EPISODE 73
May 20, 2026

The ARPA for Philanthropy: Kumar Garg on Funding 'Big If True' Ideas in Science and Tech

Kumar Garg came away from his time in the Obama White House with a powerful set of tools to spotlight good ideas and scale them to drive change. Now, as the co-founder of Renaissance Philanthropy, he’s applying this toolset to philanthropy. Kumar and Tom Kalil are building the organization around a deceptively simple idea: What if philanthropy could help scientists, technologists, and innovators think bigger and then actually fund the work at the scale required?

Kumar and Claudia dive  into:
  • How Kumar would spend $500 million on health right now
  • Renaissance Philanthropy’s approach: time bound and thesis driven funding
  • How public health and academics could think bigger

Kumar’s intriguing ‘open notebook’ idea:

“It's very valuable to me if a researcher has the equivalent of an open notebook. ‘These are all the ideas… Here's my active research projects. Here's all the interesting sort of experiments I've done.’ You can imagine sending an agent out to read [these] open notebooks... it would be a way to discover people's work.”

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ABOUT OUR GUEST

Kumar Garg is the President at Renaissance Philanthropy. Kumar has helped to shape the science and tech landscape for almost two decades. Working with Eric Schmidt, he helped design and launch moonshot initiatives in education, provided early support to game-changing ideas and pioneers, and built ongoing multi-donor and multi-sector collaboratives. Prior to that, he helped set budget and policy priorities for the Obama Administration as part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and drove progress on topics ranging from education and workforce issues, biotechnology, entrepreneurship, space, advanced manufacturing, broadband, nanotechnology, behavioral sciences, digital media, incentive prizes, and broader innovation policy. In particular, he led the Obama Administration’s efforts to bolster science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, including development of major budget and policy initiatives in the State of the Union to train 100,000 excellent STEM teachers and bring computer science to all K-12 students, development of the Educate to Innovate campaign with over $1 billion in in-kind and philanthropic investment, and creation of iconic events such as the White House Science Fair. Prior to his time in government, Kumar worked on behalf of parents and children seeking educational reform as an education lawyer and advocate. Kumar received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a law degree from Yale Law School.

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