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Welcome, Kumar. We like to start these podcasts off by asking everyone the same question, which is, how do you define science policy?
Kumar Garg: I would say science policy is the set of activities that we undertake collectively as a society —so that includes government—to make sure we have a strong scientific enterprise. So that is the role the government plays as a research funder, the role that the government plays in making sure that there’s a vibrant ecosystem of private capital, so some of that research can get converted into products and services. It is playing the role of a talent magnet, which is how do the best and brightest around the world want to come here and expand our scientific capabilities? And then also, how do we think about taking what we’re doing in the scientific enterprise and applying it to hard problems, whether in education or healthcare or other areas. So science policy is not just science funding, but how science funding sits in an ecosystem. How do we actually deliver for the American people?
Science policy is not just science funding, but how science funding sits in an ecosystem. How do we actually deliver for the American people?
Government actually plays just a bunch of different roles in any topic. And I think most of the time when people say policy, they think it means a law, and then they think that might mean regulation, but actually, the government is not just a regulator, it’s a funder. So the government actually does a huge number of grants and contracts. And so what is it funding?
The government is a purchaser, so the government actually purchases a whole set of products and services. So if you’re thinking about the clean energy transition, you might say, “Well, the government can actually buy electric vehicles. They can actually buy green cement.” So that is what the government doing as a purchaser. Then there’s government as a convener. So a lot of times, you could actually play the role of actually bringing all the relevant folks who could care about the topic together. Then there’s government playing the role of international player. How does it sort of think about the US vis-a-vis other countries? And so the interesting thing is that having a blend of what are all the different roles government can play against a particular topic.
Baker: I remember one thing that you said that I found really insightful was how people assume that the system is just the way it is, a kind of status quo blindness. But if scientists are unhappy with the system or society is unhappy with the system, we have to remember that the system was human-designed and can be redesigned, and part of policy is understanding that.
Garg: Yeah. I mean, I think that one thing to just remember is that a lot of what we consider the scientific enterprise is historically contingent and was actually created by the scientific community in conversation with government. This idea of big research agencies funding researchers in labs sitting in universities, what looks like an average grant, what looks like grant review, all of these are systems that have been created over the past 50 years. And so one of the things that I always say to people is that this was done in concert with the scientific community.
So during COVID, there was a set of experiments that Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison did around what they call Fast Grants, very rapid grants. It was a very interesting experiment, but one of the things they did as a side experiment of that where they just interviewed the researchers that applied and said, “Talk about your life as a researcher. If you had no strings attached to your current funding, would you keep doing your current research? Would you change it a little bit, or would you change it a lot?” And what they were really surprised by was almost half of the researchers said they would change their research direction a lot if they had no strings attached to the funding that they had.
And that’s sort of surprising because it’s a bottom-up enterprise. Researchers are applying with their ideas. The panel reviews have other researchers on them. Most of the scientific agencies that do the funding are run by researchers, are run by the science community. So it’s a system by scientists for scientists, and yet you have, in some instances, half of scientists saying, “I would do something very different if I didn’t have the obligations of my research award.” And so it suggests that we need to continue to push on what best aligns to make sure the system actually allows young researchers to get a foot in the door. How are we actually allowing researchers to not feel that what’s in their real wishlist of the most ambitious research they’re doing is different than what they’re applying for because that’s a deep disconnect that we would want to solve.
Third is what are things that don’t fit within the context of a single research paper? Like I want to build a canonical dataset that could help lots of researchers, or I want to build the tool that could really advance my field. Well, if everything gets counted as a paper, building the tool might not get you the same value. And so there’s always challenges any system, but I think that one thing to just remember is that everything that we have right now that is the American scientific enterprise was created to serve the scientific community itself. And so there’s nothing preordained about it. We can adapt it to the modern age just as readily rather than thinking there’s a deep reason why it has to be structured in a particular way.
Baker: That is a perfect segue to my next question, which is tell me about what you are actually physically doing. What were you doing say this past Tuesday?
Garg: Yeah. So I currently run an organization called Renaissance Philanthropy. The idea behind Renaissance Philanthropy is that there’s a lot of interest among folks who have done well, who could be donors and give philanthropically in science and tech issues, but there’s a huge expertise gap and time gap among the philanthropists that they’re potentially very still professionally active or they’re busy with family, or there’s a gap between what they know versus what they’re interested in. They might be very interested in particular issues, like how can we be advancing the state of biomedical innovation or what can we be doing on the application of AI as it relates to wildfire or some other emerging area, but that’s not their day-to-day area of expertise.
Right now, the only way for them to really bet on those topics is to build a foundation with a large cohort of technical staff that can build out those programs, or sometimes, they will write a large check to their alma mater. But sometimes, they don’t want to do either of those options. And then the box number three ends up being like, “Well, I’ll just decide later.” And the world actually has a lot of really good ideas that are bubbling up from the research community. And so it’s a real tragedy that “decide later” is a default view of a lot of folks who could be more active.
At some version, I’m on the early end of every conversation, which is what’s the biggest, most interesting idea that somebody either wants to work on or what’s the biggest, most interesting idea that somebody wants to fund?
And so the idea for Renaissance is let’s borrow an idea from both the way DARPA designs programs—this idea of technical programs that are time-bound, ambitious—and let’s also borrow an idea from the way investing works where you have a lot of these intermediary organizations, whether venture capital funds, private equity funds, and others, who do well-designed, leader-led, time-bound fundraising around that topic. And so we said, “Hey, can we get more donors off the sidelines by building ambitious science and tech programs?” So that’s the basic idea of Renaissance. We’re just two years old.
So a lot of what I do is actually either working with our fund leads. So, hey, we’re building a program at the intersection of AI and education. Can we double the rate of middle school math outcomes using a combination of AI and tutoring? That program is a multi-year program. Some of it is like, how is that program going and what’s the next AI and education program we built? So some of it is program design, some of it is recruiting leaders, and then some of it is talking to donors and saying, “Hey, if you’re interested in some of these topics, this is an ambitious program that you could philanthropically invest into.” So at some version, I’m on the early end of every conversation, which is what’s the biggest, most interesting idea that somebody either wants to work on or what’s the biggest, most interesting idea that somebody wants to fund?
Baker: It sounds like one of the most interesting possible jobs ever.
Garg: It’s definitely super interesting because I get to be a little bit of people’s excuse for thinking big. And then the trick is to find what’s the kernel of what they want to accomplish that you could accomplish using philanthropic dollars within a time-bound period, because some problems are ones where it’s a big, exciting area, but you can’t actually think of where could you actually go. So climate, for example, what are areas where you could really make a dent in a three to five-year timeframe? So we now have a program, a fund that’s specifically focusing on geologic hydrogen. And the nice thing about that as a topic is that there’s a lot of reason why people are excited about hydrogen. The problem is that it’s so speculative that right now industry is not investing in it. So a philanthropic program that does the subsurface mapping, the early pilot wells, figures out the unit economics of all the different technical risk questions in a three to five-year period, and then if it is promising, then industry rushes in, that’s a good philanthropic bet. But it takes a bunch of conversations because climate is a big topic, whereas like, oh, we could actually make a dent in geologic hydrogen in a three to five-year period. That’s, I think, the art of the work, which is tangible, but big deals, we call it “big, if true,” that fit within that shape.
Baker: It actually sounds quite similar to what you were doing in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was finding the ideas that were worth nurturing. Tell me about your path into science policy.
Garg: Yeah. So these things make more sense when you tell the story backwards because you’re like, “Well, one thing leads to another.” But I think the biggest thing was that … And this is the biggest advice I give people, which is just that I was actually very curious about how government worked, and I had this strong sense that the only way I could really figure out how government worked was to work in government. That sounds kind of obvious, but a lot of people are curious about these things, but then don’t dive in. So coming out of graduate school, I had done a year of supervising a case that was suing the State of Connecticut for underfunding the school system, but I was very interested in—there was a new president that was about to be elected—finding some way back to DC.
And one thing I always recommend people is fellowships are a great way into government because the government gets you for free. And so you can get more traction on conversations, and then you can then try to figure out, if you like it and they like you, how to stay. So I interviewed with the Science Office at the White House and they said, “Well, actually, we don’t actually have somebody who’s working on education and you seem to have at least some background there supervising in education.” And they were willing to sponsor my fellowship or at least say that they were willing to give me a desk and a seat. And so then I applied for the fellowship and I got it. And then when I showed up, I remember they were like, “Oh, you actually got it.” It was almost like, “Okay, so what should we do with you?”
The best advice I got was, “You don’t need to think up all the great ideas. You just need to go find them.”
And so I got there and the best advice I got was, “You don’t need to think up all the great ideas. You just need to go find them.” And so I built this really large call list and I said, “I just started here. I’m a fellow. The President wants to do more on math and science education.” They just gave the speech. I would send them a link. I was like, “What do you think we should do?” So I would just call anyone I could get ahold of and say, “What do you think we should be doing?” And out of that came a lot of the ideas that then we implemented as an office over the next couple years.
Baker: Yeah, I didn’t realize that the Office of Science and Technology Policy didn’t regularly get a public service fellow, that you placed yourself there. And then you stayed rising up over the next eight years always with a huge breadth of things. And I remember one thing that you’ve said is how powerful it can be just to set the agenda, how you can make something possible by articulating an idea or helping find those ideas and getting them articulated. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that.
Garg: One of the things that happened was during my fellowship year, the first portfolio I worked on, which was math and science education, just took off. At the two-month mark, I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t figure this thing out.” And by the six-month mark… I mean, just the learning curve is very steep. I had done multiple events with the President. We had a huge initiative that we had presented to him and got signed off. We were out there building out this initiative, but the spillover benefit of that was also just that it was one of the first major science initiatives of the Obama administration. And so I’d now been spending a lot of time with the broader White House, like how do we actually work with the other policy councils? How do we brief ideas to the West Wing? How do you present ideas to the president?
And so I fell into this role where increasingly, I was the person in the Science Office that had been interacting with all the other speech writing, the West Wing, the political team, how do we brief ideas to the president? So then when other ideas would start to come up the ladder, they would say, “Oh, go work with Kumar. He knows how to design ideas that get presidential-level attention.” So I sort of stepped into this role of being like wing person for our other technical leads. So I would say, “Oh, we are trying to do this big push on open data and open science.” Oh, well, what’s the way that we design this as an executive order? What’s the way that we actually build partnerships with all the agencies of what they would want to announce under it? How do we actually roll this out in a way that would be interesting and exciting to the folks who are working directly for the president for how we would roll this out?
And so what ended up happening was that I would both, in some instances, design the idea, but in a lot of instances, what I was really trying to do is figure out what the guts of it was that we could actually would resonate in a broader context. So over the next, we did big initiatives around advanced manufacturing, like how do we actually invest in where manufacturing is going? Everything from 3D printing to big initiatives out of multiple universities, initiatives out of DARPA, how do you actually build that into an investment portfolio of investing in advanced manufacturing that cuts across all this work?
We did a big push around the BRAIN Initiative around, you know, one of the ideas that had been bubbling in the community is that neurotechnology had gotten to a point where we didn’t just need to study single neurons or do the large-scale MRIs. We could study hundreds, if not thousands of neurons, and that would be this huge capability that could allow us to unlock understanding of the brain. You know, we took that basic idea and actually built a multi-agency initiative that also brought in philanthropic foundations, had the NIH basically create a more than 10-year plan, so there’s a whole set of researchers out there that have done key work because of the BRAIN Initiative, but how do you sort of design that initiative in a way that can actually advance? So I had the benefit of having just really strong mentors who had done this before and said, “Here’s how you design these initiatives that really feel like all hands on deck.” They bring together the key agencies that could work on it, that bring together private sector players, philanthropy, and other players, all against the common goal.
And so that idea of how do you both find ideas and then build these cross-cutting initiatives that really put points on the board, so we did that in advanced manufacturing, we did that in space, we did that in the maker movement, we did that on computer science education. So over time, it really became this fairly running list, but it was really a team effort where, often, I was playing wing person to somebody who I thought had really good idea, but probably was very heads down and wouldn’t know how do you actually design an initiative that gets presidential-level attention, that can use that presidential-level attention to actually then drive activity across the agencies and in the broader world and becomes a loop where you can be a lot more ambitious, versus this one agency is going to do this one RFP, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t allow you to do this multi-sector push.
Baker: And tell me how you have taken those instincts of finding an idea and expanding it into an initiative now that you’ve left government.
Garg: Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways, it’s similar. I think the big advantage government has is that it just has a ton of scale. Right? So we designed the BRAIN Initiative and NIH gets excited about it and they’re like, “Well, this is the number of billions we’re now going to commit to the BRAIN Initiative over the next few years.” It’s just a way bigger spend. When you’re sort of outside government, whether you’re doing things philanthropically and others, the size of your investment, it just ends up being smaller. So you have to design more catalytic things that are earlier in hopes that other people can catch and run with it.
But the basic process of finding really big ideas that are hiding out there, like I mentioned the geologic hydrogen example or AI education or others, it’s the same basic process, which is it’s talking to technical experts and basically playing 20 questions with them where they say, “Oh, well, actually, if we could figure out this thing, it opens up the space.” And what you find is there’s an old adage in the civic tech community, no one else is coming. So once you find, oh, this is really high value, don’t leave it to chance that somebody will figure it out. Maybe there’s no one figuring it out.
Baker: So when you began in science policy, you were at OSTP where Tom Kalil was the deputy director, and you have also worked with him at Schmidt Futures and came with him when he founded Renaissance Philanthropy. So I wanted to ask, how do you decide to stay at an institution? I mean, you stayed at OSTP for eight years. And how do you decide to stay with an individual?
People think about it as jobs that they apply for, but I think it’s better to think about is who do I want to work with? Who do I want to learn from? What arenas do I want to be in?
Garg: One of the things I’ve learned over time is that it’s really one of the most important decisions you make. It sounds cliché, but it just keeps playing out, is that you are deeply affected by the people you surround yourself with. And so if you can pick environments where you have really strong mentors and where there’s a lot of learning to do and where you can have a culture that you can contribute to that is very motivated on doing real work and getting to the real answer and doing real good, that’s really powerful. And the reason I did the Science Office for all eight years is I felt like I kept leveling up in my own ability to push on my own ability, but also just I was able to train a whole generation of policy entrepreneurs that work with me and around me. I was able to come up with ideas and push them, and I felt like it was this very formative, generative environment.
That’s the only piece of advice I would give, which is people think about it as jobs that they apply for, but I think it’s better to think about is who do I want to work with? Who do I want to learn from? What arenas do I want to be in? And just like the rest is all just things that will appear before you that you cannot fully map.
One of the things that dawned on me recently was that I’ve never applied for a job, period. I’ve invented some version of every job that I’ve ever done. I started doing something and I was like, “I think this could be a job. This thing is feeling really generative. I should make this into a job. I should create an organization that does this thing.” So that doesn’t mean that everyone should do that, but it just means that being really thoughtful about what is it actually would help you thrive and try to index for that rather than thinking about it only as what are my skills, what are the jobs?What is my title? I think people stress out about that in ways that I just find, I’m like, all of it will burn off, but the peers and the learning is what you will keep building on top of.
Baker: And I’m wondering how this relates to a quote that I have seen attributed to you, which is that you can get much more done when you don’t worry about who takes credit.
Garg: Yeah. We had a whiteboard, working for Tom Kalil. One of the aphorisms on the board was, “You get more done if you don’t care who gets the credit.” I sometimes get pushback on this because there are bad actors who do engage in credit stealing or not giving appropriate credit, but I think the way to think about this is just that lots of things that are really big opportunities. What makes them big opportunities is lots of people see themselves in the victory. And there’s something really powerful in letting others feel the win. There’s just a question around how credit flows matters, right? And one of the things we would always coach the team on is we will get more done with the other policy councils, with all these different actors inside and outside government if we understand that we can trade relevance for credit.
You get more done if you don’t care who gets the credit.
And there’s just lots of situations in life where you can have given the right person the right idea and know that it made a huge difference, but saying it out loud that you gave them the idea kind of makes it not work. Tom has this line which is, “You don’t have to feel like you have to come up with all the ideas. You just have to find people with good ideas and help them make them happen.” And there’s a servant leadership to that that I really value. So I sometimes say it’s like, “find your doers,” that’s the work. I don’t have to come up with the answer. I have to find the people who are motivated, but they’re stuck for some reason. They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the connections, they don’t realize here’s all the additional doors they can knock on. And I can way accelerate their ability to get traction just by being helpful.
Baker: What are the big questions and goals that motivate you to do your work?
Garg: Yeah, I think one area that I’m very motivated on is how do we substantially increase the amount of philanthropy that’s happening in science and technology? That’s a big question. How do we grow? How do we take more of the denominator and move it into the numerator? I think how do we think about big-if-true science? What are the big areas where we could have a big impact in science that we are or not betting on? And then how do we actually make this into science is going through a lot in this current moment? So how do we rebuild the public connectivity with science and think about strengthening science as an ecosystem apolitically?
Baker: The world of possibilities always seems bigger after talking with you. So thank you so much.
Garg: No, thank you for having me, and thank you for all the work.
Baker: Check our show notes to learn more about Renaissance Philanthropy and Kumar Garg’s work, and please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts.
What are your ideas that would be big if true? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org or by tagging us on social media using the hashtag, #SciencePolicyIRL. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and our podcast editor, Shannon Lynch. My name is Monya Baker, senior editor at Issues. Thanks for listening.