Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

When Google went public, they promised 1% of their equity and profits to be contributed to Making the world a better place From their IPO filing:

“We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place… we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google?s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world?s problems.?

Check out Google.org:

“We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.”

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At today?s market value, this equates to a foundation with about $800 million in equity, and $5 million+ per year from their profits.

Given what they?ve accomplished in the business world, as well as their demonstrated ability to tilt large windmills on Wall St, I think that there is some really significant potential for innovative philanthropy and social venture investing here.

This is all great sentiment, and putting words like this in an SEC filing and collecting investor money is serious business.

Just thought that someone should help them remember what they said last year.

Christopher Allen wrote and interesting piece on the Dunbar limit for on-line communities.

Here’s a piece by Hazen which has an interesting limit to Ant Colonies:

“A similar rule of density seems to pertain to ant colonies: In those with 80,000 ants or more, a new behavior emerges. The ants of that colony become aggressive, and begin attacking adjacent ant colonies. A colony containing fewer than that number of ants will stay within its immediate territory.”

hmmmm… I wonder if the Dunbar limit varies with the complexity of the agents in the community. Humans are more complex than ants; their limits are therefore lower.