Omidyar Network’s Journey

2024 and beyond

Bending the arc of the digital revolution toward shared power, prosperity, and possibility

In 2024, Omidyar Network announced our latest strategy evolution: a renewed focus on bending the arc of the digital revolution toward shared power, prosperity, and possibility.

Incorporating 20 years of impact in the areas of technology, the economy, and belonging, we are partnering with some of the world’s brightest thinkers and innovators to guide our digital future toward the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Hear from our CEO Mike Kubzansky about our latest strategy refresh here.

2018–2024

A three-pronged, whole-of-society approach

Multiple economic, social, political, and technological changes fundamentally altered our operating context. These changes and became too powerful to ignore. Sharp and rising inequality, worsening white supremacy and “othering,” a planet in crisis, technology’s increasingly pervasive role in our lives, liberal democracy under threat….the list of challenges and ills that surfaced, or were exacerbated, in the 2010s is long.

In order to continue to have a meaningful impact, we decided to update and diversify our approaches to match these new challenges.

During this time, we launched several of our long-standing initiatives as independent sister organizations, allowing them greater control and decision-making authority over their work as they continue the high-impact original approaches they pioneered over the past decade.

From 2018 to 2020, we decided that our initiatives that focused on specific issues like financial health, property rights, education, emerging technology, digital rights, civic participation, independent media, and other sectors would spin out to become their own independent entities (that continue to be a part of The Omidyar Group).

They continue their path-breaking work as Flourish Ventures, Omidyar Network India, Spero Ventures, Imaginable Futures, Luminate, and PLACE. We are proud to have them as thought partners and peers in this work (along with other entities from The Omidyar Group like Democracy Fund, Hope Lab, and Humanity United).

In 2019, Omidyar Network then turned its own focus to addressing a core set of pressing, difficult, and overlapping issues that permeate our society today and to do so by addressing the upstream macro root causes that shape and drive outcomes in three broad areas. The first two drew deeply on our prior history of working on economic inclusion and technology access issues, and the third had become a critical issue for everyone in society:

A three-pronged, whole-of-society approach

2012–2018

Initiatives for sector-level focus

As the organization matured and learned from supporting entrepreneurial endeavors across the globe, we found that our flexible toolkit was particularly suited to certain sectors and supported the infrastructure that enabled them to replicate and scale.

In 2013, we reorganized the firm around specific “sectors” or “vertical” initiatives, each of which housed dedicated global teams and a distinct initiative strategy and theory of change. Our initiatives included Education, Emerging Tech (formerly Consumer Internet and Mobile), Financial Inclusion, Governance & Citizen Engagement, Impact Investing, Field Building, and Property Rights. Over time, we added an initiative on Digital Identity and explored opportunities in Consumer Solar/Energy systems, and did additional work to build out entrepreneurial ecosystems in developing country markets.

We developed a belief that there is a broad range of viable investment profiles, some of which involved a trade-off between social return and financial impact, and many which did not.

In 2016, we presented an investment framework, Across the Returns Continuum, that extends from fully commercial investments at one end to philanthropic grants at the other.

We evolved from our origins in Silicon Valley to teams based in Africa (originally Johannesburg), Mumbai, Bangalore, London, and Washington, DC. We also built out our toolkit to provide our partners with more than investment and grant capital, giving human capital support, and building out a research and intellectual capital team and practice to share our learnings back to the field.

As we approached the end of our first decade, we took stock of our successes and failures, impact and lessons of our first decade of work.

Initiatives for Sector-Level Focus

1995 – 2008

Omidyar Family Foundation becomes Omidyar Network

Throughout the evolution of our organization, we have assumed a variety of structures to achieve one consistent goal: Build healthy systems that can foster innovation, scale solutions, and solve big challenges.

Pam and Pierre realized that the eBay experience was applicable to their philanthropy. They had seen firsthand how the eBay platform empowered millions of people to make a living as entrepreneurs. But our individual foundation grants impacted tens of thousands, at most.

These insights led to the creation in 2004 of Omidyar Network, a hybrid LLC and foundation entity that enabled for-profit investing alongside grant-making. This novel structure allowed us to support early-stage organizations that catalyze economic and social change and gave us the autonomy to work flexibly across the returns continuum.

Our structure allowed us to adopt an “impact first, tool second” approach, centering systems and impact, and deploying relevant tools as needed.

Omidyar Family Foundation becomes Omidyar Network

In the early days of the internet…

our co-founder, Pierre Omidyar, sought a way to harness the power of individuals, technology, and community to create a new and unique kind of market. Over Labor Day weekend in 1995, AuctionWeb, the precursor to eBay, was born.

After creating eBay, Pierre and his wife Pam turned their focus toward philanthropy.

They share a strong belief that people are inherently good and capable, but don’t always have access to opportunity. Their philanthropy focuses on increasing that access and addressing inequities through innovative long-term solutions that empower individuals, cultivate accountable and adaptive institutions, and build healthier societies.

Pierre’s early belief in the power of markets and technology, and the accompanying imperative to think big about what’s possible, is a thread that runs through Omidyar Network’s history—as is a willingness to think creatively about how philanthropy operates across systems that impact our lives.

We will continue to evolve to match the challenges of an ever-changing world on our journey to build more inclusive and equitable societies.