Podcast with Larry Kramer on philanthropy and Hewlett Foundation

A foundation giving away $600 million a year still cannot solve climate change alone. Larry Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation, explains why philanthropy's greatest challenge is not funding but collaboration , and why the biological instinct to divide the world into "us vs. them" may be the single biggest barrier to solving collective problems. Subscribe for more on how collaboration works at scale. Larry Kramer brings a unique trajectory to this conversation: constitutional law professor at Chicago, Michigan, and NYU, then dean of Stanford Law School, and since 2012 president of one of the world's largest philanthropic foundations. His perspective bridges academic theory, institutional governance, and the practical realities of deploying hundreds of millions of dollars toward systemic change. The central argument is that philanthropy is collaboration by definition , and most of it is done badly. Good philanthropy, Kramer explains, is a genuine partnership between funder and grantee, where both sides recognize their respective strengths. Grantees have frontline knowledge; foundations have cross-field perspective. The challenge is preventing the power asymmetry of money from distorting the relationship. Trust is what makes the difference: it allows grantees to report difficulties honestly and foundations to receive critical feedback without defensiveness. Kramer extends this to collaboration between foundations. The Hewlett Foundation's climate work illustrates the complexity: achieving meaningful impact on a problem this large requires coordinating with dozens of other funders, each with different theories of change, different timelines, and different institutional cultures. The practical mechanics involve everything from co-funding arrangements to informal trades , "if you invest in this, we'll fund something aligned with your priorities." The conversation addresses a tension rarely discussed publicly: the relationship between a foundation's endowment investments and its mission. Kramer describes the challenge of aligning investment portfolios with programmatic goals when the financial markets that generate endowment returns may conflict with the social outcomes the foundation seeks. Critics oversimplify; the reality involves genuine tradeoffs that require nuanced collaboration between investment teams and program staff. On the architecture of effective collaboration, Kramer identifies several failure modes: organizations that confuse alignment with agreement, leaders who cannot tolerate ambiguity, and institutional cultures that reward individual credit over collective impact. His experience at Stanford Law School , where faculty collaboration required navigating enormous egos and competing intellectual frameworks , informs his approach at Hewlett. Kramer frames humanity's three largest challenges as climate and biodiversity, the survival of democracy, and the relationship between government, markets, and society. Almost every other problem connects to these three. His assessment oscillates between days of despair and cautious optimism, but he is clear that extinction is not inevitable , the question is how far along the continuum of disaster we will slide. If he could change one thing about humans, it would be the biologically embedded tendency to frame the world as us versus them. Global problems require global governance, but almost nobody can embrace that idea because tribal identity is wired into our genetic structure. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.