Philanthropy
Built into the structure, not added to it.
ITQAN is being built to direct a share of the manager's carry to charitable work — a decision taken while the fund is formed rather than one taken later, out of a budget. Three areas are in scope: veterans, aerospace and STEM education, and Arizona.
The intention
A share of carry, to be settled at formation.
The fund is built to direct a share of its carried interest — the manager’s share of investment gains — to charitable work. The intent is being written into how the fund is structured, rather than attached to it once the fund is running.
Carry is what the manager earns after investors have their capital back. Directing a share of it means the charitable commitment comes out of what the people running the fund take home, not out of what the fund returns to the people who backed it. That distinction is the whole of the arrangement, and it is why it sits in the structure rather than in a policy.
The percentage is not published here. A figure that has not been through counsel is worth less than no figure at all, and this page will carry one only when it is final. Nor does anything here describe something already done: the fund holds no portfolio, has realised nothing, and has given nothing away. This is an intention, set out early so that it can be held to later.
Where it goes
Three areas, not a general fund.
Giving is easiest to do badly when it is spread thin. The scope is narrow on purpose, and each area borders work the fund already does — which is the only reason to think the money will be placed with any judgement at all.
01
Veterans
Support for men and women leaving military service, weighted toward the part that is hardest: the move into technical and engineering careers. The fund invests in defence and dual-use technology, and the people who operated that technology in service understand better than most what it has to survive.
02
Aerospace & STEM education
Access to aerospace and engineering education for students who would not otherwise get near it — the lab time, the flight hours, the first piece of hardware someone is allowed to take apart. Space and autonomy are two of the areas the fund invests in, and both are limited by how few people are trained to work in them.
03
Arizona
The fund's US office sits in Arizona, and a share of the giving is intended to stay there. Local giving is the kind least easily performed and most easily checked: the people it reaches are in the same city as the people who decided it, and the result is visible without a report.
Why it is structured this way
Tied to performance, not to a budget.
Most corporate giving is a line in a marketing budget, and it behaves like one. It is spent whether or not the business did anything worth marking. It is sized to what the brand needs rather than to what the work earned. And it is among the first things cut when the year goes badly — which is to say, it is a cost of appearing generous, and it is treated with exactly the seriousness that implies.
Carry behaves differently, because carry only exists if the fund performs. Tying giving to it puts the charitable share and the manager’s own compensation in the same pool, realised at the same moment, on the same condition. It cannot be quietly trimmed in a weak year, because in a weak year there is nothing to trim. It cannot be inflated for a photograph in a strong one, because the proportion was settled before anyone knew which kind of year it would be. The commitment is made at the one point where no one yet has an interest in the answer, and after that it is arithmetic rather than goodwill.
The honest cost is that giving structured this way is variable and late. Carry arrives at the end of a fund’s life, if it arrives at all, so this is not an annual budget and should not be read as one. It buys something else instead: a commitment that cannot be renegotiated once the outcome is known.
The recipient
Named once the arrangement is confirmed.
The partner organisation will be named here once the arrangement is confirmed in writing and it has agreed to appear alongside the fund. Publishing a recipient before that is a claim about someone else’s institution rather than about this one, and it is not ours to make.
The same instinct, applied to the investing.
Settle the rule while it is still cheap to settle. That is how the fund is built, and how it decides what to back.