When I caught up with Omidyar Network CEO Mike Kubzansky last week, he was holed up in a hotel room in Denver. “I was lightning-stormed out of my connection,” he said with a chuckle. “I will hustle through the airport to get to my final destination as soon as our call is over.”
Despite the inconvenience, Kubzansky was in an ebullient mood. The previous day, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google engages in monopolistic practices to maintain its dominance over online advertising and internet search.
The verdict, which Google plans to appeal, is great news for Omidyar Network, the influential hybrid foundation and LLC established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, which has called out Google’s monopolistic practices as part of its broader efforts to rein in Big Tech. “We’re thrilled with the verdict,” Kubzansky said.
But there was more. On July 30, the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act, requiring tech companies to protect children from dangerous online content. In a statement, Omidyar Network praised its passage, calling the bill “a significant step forward in protecting our children’s digital wellbeing.”
The timing of these news items was profoundly auspicious because the purpose of my call was to discuss Kubzansky’s July 23 blog post announcing Omidyar Network’s “strategy evolution.” The funder, which currently has three priority areas — Responsible Technology, Reimagining Capitalism and Building Cultures of Belonging — wants to ensure that the rapid expansion of digital technology has a “positive impact on our lives and livelihoods, our communities and our society,” Kubzansky wrote.
Omidyar Network will share more details about its new strategy in early 2025. But that didn’t stop Kubzansky from explaining how he and his team, buoyed by recent successes in Washington, D.C., are thinking about this work, which aims to construct consensus-driven guardrails around increasingly ubiquitous digital technology, and AI in particular.
“We felt that the conversation about AI opened a window that isn’t going to be open forever,” he said. “We have an opportunity to have a conversation as a society about what we want tech to do for us.”
“Seismic change”
Omidyar Network conducted its last strategy refresh five years ago. During this time, funders have contended with a global pandemic, a racial justice uprising and what Kubzansky called the “seismic change” that was “the advent of generative AI in the public consciousness.”
The key words there are “the public consciousness.” While forward-looking funders had been sounding the alarm on AI for years, one could argue that it wasn’t until November 30, 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world, that the public truly came to terms with how AI could adversely transform society.
The average American wasn’t alone in this regard. In May 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate subcommittee and encouraged members to regulate AI. Looking back, Kubzansky found the public plea for regulation both revealing and unprecedented. “When Altman is saying, ‘We need guardrails,’ that’s a different conversation from those we’ve had in the past,” he said.
Seven months later, Omidyar Network launched a $30 million funding effort to promote the inclusive and responsible development of generative AI. The initiative, which presaged some of the themes that undergird its strategy evolution, “centers the social impacts of generative AI, elevates a range of diverse voices in AI development and governance, and promotes innovation and competition to maximize AI’s promise,” according to Omidyar Network’s press release.
In early 2024, the board, which includes Pam, kicked off its strategic planning process. Stakeholders also consulted with Pierre. While the eBay founder does not sit on Omidyar Network’s board and generally isn’t involved in its day-to-day grantmaking decisions, he has a say in the organization’s big-picture decisions, like rolling out its Reimagining Capitalism and Responsible Technology priority areas.
That being said, “it would be a mistake to read the new strategy as, ‘Oh, this is what Pierre wanted us to do,’” Kubzansky told me. “This is what our team thought was most likely to lead to high impact in the next five years.”
Omidyar Network, of course, is just one of many separate “companies, organizations and initiatives” backed by Pierre and Pam and collected under their Omidyar Group umbrella. The others, which include such consequential players as the Democracy Fund, Humanity United, First Look Media, Luminate and more, reflect their founders’ longstanding penchant for casting a wide net and looking beyond traditional philanthropic models to pioneer methods like LLC giving, which a whole bunch of billionaire funders have embraced. Omidyar Network’s own wide-ranging funding over the years also speaks to Omidyar philanthropy’s notable willingness, despite its eBay origins, to spurn simple tech boosterism and question prevailing norms in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Pushing for responsible technology
As the board worked through the strategy-setting process, Omidyar Network made investments that foreshadowed aspects of its forthcoming evolution.
In April, it announced that along with the Ford and Nathan Cummings foundations, it purchased shares in Anthropic, a generative AI company that was put up for sale as part of FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings. By investing in an AI company committed to transparency, accountability and safety, the funding aligned with its Responsible Technology priority area.
Here’s an example of what Omidyar Network means by “responsible technology.” Anthropic’s large language model — a type of AI program that uses machine learning to analyze and understand text — is governed by a constitution inspired by the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and informed by input from 1,000 Americans. The fact that Anthropic has such a constitution “is very unusual,” Kubzansky said. “You don’t see that in many companies this side of Patagonia.”
Omidyar Network’s board formally signed off on its strategy evolution in May. Two months later, it went public with the news, with Kubzansky’s blog post laying out potential priorities, including developing a framework to “responsibly steer digital technologies toward humanity’s shared interests and incredible possibilities” and cultivating “a more inclusive and representative digital technology system by expanding who finances, creates, advocates, governs and delivers it.”
Kubzansky told me he and his team are consulting with outside experts “who can give us perspectives that we may not consider ourselves.” These conversations will inform Omidyar Network’s plans to provide more details on the strategy early next year.
“The previous work isn’t going in the archives”
With a new strategy on the horizon, what of Omidyar Network’s existing funding areas: Responsible Technology, Reimagining Capitalism, and Building Cultures of Belonging?
“The previous work isn’t going in the archives,” Kubzansky said. “It’s very much informing our worldview and approach.”
Consider Reimagining Capitalism. The program’s “core thesis,” Kubzansky said, is, “‘what’s the relationship between governments and markets? And how does society in its political economy set boundaries and expectations for what it wants the private sector to be doing?’”
From there, it’s a very short theoretical leap to the area of tech governance, which Kubzansky cited as a potential new area of focus. Tech “tends to be relatively unregulated compared to, say, biomedicine or chemicals,” he said. Similarly, society has a vested interest in seeing that a handful of companies — and especially those that lack Anthropic’s commitment to the public good — don’t end up dominating the fast-growing generative AI market.
There’s also a strong thematic link between the revised strategy’s focus on cultivating a more inclusive technology system and Omidyar Network’s Building a Culture of Belonging program, which seeks to facilitate cohesion by bringing disengaged individuals into the civic, cultural and economic fold.
One of the program’s grantees, Black Innovation Alliance, is a coalition of 175 member organizations committed to providing equitable access to resources, knowledge and opportunities to Black entrepreneurs, tech founders and technologists. The alliance is an example of the type of organization that may receive support once Omidyar Network provides more details about its approach next year.
“Our underlying interest in belonging will remain,” Kubzansky said. “It will show up differently in this strategy because it will be done through a tech lens. Part of the focus will be on building the diverse, unexpected coalitions, new voices and civic infrastructure we need for the digital age.”
Consensus, not chaos
One of the many striking aspects of the D.C. District Court’s Google verdict was that it helped dispel a narrative — never all that accurate to begin with — that Big Tech is an omnipotent behemoth immune to efforts by the public sector, or philanthropy, to rein it in.
For starters, the trope fails to account for the “things philanthropy can do in terms of setting the intellectual agenda,” Kubzansky said. “It isn’t necessarily expensive, but it’s very important in terms of building a different institutional architecture around the sector.”
In June 2020, Omidyar Network published a set of policy papers citing potential antitrust issues against tech cases, including “Roadmap for a Monopolization Case Against Google Regarding the Search Market.” It has also funded an array of like-minded research and advocacy organizations like American Economic Liberties Project, Open Markets Institute and Public Knowledge. Over time, these efforts formed a bulwark against Big Tech’s formidable lobbying footprint and laid the legal groundwork that led to the D.C. District Court’s ruling.
It also helps that most Americans are on the same page. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of respondents believe tech companies should be regulated more than they are now, while only 16% feel they should be regulated less.
Americans’ frustration with the status quo came into sharp focus when the Senate, spurred by extensive lobbying from children and parents, passed the Kids Online Safety Act. “Those groups were super effective,” Kubzansky said. “One of the things we’ve been thinking about is how to build on that insight to create broader coalitions that include other voices — people of faith, veterans — into those conversations because you generate a more powerful effect when more voices are heard.”
Kubzansky and his team are also thinking about how Omidyar Network will measure the effectiveness of investments made after its strategy evolution is implemented. “We will have a preliminary five-year time horizon,” he said, “during which time we will be working with many others to ensure there are guardrails and frameworks in place to steer digital technology toward our shared humanity.”
His comment points to the future while giving a nod to the past. For the previous 30 years, Americans navigated a digital Wild West lacking the kinds of checks on power that we take for granted in other aspects of our lives. But the explosion of generative AI has given funders, policymakers and tech companies a rare opportunity to create a digital technology landscape governed by consensus rather than chaos.
“With every other technology, we’ve eventually decided on what we want it for,” Kubzansky said. “We haven’t gotten to that stage with tech, and it’s time to get there.”
