I’m an engineer who gave away $700 million.
For a decade I directed Google.org’s philanthropy. Then I left to build the alternative I’d been funding, and to raise money for it from the sector I knew best. Now I write software with AI every day.
Every one of those seats taught me the same thing: power funds what it can read, and charges the people it can’t a steep price for admission. Capital has always worked this way. AI does it now too, faster and at a scale we’ve never seen, deciding who gets seen, who gets counted, and who gets built for, usually far from the people it’s deciding about.
This publication is about that price. Who pays it, who sets it, and what it would take to lower it, in the systems that fund us and the systems that now think for us.
What you’ll get
Most weeks, a short note I call Field Notes: what moved in the systems reshaping the social sector, the money and the machines both, and what I make of it. The capital, the models, the power shifts, the arguments worth having. It draws on what the sector’s leading voices published, on what I can see in the funding market, and on what I’m learning building with AI. Sources linked, so you can check my work. Once a month or so, a longer essay. Throughout: who gets seen, who gets backed, and what gets built.
About the name
Borrowed, with gratitude, from James Baldwin, who knew better than anyone what admission costs. His price of the ticket was what America charged for entry into rooms never built for the people paying. Philanthropy has its own version: the price of being fundable is making yourself legible to people far from the problem. Now there’s a newer kind of admission price: making yourself legible to a machine. I write about that toll, and about the people who shouldn’t have to pay it.
About me
I’m Justin Steele, an engineer by training who has worked every seat at this table. I started on the ground at Year Up United, learning what the work costs up close. Then a decade behind the funder’s desk, directing Google.org’s giving across the Bay Area and the Americas.
And I build. Mostly from scratch, increasingly with AI: Kindora, a public benefit corporation putting AI to work for the social sector; Outdoorithm and Outdoorithm Collective, the company and nonprofit my wife Sally and I run to get families like ours outdoors; the Flourish Fund’s National Foster Care Innovation Challenge; CRMs and applicant tracking systems for mission-driven teams. I write code with AI every day.
I’m a trustee of The San Francisco Foundation and have served on the board of the National Society of Black Engineers. I live in Oakland with Sally and our four daughters.
I’m building in the sector I write about. Where that’s relevant, I’ll say so.
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