The Rant Podcast
A bi-weekly podcast focused on pulling back the curtain on the American higher education system and breaking down the people, the policies and the politics. The podcast host, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is a known innovator and leader in higher education. The podcast will not pull any punches as it delves into tough questions about the culture, politics and policies of our higher education system.
The Rant Podcast
Navigating the Next Four Years with Ellie Bertani
Ellie Bertani, CEO of GitLab Foundation, revolutionizes philanthropy with a data-driven approach that puts measurable economic impact at the center of every grant decision. This eye-opening conversation reveals how GitLab Foundation aims to generate at least $100 in increased earnings for every dollar they invest – a "North Star 100X goal" that guides their work across the United States, Colombia, and Kenya.
What happens when you apply financial modeling to philanthropy? Bertani explains how her foundation builds ROI projections for every potential grant, allowing them to identify high-impact opportunities that might otherwise go unfunded. This approach enables GitLab Foundation to take calculated risks on innovative, sometimes "crazy" ideas that more conservative funders might avoid – precisely the role philanthropy should play in our ecosystem.
The conversation explores GitLab's unique partnerships, including their collaboration with OpenAI and the Balmer Group on an AI for Economic Opportunity Fund. These partnerships amplify their impact while ensuring emerging technologies benefit those who need them most. As Bertani notes, historically, technological advances haven't immediately helped lower-income communities – a pattern she's determined to break.
Against the backdrop of political uncertainty and growing scrutiny of philanthropy, Bertani shares why GitLab's focus on measurable outcomes and economic mobility for Americans remains vital. Her journey from early-career nonprofit work to the Gates Foundation to leading frontline workforce initiatives at Walmart and Wells Fargo uniquely positions her to bridge sectors and maximize impact.
For foundation leaders, nonprofit professionals, and anyone interested in evidence-based approaches to creating opportunity, this conversation offers practical insights on measuring what matters. How can philanthropic dollars drive real economic change? What does true partnership between funders, grantees, and industry look like? Listen now to discover how data-driven giving can transform lives.
https://www.gitlabfoundation.org/
eloy@4leggedmedia.com
Hi, this is Eloy Ortiz-Oakley and welcome back to the Rant podcast, the podcast where we pull back the curtain and break down the people, the policies and the politics of our higher education system. In this episode, I get to sit down with my friend and colleague, ellie Bertani. Ellie is the CEO of GitLab Foundation and we talk about how her foundation is focused on return on investment and supporting innovation in the field to improve access to opportunity through increased earnings and economic mobility. We also talk about how foundations at large are supporting innovation in the field and improving outcomes through their grantees and through their investments on the ground. But before I get into my conversation with Ellie, I do want to take a moment just to highlight the several things that have occurred since our last podcast.
Speaker 1:Things continue to change in Washington DC, whether it's the tariff derby that's happening right now or the impacts of the Department of Education. But recently there's been an attack on 501c3s, whether it's the attacks on Harvard University's non-profit status or questions about whether or not non-profits throughout the country are supporting terrorist organizations. Now, speaking for my foundation, the College Futures Foundation, we support Americans, americans underground in California, helping them improve economic mobility through a better return on investment for their education. There is nothing anti-American against that. As a matter of fact, it's the complete opposite. We are improving outcomes, we are improving the efficiency of government and other forms of investments in institutions that support learning, and I applaud GitLab Foundation, gates Foundation and many of our other sister organizations who are doing just that supporting people on the ground, improving the lives of people who are sometimes forgotten by our governments local, state and national government and so the work of nonprofits really supports the American dream, supports efforts in America to ensure that everybody has equal access to opportunity. Those are things that we should be supporting because it gets to people on all sides of the aisle on the left, on the right, everything in between. There is a non-profit there supporting those efforts. So the non-profit ecosystem is really there to support gaining access to the American dreams in all of its forms.
Speaker 1:So I hope that the administration backs off on some of those efforts. Certainly there are policy debates that should be had, and certainly the administration should be driving down on institutions and organizations to improve the efficiency of government and improve the efficiency of the supports that go to help people in everyday communities across this country. So I know for our part at College Futures Foundation. We will continue to double down on our efforts to improve economic mobility, to improve access to the California dream, to take what we learn here in California and echo it across the country and help shape federal policy. That's what foundations do. They support those efforts, they give voice to great ideas, they mitigate the risk for innovation and they help support their states and their communities in this country moving forward.
Speaker 1:So I hope the administration and Congress see the value of the nonprofit ecosystem and find ways to continue to support their efforts, not to undermine their efforts. I get that sometimes they disagree with the positions of some nonprofits, but we can't pick and choose. This sort cuts both ways. So let's maintain support for 501c3s and maintain support for organizations that are supporting innovation on the ground and improving the efficiency of government, of bureaucracies and of putting the people first. So with that backdrop, please enjoy my conversation with Ellie Bertani, ceo of GitLab Foundation. Ellie, welcome to the Rant podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me. It's great to see you, Eli.
Speaker 1:It's great to see you too. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us here on the Rant. I know there's a lot going on in your world, a lot going on with your organization, so let's jump right into it. So, elliot, you lead a relatively new foundation, the GitLab Foundation, and you're focused on improving lifetime earnings through access to opportunity, and I know we're all talking about opportunity these days. Tell us about the foundation, its origins and its mission. Let's start there. Tell us a little bit about GitLab.
Speaker 3:Wonderful. Well, thanks again for having me. It's always a pleasure to see you and to be able to talk a little bit about our work but, more importantly, the great work that our grantees are doing all across the US, as well as in Colombia and Kenya, which are two other markets we operate in. So, as you said, our focus is entirely on economic mobility and helping people increase their lifetime earnings. We think about that fairly broadly. We invest in areas that include workforce development, but also technology innovations that can help nonprofits and our grantees really extend the reach of their services and the depth of their impact in helping people increase their wages to above a living wage.
Speaker 3:But what makes us somewhat unique is our approach to grantmaking. So we take a very return on investment centric approach when we think about projects that we want to fund. For every grant that we consider, we actually build a financial model, if you can believe it, that helps us estimate what we think the impact on people's paychecks or wallets will be over time. And we do it because we want to have the maximum impact with every dollar that we think we can. For us, that means we'd like to drive at least $100 in increased income for every dollar that we invest.
Speaker 3:We call that our North Star 100X goal and when we started two and a half years ago we didn't actually know if that was even an attainable goal, if we'd be able to find projects like that, if grantees would be able and willing to share their data with us in a way where we could make these estimations and support measuring these outcomes on the tail end. But we've been really fortunate and pleased to see that we have been able to find these kinds of investments. We have made over 120 grants in our first two years and our portfolio is really delivering on these results and we've been really excited to share these projects and these grantees with other funders that want to invest in high ROI type of work. So we're really looking to extend our impact in the future.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm glad to hear that you are focused on impact and focused on economic mobility. That's certainly something that resonates with me in my day job at College Futures. We're also focused on economic mobility, so this seems to be a very important focus for organizations like yours these days, which I think is the right focus. How do you actually think about, in your grant making, moving the needle on economic mobility with your grantees in the work that they do?
Speaker 3:So we try to be a really grantee-centric partner in everything we do. So even though probably what I described sounds a little bit complicated and maybe burdensome for grantees and how we think about evaluating grants, we try to make a relatively light touch and take a what I would call a rigorous but reasonable approach. So whenever we are looking for a project, looking for a high-performing, exciting organization, often we'll invite several ideas from them and part of our process is to explore the potential return on investment of any idea that they bring to the table. We look at their business models with them and say where would an investment really turbocharge your growth or your organization? Or what is a new idea that other funders haven't funded for you but is a real moonshot?
Speaker 3:One of the things that's very fortunate about us is we are able, because of our funding structure, to really take risks with our money. Some funders are able to do that and take a more risk-averse approach. They want to fund proven and known organizations or ideas. We're very lucky to be able to push the envelope and try to build and invest in new things with our grantees and we think that's a really important role for philanthropy to play to invest in demonstration projects or somewhat crazy ideas that could really change an organization or change the sector. So we work closely with grantees. We explore their models, we explore their creative, crazy ideas. We work with them to model these ideas and then when we find something really innovative and exciting, we both invest in it and then work with grantees to build their capacity in addition to measure their outcomes. And we like to stay really close to our grantees and be supportive in a variety of ways.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you mentioned this opportunity for philanthropy to open up the appetite to risk in the field, because I think that is philanthropy's most important role. We have the opportunity, whether because of our resources or our scope or reach, to create an opportunity for grantees and people in the field to take risks, risks that they can't otherwise afford to take. I mean, I think that's exactly the role philanthropy should play, so applaud the GitLab Foundation for playing that role. Now you mentioned that you operate in a couple of other countries Colombia and Kenya. Why those countries? How did you get there?
Speaker 3:I love this question because it does seem a little bit random at face value.
Speaker 3:When we decided to work in international markets, we basically did an analysis of a variety of factors that we thought would be important.
Speaker 3:We wanted to look at income disparities because obviously with our mission we want to try to drive incomes as high as possible and so that difference between the lowest income and the highest income in a country can really matter. We also looked at things like the ease of doing business, for philanthropy in a country can really matter. We also looked at things like the ease of doing business for philanthropy in a country. Are there other successful philanthropies already there that we could learn from? Because we wanted to have it interrupt as quickly as possible. We looked at things like how transparent is the country, how much data is available to help us make good decisions, and then, frankly, we saw sort of clusters of interesting potential markets we could work in in Latin America and in East Africa. So we chose one market at each and have been learning on the ground as we go and with a hope and a desire to potentially grow from those base countries in the future.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about you and your journey to GitLab. Tell us about what you were doing before you got to the foundation and also what drew you to this mission and to this organization.
Speaker 3:Excellent Well, so I've had a bit of a wandering path to get here, though in hindsight the pieces do seem to fit together. When I started my career journey I was very mission-oriented and started working in the nonprofit sector pretty early. I started at a frontline nonprofit and then had the great opportunity to join a very early stage philanthropy, a foundation based in Seattle where I'm from, and was the second hire. So I helped them build their grant-making program from scratch, which was a great precursor for the role I'm in today, since we two are a new foundation. I then had the opportunity to join the Bates Foundation. I was there for three years in their global health program and that really opened my eyes to the possibility of cross-sectoral work.
Speaker 3:So Gates and the Global Health Program was doing really innovative work at the time on incentivizing private sector companies to invest in neglected diseases and drug development and vaccine development diagnostics, and I was very intrigued at how philanthropy could work with the private sector and the public sector to tackle these big issues. So I learned a lot there. I got very motivated and I said I want to both study this more. I went back to graduate school at that time, but eventually I want to go on the private sector and learn as much as I can about that side of the fence. So after grad school I was in the private sector for 10 years. In particular, I spent eight years at Walmart. There I was in charge of frontline workforce economic opportunity so frontline workforce strategy and read and invested in a number of programs to help Walmart frontline workers achieve economic stability and mobility in their jobs with Walmart. It was a really exciting time to be there because the leadership team had really was really acknowledging Walmart's challenges with the frontline workforce and really committed to it.
Speaker 3:So we did a lot of meaningful work there. I then went to Wells Fargo and did similar work for a few years, did similar work for a few years and then had this sort of amazing opportunity, landed by LAP, to start and build from ground up a new foundation focused on economic mobility that really sort of was sort of a capstone of all this work that I had done over the prior 20 years. So I feel incredibly lucky to sit in this seat today and help build this institution from the ground up.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure GitLab Foundation feels the same way. They're lucky to have you build it, particularly at this moment in time. Let's talk a little bit about this moment in time. When you started this journey with GitLab, you were beginning to focus on economic mobility. I think you, like a lot of us, saw the challenges that, as you mentioned, frontline workers were facing post-COVID struggling on the ground with their earnings, the cost of living in communities throughout the country, the feeling amongst many Americans that there was a lack of access to opportunities. So you began this journey well before the last presidential election. How has the changes in politics, the changes in attitude right now, affected the way you think about your mission, or has that just helped you double down on the mission of improving economic mobility?
Speaker 3:Gosh, it's such a good question. It's such an important and challenging question to answer, if only because it feels like every day there's a shift and new news and new considerations to take into account. I assume, even once this podcast is published, you know, things will have dramatically changed.
Speaker 1:It's already old.
Speaker 3:Right now. It's a risk we have, but I will say, as with most areas in industries, uncertainty makes it very difficult to plan well for this work. We are seeing a lot of concern in our international markets. Obviously, with the cut on international aid that's affecting at least half of our grantees are impacted one way or another, some very significantly, some less significantly, but we've seen a lot of organizations already shutting down, which is, you know, for people who care about this kind of work, it's really disappointing.
Speaker 3:Reactions may range from disappointed to horrified, depending on the issue area. I have worries that there might be targeting of the philanthropic sector in and of itself and 501c3s and tax-exempt statuses, which would really affect how donors think about funding. And then, of course, with the economy potentially on the brink of recession, we know that historically, donors tend to pull back Now. So those are all the negatives I will say. There are a few things that I'm optimistic about and hopeful about. I know already that there are donors that are stepping up and already vocally committing to giving more than they would have otherwise given the number of challenges, and that is a great sign. And.
Speaker 3:I hope that other funders and donors do that.
Speaker 3:One of our principal funders, sidsi Brandy, has stepped up and increased his funding year over year, and I think that's a great. It is the right thing to do in this moment. It is the right thing to do in this moment. I also think that you know we have been on a journey as a foundation to be highly outcomes-oriented, highly ROI-focused, and I think we're fortunate to have that approach because it means that in a world of more limited resources, we can have high confidence that our dollars are pointed towards the highest impact possible. And I think we're on a mission to try to also convince other philanthropies that it's great to think about outcomes, to think about return on investments, to adopt this mindset so that all of us in this difficult times can maximize the impact of every dollar. And so you know, hopefully, we've been talking to a lot of funders about our methodology, about how we think about this, we've been advising them on how they might similarly think about outcomes and ROI, and I'm hopeful that that is a useful conversation to have at this moment.
Speaker 1:I hope so too. A useful conversation to have at this moment. I hope so too. I mean, if you think about the work that you're doing, it fits exactly where the rhetoric is leading us towards. So we've heard a lot about efficiency in government the last couple of months. So whether those are rhetorical statements or true statements we'll see.
Speaker 1:But we've heard about efficiency. We've heard about creating greater opportunity for low-income and working-class Americans. We've heard about the erosion in confidence in government in other organizations. So the work that you're leading isn't some woke project. The work that you're leading is actually aligning very well with the need for more focused investment in opportunity, investments that people can actually see the return on their investment appropriate mission right now than the mission you have. So the notion that the United States government or this administration would even think about going after an organization, a philanthropic organization like yours or the one I lead or any of the other ones who are trying to create greater opportunity for more Americans, is just beyond my comprehension. So I'm hopeful that that's just rhetoric at this point, although, as of the time of this recording, harvard's nonprofit status is under attack or at least under threat. So we'll see where this all goes, but I certainly hope that you and your organization continue to show the leadership that you're showing and the focus on return on investment that we need to see in every organization right now.
Speaker 3:Well, I appreciate that. Thank you for the kind words and I hope I, like you, hope that my worst fears aren't realized. What a shame. There's so much good that philanthropy does and the nonprofit sector as a whole. It fills so many gaps that the federal government itself otherwise would have theoretically would have to fund or support. That's why we have the nonprofit sector in this country, and part of the reason taxes are lower than in many other countries is because it provides this foundational support, and so it would be a gross shame if you know the generosity of so many Americans were impacted by some strange turn of thought.
Speaker 1:Now you've talked about your mission, and I think it's a great mission, particularly for this moment in time. Tell us about your partners. Who are your partners in this work? And you talked a little bit about return on investment. What do you see success looking like in, say, five years?
Speaker 3:So on, partners. So we actually think of ourselves. One of our core values is collaboration. We think of ourselves as a and talk about ourselves as a partnerships first grant, maker, and that means a couple of different things. First, it means we are always seeking to partner with other foundations, individual donors as well. A couple examples in a minute. But for us, again, trying to inspire others to invest in these high ROI projects is a priority. There are more projects than we ourselves can possibly fund. We have discovered that at this point, which is exciting, and so where others want to, you know, jump on board and help us in delivering these high value projects, we're always excited. An example of this is a couple of years ago, we launched one of the first funds related to economic mobility and AI in the sector.
Speaker 3:We call it our AI for Economic Opportunity Fund and this last year we were very fortunate to have the Balmer Group join us in a partnership around this. So what Balmer liked about our approach is we move very fast, as you might imagine, since we've had 120 grantees in two years. We're really focused on getting capital out the door and we have a very streamlined at this point vetting process and we leverage experts to help us make some of these decisions. So what Balmer committed to do was we would fund effectively the seed stage of 10 to 15 different ideas through the fund and they pre-committed to scaling as many of those projects that showed success to the tune of an additional $1 to $3 million. So we're putting in maybe $250,000, a small initial investment running a cohort courting these grantees for a year and then after a year there's sort of a demo day. They show the results and the Balmer team will select an additional subset to fund as a second stage. Really exciting, novel way to partner. Really good for the grantee organizations. It really helps us leverage up our dollars because ours are, you know, significant but still much less than Ballmer Groups. We also look to partner with leading industry experts. So in our AI fund we're one of only two social impact organizations that's a formal partnership with OpenAI. Engineers actually for six months advise and work with the grantees to build their tools and products, because we're really trying to maximize the grantees' success rates as well.
Speaker 3:So funder partners and industry partners very important to us, but of course, our most important partners are our grantees and, as you've heard, we think about ways to invest in grantees in other ways to help them maximize their impact and effectiveness.
Speaker 3:And one of the ways we do this, in addition to the examples I just gave, is we have this very unique Learning for Action Fund that we launched last year and this is a focus on helping nonprofits build their internal data management measurement impact methodologies. So in some cases this is giving grants to organizations to help them do end-user qualitative research right so they can survey their program participants, learn what's working and what's not about their services or their products and then help them iterate and improve their program design. And another way is helping them quite literally track and measure their impact over time, because when nonprofits can talk about the return on their investment or the actual impact they're having on earnings Others. We believe other funders will come in and get excited and react to that, and more so. Most funders don't fund in this area. We think it's a uniquely important place to support grantees, and so we started doing more and more of that over time.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like you're filling a really important space in philanthropy and helping philanthropy see greater opportunities to focus on that return on investment. Now you talked about your relationship with OpenAI. Obviously, AI is dominating conversations in education, technology and in other workforce training spaces. You and I both make the annual pilgrimage to ASU GSV and you can't help, but I mean, there isn't a topic or an organization that doesn't have AI in the title somewhere. How do you see AI helping advance economic mobility in today's society?
Speaker 3:I am cautiously optimistic is sort of my frame of mind these days, but very optimistic in a few select areas. The caution, of course, is there's a lot of downside risk, as we all know. That is concerning, truly concerning For the nonprofit sector. A couple things I believe to be true. First, I don't want to see the sector left behind, as has been in many prior instances with the advent of new technologies, where the private sector and extractive companies have really dominated the use and the technology and it has, you know, a lot of. The outcomes therefore have been either unintended negative consequences or simply without a social impact frame. So, and face value, I think is important to invest in nonprofits' ability to use this technology, work with this technology, so they don't get left behind.
Speaker 3:I also think that there's real opportunity on two fronts as it relates to economic opportunity. The first is there are a lot of very exciting, interesting tools that can be developed and are being developed by the nonprofit sector to help attack problems that have traditionally been very difficult to attack. So some examples include if I'm coming out of, if I'm a high schooler coming out of high school and I care about being able to, you know, have a living wage support my family someday? What are the best careers I can move into? What are the best training programs or degrees or credentials I should be pursuing? That has traditionally been very, very opaque, very difficult to navigate. Very few professionals right, like you think of a high school, 600 people with one college counselor.
Speaker 3:Right, there's big opportunities to expand access for people to critical information to help them make great decisions. That extends across many, many areas, many tools you could think of that help people access great information to improve their lives. The second area that I think is real potential is for nonprofits to themselves be able to become more cost efficient, extend their services to more people. You know grow because they can do more with less, and that's you know. You know grow because they can do more with less, and that's you know AI 101, but I think more and more nonprofits are harnessing that potential and there are more and more tools that will help them do so over time. So I am bullish in those areas, with some real concerns about other areas we haven't discussed yet today.
Speaker 1:Certainly the speed at which things are moving and our own history in humanity. I can't say I've witnessed too many periods of time where the advance in technology has directly benefited the lowest income sections of our society right off the bat. So I'm hopeful that we can design for that, that we can focus on that, that we can focus on that and I think philanthropy has an important role to play to ensure that, as our grantees, as the field is leveraging technology to improve things like economic mobility or to improve educational outcomes, that we design around those who have the least access to the technology first, that we design around those who have the least access to the technology first, but we'll see how this all shakes out.
Speaker 3:I couldn't agree more and in a sense it's been really take our partnership with OpenAI as an example and by seeing the dozens of grantees and exciting projects that really have a social impact, lens and intent that will help OpenAI, as one example, think differently about how it wants to advance its own work, how important it is to take into account the common good, not just the private good, as it's doing the rest of its work as well. I'm hopeful.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll trust your hope. So, ellie, let me ask you one final question as we begin to wrap up when do you see Get Lab Foundation over the next five years, and what impact do you hope?
Speaker 3:to see from your organization, boy. So we've been talking a lot about this internally over the past few months and working on a three-year strategic plan. You know, first and foremost, we want to continue to be the best outcome-centric, collaborative grantmaker, risk-tolerant grantmaker we can be. So always, we want to ensure that we're doing high-quality work, that we're learning from the best minds in the industry, like yours, that we are getting, you know, are highly grantee centric and moving capital as quickly as possible to innovators who are doing really excited work. That, though, we're really we're seeing, as I mentioned earlier, interest from other funders on how they themselves can be more outcomes oriented.
Speaker 3:We're starting to have a lot of conversations We've had, you know, 25 to 30 in the past year alone and so we're thinking about, you know, taking on more formal advisory roles with some of these philanthropies who are coming to talk to us, potentially doing some modeling on behalf of some of these other organizations that have smaller staff but want to take this approach or to train up their staff on how to do this kind of work. I think if we can extend our mission to really think about the whole sector transforming and moving in this direction, that's net positive and that really could extend our impact and we're excited about the potential to co-invest as always, with other large philanthropies in this space, and anything we can do in that regard will just extend the potential for more and more organizations to have these high return investments. So those are the directions we're heading in. We are growing as a team, growing as an organization, and I'm just really proud of the work that the team and the grantees are delivering.
Speaker 1:Well, we're also proud of your work. I think you're a great example of what a philanthropy can do, how it can use return on investment to really drive measurement of philanthropy and to focus it on improving the lives of people throughout this country and, in your case, throughout the world. So, ellie, thank you for being on the Rant podcast and thank you for the work that you're leading.
Speaker 3:Thank you, it's been a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thanks for joining us. Everybody, you've been listening to my conversation with Ellie Bertani, president and CEO of Get Left Foundation. If you enjoyed this conversation, please leave your comments. Leave me any questions that you might have based on this conversation and continue to follow us on YouTube Hit, subscribe and if you're listening to us on audio, continue to follow us on your favorite podcast platform.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining us everybody, and we'll see you all soon.
