V6A
THE FUND
V6A is in the business of ideas, paricularly those that arrive before the institutional and cultural infrastructure to support them do.
We support early experiments and help promising work find its next form. We are particularly drawn to ideas that are too early, unusual, or transdisciplinary for existing capital and institutions. But our deeper interest is in the after: what conditions and pathways allow an idea to become a more durable societal capability?
We do not believe there is any shortage of good ideas in the world. Our reason for being lies in the observation that society produces more worthwhile ideas than it has the capacity to carry or integrate.
We are interested in a particular bottleneck to progress: the failure of promising ideas to survive long enough for the conditions around them to develop. Many good ideas, whether prototype or pilot, have disappeared after an initial burst of attention and support. We believe this failure is not a reflection of the idea itself, but due to the conditions and infrastructure that would support their continuity never having the chance to form.
The invention of the light bulb was a engineering and scientific feat. But it wasn’t until the development of public utilities, standardized voltage and current, distribution grids, sockets and plugs that electric light become a societal one.
V6A studies and intervenes in this gap through applied R&D and a new approach to philanthropy. We keep encountering ideas whose trajectories cannot be explained by their quality alone. We want to follow those trajectories, test what changes them, and learn what kinds of support should become possible to support our capacity to operationalize innovation.
We call these surrounding systems capability infrastructure: the institutions, standards, funding mechanisms, communities, norms, and pathways that allow experiments to accumulate rather than disappear.
Our broader interest is in the systems through which society encounters, (con)tests, interprets, alters, remembers, and sometimes integrates ideas into wider society and culture.
We see these systems as capability infrastructures that allows experimentation to compound and accumulate, rather than dissipate their effort.
Previously, we operated as an applied studio and built a constellation of projects, collaborators, and funders over 3 years. Our work focused on emerging open-source technologies and privacy-preserving cryptography; both domains that hold strange and consequential ideas with the potential to profoundly reshape the world.
Our role was to bridge the gap between these technologies and meaningful implementation, despite their overton windows still coming into view. We brought together diverse sectors and expertise, from public to private to civic to do so.
The next iteration of V6A is now taking shape.
Our purpose is to widen the range of futures society is capable of carrying. We do so through specialized funds for defined areas of opportunity and exploratory grants for work that does not yet fit an established category. V6A’s long-term purpose is to make experimentation more cumulative. We’d like to see a wider range of ideas society can draw upon to meet the challenges and opportunities of our time.
What futures would you like to see?
hello@v6acolab.org