Since the sale of WhatsApp made him a billionaire a decade ago, Jan Koum has become a quiet but powerful megadonor, best known for backing Jewish causes. But it turns out the messaging app cofounder’s low-profile, $1.4 billion Koum Family Foundation is likely just one part of a philanthropic operation at least twice that size.
We can’t say for certain, but the 48-year-old appears to be the donor behind the K18n Foundation, a three-year-old nonprofit that received nearly $1.6 billion in 2022, shares three board officers with the Koum Family Foundation, including the same president, and is invested in a new venture fund launched by the tech billionaire.
The below-the-radar entity is the latest reminder that Silicon Valley’s young founders are rapidly reshaping the nonprofit and philanthropic landscapes, and often doing so without seeking any publicity. For instance, last month, I broke the news that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz last year contributed $1.9 billion to Good Ventures, the foundation that he runs with his wife, former journalist Cari Tuna — an amount on par with the endowments of some of the nation’s larger foundations.
Koum, for his part, hasn’t emptied his piggy bank for philanthropy — Forbes estimates his wealth at $16 billion. But his new organization does underline that these 40-something tech billionaires are putting their fortunes to charitable use at a dramatically faster rate than we have seen before, a sharp contrast with most of their boomer billionaire peers.
The new nonprofit also demonstrates the central role in tech philanthropy played by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the nation’s richest community foundation, which is known for managing the donor-advised funds of elite tech donors like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Skoll.
K18n is technically a “supporting organization” of SVCF, a philanthropic structure offered by many community foundations and DAF sponsors, and whose requirements fall roughly between those for a private foundation and a donor-advised fund.
Legally speaking, SVCF controls K18n, and has the power to appoint a majority of its board members. The community foundation’s president, Nicole Taylor, as well as its general counsel and chief financial officer, serve on the K18n board, holding three of five seats.
“SVCF’s policy is that we don’t comment on our donors’ philanthropic activities,” a community foundation spokesperson said in a statement.
The many connections between K18n and Koum
To be clear, Jan Koum is not mentioned anywhere in K18n’s IRS filings. Yet in the nonprofit’s 2022 990, its most recent, K18n reports both staff and investments in common with the Koum Family Foundation.
The nonprofit’s president is Yana Kalika, a former learning technologies manager, according to LinkedIn, who also draws a six-figure salary as president and CEO of the Koum Family Foundation.
K18n’s treasurer also had a role as chief financial officer of the Koum Family Foundation that year, and K18n’s secretary was listed as serving in the same role at the grantmaker. Kalika and the other officers did not respond to messages sent to them and representatives.
The two organizations’ balance sheets reveal another link. The Koum Family Foundation and K18n are both invested in a pooled fund, Newlands Philanthropic, which is one branch of a $10 billion investment firm, Newlands, launched in 2021 by Koum and a former partner at the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
“Some peers consider Dallas-based Newlands to be effectively Koum’s family office,” Forbes reported late last year.
What might this new $1.5 billion fund support?
What form K18n’s funding takes remains to be seen. The nonprofit reported no grants and paid no salaries in 2022, with all of its $1.2 million in expenses going to management, legal accounting and insurance. Its assets totaled $1.5 billion at the end of the year, roughly $100 million less than it received, apparently due to a downturn in its portfolio.
There is another window into Koum’s priorities, though: the Palo Alto-based Koum Family Foundation, which has been granting around $100 million a year since 2019.
The foundation has sent its biggest checks — and nearly all its support — to Jewish groups in recent years. In 2022, its top grantees included the European Jewish Association ($15 million), itrek ($3 million), the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center ($2.3 million), Birthright ($2 million) and Stanford Jewish Center ($2 million). Another $8.5 million went to the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, including several awards naming specific recipients.
“More than any other cause, Koum gives to nonprofits affiliated with Chabad Lubavitch, the international and growing Hasidic Orthodox Jewish movement with origins in Eastern Europe,” reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an extensive 2022 profile of Koum and his philanthropy.
Koum, who was born in Ukraine and immigrated to California at age 16, has also cut checks to his birth country’s department of health to buy ambulances ($1.7 million), X-ray systems ($1 million) and ultrasound machines ($470,685). The foundation has also favored Stanford University, sending it awards of $5 million in both 2021 and 2022 (for Stanford Medical), and nearly $10 million in 2020.
The foundation’s $1.4 billion endowment in 2022 was actually down 37% from a year earlier, but it’s likely the portfolio has since recovered, according to John Seitz, founder and CEO of FoundationMark. IRS filings indicate the foundation was primarily invested in tech stocks, which generally fell in 2022 but rebounded last year. For instance, Meta, the foundation’s largest holding, fell to a low of around $120 at the end of 2022, only to nearly triple in value last year — and recently topped $540 a share. That could mean K18n is now even larger than it was in 2022.
What is the relationship between SVCF and K18n?
Every supporting organization is “operated exclusively for the benefit” of the organization it supports, at least in legal terms. In K18n’s case, this reality is spelled out in the mission listed in its IRS forms: “to support the programs and activities of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.” A later section adds some additional detail, while remaining vague: “by making charitable gifts supporting education, the arts, religion, and humanitarian aid efforts.”
In practice, a wide range of supporting organizations exist that are indistinguishable to a casual observer from independent private foundations, ranging from the gargantuan $4.9 billion George Kaiser Family Foundation (a supporting organization of the Tulsa Community Foundation) to breast cancer advocate Laurie Mezzalingua’s $67 million Saint Agatha Foundation (a supporting organization of the National Philanthropic Trust).
SVCF controls a variety of other supporting organizations, albeit much smaller ones. Examples include the $4 million Shuchman Lesser Foundation, the $4 million Chong-Moon Lee Foundation and the $14 million Driscoll Family Foundation. Each has its own mission, though unlike K18n, only one mentions SVCF.
Donors and their families cannot control the board of any supporting organization nor have veto power over decisions, said Ben McDearmon, director of legal resources for the Council on Foundations. By placing such high-level staff — its CEO, CFO and general counsel — on the board of K18n, SVCF has put itself in a “position of strength” regarding its legal requirements.
Yet there can be gray areas.
“Practically speaking, do those boards sometimes kind of look to that person, sort of giving more weight to what they say? I don’t think that is out of the question,” McDearmon said. “I think a lot of weight is given to what the goals were when they were setting this up.”
Why start a supporting organization if you have a foundation?
Koum already had a private foundation, the Koum Family Foundation, when he started K18n in 2021. So why set up a new structure?
One reason may be what K18n has plans to support. Some types of funding and activities are more easily carried out through a supporting organization, many of which run their own programs, versus working through a private foundation, McDearmon said. Individual grants, such as scholarships, can also be easier, and public charities have some leeway to support lobbying. He likened setting up such a structure to the reason some families set up donor-advised funds in addition to private foundations.
Christopher Hoyt, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, said another major reason donors opt for supporting organizations are the tax benefits.
Donations to a supporting organization qualify for more tax benefits, including a higher charitable income tax deduction. To Hoyt, the fact that K18n received a $1.6 billion donation in 2022, the year after it was founded, offers a possible motivation. Newlands, notably, was launched in 2021.
“There might have been a lot of income that year,” he said, noting he was speculating. “Maybe they sold a lot of the business, had $20 billion worth of income and they wanted a large deduction.”
Whatever the rationale, the quiet launch of the $1.5 billion K18n Foundation is yet another example of a new crop of mega-billionaires putting philanthropic infrastructure in place dwarfing the big legacy funders of yesteryear. It’s unclear what K18n was set up to support, but it certainly has deep coffers to draw upon. And judging from its posture so far, it’ll do so well out of the limelight.
