NobleReach Foundation's $500M Endowment to Transform American Innovation

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic exemplify national challenges requiring a new approach to achieve the most effective technological solutions. 

NobleReach Foundation’s CEO Arun Gupta is taking on those challenges, heading a nonprofit startup with half a billion dollars in endowment. Founded as a spinoff of LMI, NobleReach offers a new and ambitious model to drive American innovation through the collaboration of academia, and the private and public sectors.

Arun is a highly successful venture capitalist, a best-selling author of Venture Meets Mission, a Faculty Lecturer at Stanford University, and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Georgetown University. 

He is marshaling the U.S.’s brightest entrepreneurs to drive this innovation model.

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I'm Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series, Experienced Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

Artificial intelligence has made visible the technological challenges facing our country. NobleReach Foundation CEO Arun Gupta is leading a nonprofit startup presenting a new model to solve these challenges, bringing together academia and the private and public sectors to drive innovation.

Arun is a highly successful venture capitalist, best-selling author of Venture Meets Mission, a faculty lecturer at Stanford University, and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Georgetown University.

He shares the early steps now underway at NobleReach that include a half-billion dollar endowment and the launch of the first cohort of NobleReach Scholars. The 19 selected are being placed into positions at the intersection of academia and the private and public sectors, building a community whose members are dedicated to public service in a disruptively new way.

Arun, thank you for being a guest on Experienced Voices. 

Arun Gupta: Thank you for having me today. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, I'm very excited to speak with you this morning because I looked at your background as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, bestselling author, and professor of entrepreneurship. As I was reading your background, I was impressed on how deeply involved you are with entrepreneurs.

I thought the first step we would take in our conversation is for you to lay the groundwork of how do you assess the entrepreneurial talent that exists in America that is part of your story of keeping America competitive. 

Arun Gupta: Well, thank you for the question.

And thank you for having me today. You know, when I, when I think about the entrepreneurial talent in the U. S., it probably has a couple of dimensions to it. One is the, the cultural spirit of entrepreneurship that we have here in America which I think is unlike anywhere else in the world, and our ability to, create entrepreneurs in the talent creation process. I like to consider those our two superpowers in this country, our ability to create talent and our ability to Innovate with entrepreneurs. The evidence of that is everyone from around the world comes here to do both.

They come to our higher education ecosystem and they also come to start companies here. I think what makes us unique is deeply culturally, the ability to take risks, fail, get back up, and do it again. While I think our talent is outstanding here in the U. S. compared to other places in the world, I think what really differentiates us is the cultural infrastructure that we put around that talent to allow them to be able to really grow and succeed.

And if they don't succeed, be able to do it again receive capital, and learn from it. and succeed accordingly. That I think is the core of our entrepreneurial ecosystem here. 

Jeanne Gray: You've established a mission through your foundation, NobleReach, and we'll get into the details of that, but part of that I picked up was that you're advocating for some changes and that the time is now for those changes, specifically about entrepreneurship. So why now? What has been prompting you to say there should be change? 

Arun Gupta: The why now has a couple of elements. One is around where is the innovation coming from in our society? The second is, where is that talent coming from? The third is what are the kinds of problems we're looking to address? 

When you look at the kinds of problems we're looking to address the world is changing rapidly, right? The world is anyone that had a five year plan didn't have ChatGPT in their five-year plan.

The point being is that the kind of mindset we need today to solve these problems requires a level of testing and learning or the mindset of building the plane while you're flying it. We can't just sit and plan for five years and then go execute. We had the benefit of that in previous decades we don't any longer. 

So the folks best equipped to build the plane while they're flying it are actually entrepreneurs. That's what they're used to doing. That's what they've been trained to do. And that requires constantly testing and learning and iterating and building, a minimum viable product and having a lean startup.

And so why we contend the why now is that for great power competition especially against our autocratic adversaries today again, our superpowers are our ability to innovate in this country.

Having said that, what we now also need to think about is not how do we innovate because we have the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world, but how do we now connect that to government in the scale and reach of government to solve these big problems?

We're not going to solve climate or national security or defense or cyber or health with just a startup either. We need the scale and reach of government to be able to do these because a lot of these problems aren't only U. S. problems...global problems and they require a lot of different stakeholders to participate in a meaningful way.

And that's why we think the time is now even more so than a decade ago. 

Jeanne Gray: Now, I know you're advocating for this publicly. You wrote your bestseller, Venture Meets Mission, and now you've also founded NobleReach Foundation. Share a little bit about the mission of NobleReach and how that dovetails into your advocacy.

Arun Gupta: Three core areas that we focus on at NobleReach. One is while students are at school, through our academic programs, how do we inspire them to think about using their entrepreneurial talent, not on things like Candy Crush 3. 0 but creating curriculum whereby they're using that entrepreneurial talent to solve mission-driven, social impactful problems, but in a for-profit way.

We're also trying to break down the barrier of an artificial choice that we've given this generation with the vernacular that we use for profit, not for profit, private sector, public sector makes it feel like they have to pick making money or doing good, but we feel like there's a middle ground there.

And we're trying to create a language around that and highlight that. So that's the academic side. Once we're inspiring these students around that, we also think we need to start thinking about how do we modernize the infrastructure to take that talent and expose them to government in a Teach for America like model where people are top tech students can now go into government for a year or two, really understand the landscape and the language and, the purposefulness of government and humanize government in that process so that they can then decide whether they want to stay in public sector or look at a career where they're, creating change from the outside in a positive way.

We can start to rebuild trust in the society. Then the third is we have an innovation program where really what we're looking to do there is like, how do we create an army of entrepreneurs that we can start connecting to the deep research that we do inside of government in our academic institutions and bringing that research out in more with more efficacy, so that we have more at bats in this country to take that research and commercialize it to solve big problems. 

Those are the three areas that we're really advocating for. How do we create a renewed partnership between government and entrepreneurs to go solve big problems? 

Jeanne Gray: Can you give the listener an example of these students that come into NobleReach and then you place them?

Where are you placing them? And can you give an example of the exposure to a big challenge or big problem that's drawing out their entrepreneurial spirit. 

Arun Gupta: Sure. The students we're bringing on board, we've received applications from across 90 universities. We were 10X oversubscribed.

They fit into our deep tech model of looking for students who have AI, cyber materials, bio backgrounds that we're placing. Currently we're placing them across eight agencies. Those include, but not exclusively Space Force, Navy, Treasury Commerce, CISA, FDA and HUD.

The students now go in and they've just completed a three week boot camp that we held here in D. C. where we brought in senior leaders across academic, industry, and government to speak to them. To talk to them about why they are needed at this point in time in a meaningful way. 

Those speakers included Secretary Raimondo from Commerce, Condoleezza Rice who leads the Hoover Institute and former Secretary of State, national security folks like Matt Pottinger and Colin Call from the Trump and Biden administration, respectively. Plus Jen Easterly from CISA and numerous others that came and spoke to these students to really show the need for what we think is going to be a growing need of dual citizens, people that understand the public sector and the private sector in a meaningful way. 

The students are now going in trained during the boot camp as well on a model of what we call innovation for impact, which is based on the hacking for defense model of steep lean startup methodology created by Steve Blank.  How do you identify problems out there and then work backwards to test and iterate on solutions.

We look to see them go in and start their public service here next week. We're excited about the kinds of opportunities that they're going to get to participate in across these diverse agencies. 

Jeanne Gray: How long. Are they committed to this program? 

Arun Gupta: One to two years. Students will be there at least one year and they have a one year option to continue on at these agencies.

And again, this is our first cohort. We are going to begin recruiting here at the end of September for our next cohort. Last year, we didn't start recruiting actually until late January but this year we're going to be hitting, you know, a normal recruiting cycle so September 30th, the applications will be out there and you know, we expect to have a much bigger cohort you know, targeting 40 to 50 students that we can place not only in federal agencies, not only the ones that we have today, but we have we've been inundated with interest from other agencies now wanting to participate, but also state governments local governments international allies, you know that have asked to maybe place students at their embassies here and then also mission oriented ventures.

Jeanne Gray: So you've described something of enormous ambition. How has NobleReach been set up to sustain itself or to scale as quickly as you're hoping? 

Arun Gupta: Great question. And I think it's one of our big differentiators. We've had the benefit of being started with an endowment of close to half a billion dollars.

We don't have to go out and fundraise each year. We have our capital what I'd like to say is that we've done the seed round and the Series A round where we've ideated on what the program should be, we've now gone and done the product market fit and testing of those programs and we funded that ourselves. 

As we look to scale now, we've been approached by other foundations that have interests around these three areas of talent, academic curriculum, and innovation and commercialization to join us on this journey. We're beginning those conversations over the next few months to bring more partners to bear.

But we have the benefit of starting with a meaningful corpus that allows us to also think long term and start to put the foundation in place, put the infrastructure in place to have these programs, not only scale but sustain themselves  over decades.

We think this hopefully becomes a national asset that is able to catalyze more interaction between academia, industry, and government to solve big problems. 

Jeanne Gray: Looking down the road five years, are you establishing something that is like a network across the country where there are satellites that are propelling your initial mission? or is this something that's centralized in your headquarters? I think the scale of it is interesting where you're going to integrate it throughout everything that goes on in American entrepreneurship.

Arun Gupta: It's a great question. And exactly how the model plays itself out, we're in the process of being entrepreneurs ourselves and testing that out. But, I think the current hypothesis, one on the talent side and the academic side, we want to have a national footprint.

Where we're recruiting talent nationally, but we're also placing them nationally. Not only in, in federal governments, but state governments as well. What we're trying to do on that front is really create more of a movement. Again, think Teach for America where you're creating a movement of folks who really care deeply about wanting to participate and be part of the change in public education. 

That doesn't mean they're going to stay in public education for their entire career. But they're going to stay connected to public education because they're now sensitized to it. We want to create that community of public service change makers that can be on the inside, understand what the inside's like.

Many of them may stay but those that don't will stay connected and through entrepreneurial endeavors be connected to it. The community or the network, we think is incredibly important. This cohort not only be connected to each other but to be connected to subsequent cohorts and to be growing that community.

And the value of the network increases exponentially to the next person adding into the network and that's what we think we're on the tipping point and I think we've been overwhelmed by the positive response that we've had from different stakeholders.

Whether I'm talking to government folks and those could be Republicans or Democrats or industry folks, from tech or finance or entrepreneurship or academic institutions across the country, they all have the same question and that question is, how can we help?

I think that speaks loudly about a recognized view that we need to think about how we do things differently and how we collaborate differently and people wanting to help us in whatever way they can and so I think we have a moment in time right now.

Given a lot of things that have been happening existentially, we've come off covid, you take the geopolitical conflicts we've had and what's happening in climate and the acute nature of how we're all starting to feel that and also the great power competition with our autocratic adversaries, people are looking for a way for us to collaborate and to solve these big problems in a different way. What we try to write about in the book is we actually have the capacity to do it.

We've done it before. The question we try to raise in the book is why don't we do more of it? And how do we do more of it? I think that's what leaves me very optimistic as well as I'm out on campuses talking to folks or in industry, even within government, there's a desire to collaborate to solve these problems in a different way.

Jeanne Gray: Have you established short-term measures of success versus success that might not appear for five to 10 years? You're increasing the number of your scholars, but there is an end product or end result that you're hoping is going to emerge from this investment you're making. Is it a two-stage goal setting of first getting the Scholars in place, and getting a network, but measuring success in 5 or 10 years by what type of change might occur in the longer term?

Arun Gupta: It's a really great question. The honest answer is we're continuing to test and figure this out. What I'll say is in the near term the more measurable metrics you have, or how do we help change the narrative, the excitement, the energy around students wanting to do these kinds of programs, right? 

The number of applications, the breadth of the applications where we're getting and the number of placements that we have, and the kind of experience we can provide are all important metrics for us right now, right?

Because that's what influences the next cohort and wanting to apply for the next cohort after that is that energy. We're spending a lot of time on that front. On the innovation side equally, how many of these companies can we take from the science stage and bring it into the venture community?

We're tracking a stat. We've done about 90 of these spinouts from science to venture in collaboration with DARPA and NSF and now starting to do it with academic institutions. Those have gone and raised over a billion three in capital. How do we attract more capital to these kinds of opportunities?

Some of them have gotten acquired now. We're starting to see some of those shorter-term metrics that we can start to bring to bear. And then on the academic side, how do we get more and then the Scholar's piece being the infrastructure that allows them to connect into what we're doing.

I think those are the shorter-term metrics. I think the longer-term metrics that you're getting into are the success stories of those companies that are getting spun out. It's not just about capital raised. Right. But it's about impact that you've had on society and that we need to be tracking that over a five to 10-year period of time with our students that come into the program.

Really tracking over a longitudinal sense of five to ten years, the impact that they have, the connectedness that they have with public service, right? And look at Teach for America many times what they're tracking is how many of our alumni ten years out are still connected to public education?

That could mean being part of the PTA, that could mean volunteering at your school or being on a school board. It may not mean being just a teacher. You can see those kind of metrics being important as well with public service, right? It doesn't mean you just are inside a government, but even if you're on the outside, how are you staying engaged?

Because I think this is deeply at the core how do we start to break this polarized fever that we have right now and rebuild trust You know, amongst our society and create that fabric again, where we're able to collaborate across sectors in a meaningful way. 

Jeanne Gray: But it's very exciting as you talk about the vision for the future because I'm an entrepreneur and you're out there problem solving.

When you speak to someone like yourself and you have this very grand vision and all the possibilities that could emerge from it. Again, going back to the near term, you mentioned your initial funding. Can you give a hint as to who was behind the funding? Are there some big names that we know in, in entrepreneurship or venture capital?

Part two of the question is going to be in the very near term, who are some of the influencers or players that make this go faster? Because you've mentioned Teach for America and it seems you're very familiar then with the model.

I'm just trying to get a handle who are the players that are involved in all of this? The immediate players. 

Arun Gupta: We're right now building out, so I can't shed too much light on some of the players that will be coming on a luminary advisory board, but it'll be a name recognized, folks across sectors of finance, business, tech, government and academia, university presidents and et cetera.

As far as where the money came from, the money was part of a, we were part of a spin out of LMI which was set up as a not-for-profit and had a subsidiary when we sold the subsidiary to a group of investors, the funds of that went into the not for profit entity, which is what NobleReach is today.

In that process, there were a group of investors including, David Rubenstein's family office, David Rue and a number of other investors around that really were also very excited about the mission of what we could try to create. But I think the folks taking this forward is evidenced by the quality of the speakers that we have engaged with us. In our private sector partners include a number of the top investment firms, investment banks, VCs consulting firms, and big tech firms.

Jeanne Gray: Who is in the organization now or ramping up to? Is going to be your lieutenants that are going to unfold the program and work directly with the scholars? How many people are you bringing on board and how quickly? 

Arun Gupta: We've scaled pretty quickly in a short period of time. Over the last year and a half, we've gone from about four people to close to 50 today. Folks leading different aspects of our work. we've got Rebeca Lamadrid who was the former PIF director, the Presidential Innovation Fellows at the White House. 

She's leading our Scholars program and helping us scale and has done a phenomenal job in the work she's doing. She was a senior advisor. Virginia Raimondo with CHIPS has been a real voice and narrative around science to venture and helping us scale what we're doing on the innovation side and brings deep expertise around how do you collaborate across industry, government. In academia.
 
We have Dr. Linda Bixby, who has a lot of experience with being in the academic world, but also having been at the agency and having been in our intelligence community. Again, how do we bridge, exciting students at this intersection of mission, tech and entrepreneurship 

Jeanne Gray: When you put the plan together, again, twofold question is how long did it take for you to create the model before taking the first concrete steps? And did you identify particular hurdles? It sounds very exciting, but where might there be pushback or where might have been mis-assessments in what you were trying to achieve?

Arun Gupta: I think we did spend a decent amount of time thinking about the model. Look, I had the benefit of fleshing some of that out as we were writing the book. Honestly we weren't intending when we were writing the book to actually do that. Then have a foundation to kind of go put a lot of that to work.

We had thought about this like any entrepreneur would tell you, you don't know until you start. I think around here, the team would say we have a bias to action, right? Let's just start doing stuff and learn from it. You know, strategy is great, but let's have more of a direction of where we're going and that doesn't need to be perfect because no matter what you come up with your strategy, it won't be perfect.

I'd rather you be out there learning. I think the first hurdle honestly is can you attract a team? As any entrepreneur would tell you, your idea is only going to be as good as the team that you can recruit to come join the journey.

I think that was hurdle one for me. My most proudest accomplishment is the team that we've assembled here and the level of interest of folks that want to now be part of our organization. 

Not only joining the team, but being partner with us. The second piece as we started with the talent programs was it's a two-sided marketplace, really inspiring the students and graduates to want to do this given the people we're going after have very lucrative job offers to go do other things. The second piece is talking to agencies about wanting to collaborate with us. I think that exceeded our expectations. That doesn't mean that, we didn't have to try a few different things in that process to make sure the messaging resonates. 

But, with these early processes, a lot of it comes down to relationships and trust. And so that's reflective of the team that we've brought on board. A number of folks are collaborating with us because of that trust.
I think that's been paying big dividends for us. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, I think from your experience, the people you're asking to be involved buy into the adaptability of your model. 

Arun Gupta: Yes, absolutely. I think what they all recognize is that there's a big opportunity there. They also recognize we have a direction that we're heading into a North Star.

We've laid kind of a path of how we think we can get there. But at the same time that doesn't mean we're going to hit potholes and we may detour. We encourage everyone to keep testing and learning different hypotheses. Cause if we don't. we're not going to be innovating fast enough ourselves. That's how we're approaching it,

I think people feel the demand. They feel the need. They feel the positive reinforcement of our partners wanting to be helpful to us. So the rest of it's about how can we try to scale and put the processes in there. I feel like we've done a lot of the hard work up front over this past year. A lot of what we're now doing is more refining the processes to see how can we scale this. 

Jeanne Gray: For the, the first cohort there's a certain amount of risk in everything that's being done for the first time. Is their expectation that when they're doing these two year programa that they're getting training? Is mentoring part of the structure that coaches them through their two years?

Arun Gupta: Yeah, absolutely. While they're going in, what we like to say is while we're modernizing the infrastructure, we're doing it across two dimensions. One is connecting them to these opportunities, but that's not sufficient, right? It's not about just finding talent and placing them in an agency and then checking in in two years.

The second piece is we're providing them the scaffolding. We're building the infrastructure to support them while they go in. That support takes a few different dimensions. One is mentorship. We're providing them with external mentors. An example is two of our scholars going into Space Force. General Raymond has volunteered to be their mentor. Space Force and the theory of change there is in your first job, who your mentor is matters as much as what you're doing and who you're doing it for, because they set you up for that next linear opportunity.

The second is skill development. matters as much as where we're collaborating with our private sector partners, finance firms, consulting firms, tech firms. They can provide finance skill training, consulting training, and tech training to these students while they're in public service.

The third is creating a cohort, right? And a sense of camaraderie. Which arguably could be as important, if not more important than the other two. It's important for the students to feel a sense of belonging. Back to the community aspect and we have monthly and quarterly get-togethers that we have planned where we'll bring in speakers and ways for the students to stay connected.

That was a large part of the boot camp as well setting that up was so the students could really sit and talk to each other and get to know each other and build trust and relationships with one another. 

Jeanne Gray: Is part of the vision that in five years or 10 years, the community exists of 500 or a thousand of these scholars that are now scattered around the country?

Arun Gupta: I, think what the number is TBD, We are hoping it could be more than that by five years on an annual basis. And that you have scholars that have come through the program and they could become mentors now to your new scholars. They absolutely could be scattered around the country.

And hopefully you're staying connected in some capacity to public service and are helping also be ambassadors too. If they do go into the private sector of the ways to collaborate with government to help solve big problems.

Jeanne Gray: Well, we've covered a lot in our short discussion, Arun, I definitely enjoy listening to your vision and what you have plans for. What would you say to wrap up, would be the next big milestone we should be keeping our ear to the ground to be coming from NobleReach? 

Arun Gupta: I think what you should take away from this is a sense of optimism that I think we have. I think that optimism bears itself with wanting to be around recent graduates that are starting their careers, but also being around entrepreneurs that are innovating and building.
 
As far as next milestones, I think you'll be hearing a bit more about the existing scholars who are in their program and the success they're having and why they're enjoying it so much as the application comes out for the next cohort of Scholars , how we ramp this up in the folks in the people and the partners that we bring into this ecosystem to reinforce the importance of this at this moment in time for us to create this cross-collaboration between industry, academic, and government.

I think you'll be seeing a lot of that over the next six to nine months. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, great. Again, thank you for being a guest on Experienced Voices, and we will look for a report at that next big milestone. 

Arun Gupta: All right. Thank you. 

Jeanne Gray: You have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit americanentrepreneurship.com forward slash podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.