Emergent Ventures
Rewarding good ideas is great.
On this past Tuesday the 47th cohort of Emerging Venture winners was announced.
Two that I really like and are emblematic of why this is such a good thing are:
Rushil Kukreja and co-workers, northern Virginia, high school, devices to see through walls.
Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, London, work with David Perell, on why beauty has disappeared in the modern world.
You see Emergent Ventures, beyond being the work of the great Tyler Cowen, are a low-overhead fellowship and grant program administered by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It funds moonshots and highly ambitious ideas to improve society.
And they are (it is?) a very good thing.
For me, we live in a world of ideas. There are so many good ideas, in fact, that many promising projects fail not because they lack merit, but because they are too early, too strange, too risky or one from untraditional places to attract conventional support.
Emergent Ventures was designed to fill precisely this void and solve the problem. Cowen launched this program in 2018 at his some, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Under his leadership this program provides rapid, flexible funding for transformative ideas — idea that, more often than not, nobody else will bet on.
It’s a simple premise: that intellectual talent and world-changing ideas are widely distributed, but opportunity is not.
Since its inception, Emergent Ventures (from here on referred to as EV) has funded more than a thousand people across oceans and disciplines. There are even spinoffs under the EV banner in India, Africa, the Caribbean and focused on this unknown field of artificial intelligence.
At its core, EV encourages applicants to dream boldly, whether or not they hold academic credentials or institutional affiliations. Its application process is deliberately simple, and decisions are made quickly, in stark contrast to the slow and bureaucratic nature of traditional funding. The program’s goal is to back talent and ambition before they have been fully “validated” — to bridge the gap between a bright idea and its first proof of concept.
This has produced a remarkable diversity. One early Indian winner built a contact-tracing system that dramatically reduced public health response times during the pandemic. Others have pursued projects in reproductive technology, data ethics, open science, and cultural innovation. An unusual preponderance of winners seems to come from Ontario, Canada:
The point is not that all will or even should succeed, but that each is given the chance. Cowen has often described EV as “philanthropy that takes risks,” a phrase that captures its venture-style willingness to embrace uncertainty in pursuit of discovery.
Beyond individual success stories, the program’s broader impact lies in what it symbolizes. In an age dominated by credentialism and risk aversion, Emergent Ventures puts its faith in the purest of things human potential and in ideas. It is a call to reinvest in intellectual adventure and to remember that progress rarely comes from the center, but from the margins where convention loosens its grip.
Tyler Cowen once said that EV “bets on talent, not on certainty.” In that spirit, Emergent Ventures has become a quiet but powerful force in the global marketplace of ideas. A benefit and supporter of bold minds and the desire to trying something new.