Announcing Cobalt Collective

Reach is launching a new nonprofit today called The Cobalt Collective, and we’re excited to introduce our Founding Executive Director Clark McKown. First, a little background on why we started it.

Reach has roots in philanthropy. Our founders came from NewSchools Venture Fund, a different type of philanthropy started by a group of legendary venture capitalists who believed that the practices that help startups scale could also be used to scale social impact. It was a novel idea that helped inspire a broader movement to bring innovation to the social sector through venture capital. 

For the last ten years, Reach has operated as a traditionally structured venture capital fund. We embrace this powerful approach to innovation; the influence of venture capital is evident in almost every breakthrough technology of the last 50 years, from Intel and Apple to Moderna and Google. It is an undeniable force in fueling the ideas that have elevated global living standards in the modern age.

Over four funds and more than 100 investments, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with founders to bring ideas to life — improving how teachers teach, students learn, workers thrive, people heal, and communities connect.

Throughout this work, we have remained focused on impact. At Reach, it is imbued across our team, our culture, our practices, our investment theses, and our portfolio support. It is core to our work, not siloed off or compliance-driven. Over the years we’ve backed 39 research studies in our portfolio with the help of our partners, and we’ve published five reports detailing the impact journeys of our companies. 

Cobalt extends the Reach Way and our commitment to impact beyond our portfolio. It supports the broader innovation ecosystem tackling some of the toughest challenges across education and health. We’re bringing together builders, researchers, and funders to help entrepreneurs build products that work and scale. The work Cobalt will take on involves, at its heart, helping companies fulfill their impact commitments.

Our approach is informed by patterns we’ve seen firsthand over the years:

1. Expertise and domain knowledge matter.

Silicon Valley has a complicated relationship with education. Sometimes a true step-function leap in a field comes from outsiders with beginners’ eyes. But more often, they come from teams that pair the best technologists with decades of research and science in the field. Think the Desmos leadership team: a world-class technologist (Eric Berger), a great company builder (Eli Luberoff), and one of the sharpest minds in math education (Dan Meyer). 

Bridging these two cultures is hard, but it’s exactly where the highest-leverage innovation happens.

When technologists and domain experts work together, they shorten the path from evidence to impact. Too often, research stalls in journals that are often inaccessible to the very practitioners it’s meant to serve. Combine the two, and research becomes a blueprint for products that work in the real world. Technologists add speed, scalability, and systems design to ideas nurtured in science and rigorously tested. At its best, the result is responsible, high-velocity innovation.

This is not easy. There is real tension between these groups; one risk-averse, cautious, and committed to rigorous testing; the other oriented toward speed, scale, and risk. But that friction is precisely where the magic happens. I often worry about which of our portfolio companies might end up on the receiving end of Dan Meyer’s critical eye, but his voice brings the kind of rigor and challenge the field needs as the future of edtech takes shape.

2. Philanthropy should center on the founders.

Somewhere along the way, the impact sector drifted from outcomes to oversight — into a compliance-first posture of checklists, milestones, and a philanthropy industrial complex that manages process over progress. The result is mission-driven entrepreneurs who could be earning more elsewhere, being reduced to short-term milestone chasing and nudged to execute a donor’s solution rather than their own on the ground approach.

Our stance is simple: invert that dynamic and back the people closest to the problem, give them the funding, trust, and room to build, and hold ourselves accountable to what matters most: impact.

Cobalt will test a founder-first model: brief proposals, rapid yes/no decisions, and white‑glove support when possible because time is a founder’s scarcest resource. Just as VC firms work in service of entrepreneurs, philanthropy should do the same, replacing process for process’s sake with speed, trust, and partnership. 

Underlying this belief is a simple truth: We don’t yet know the solutions to the hardest problems, but we do know the answers don’t live within the walls of a donor’s foundation, in a set of carefully worded milestones, or a 5-year strategy refresh. They are more likely to live in the minds and actions of founding teams grinding hard on these challenges every day. 

3. Efficacy building is an early-stage action. 

The old model — build a product, chase growth, and five years later scramble for a randomized controlled trial to validate it — can’t keep pace with AI’s velocity. Evidence can’t be an afterthought; it has to be designed in from day one. Seven years ago I wrote about how education startups could do this. When efficacy is architected early, teams can move faster, focus on what actually works, and earn trust without waiting five years for a study.

In the era of AI, efficacy evolves from an occasional audit into a continuous, integral function. Our work aims to empower teams to capture contextual data, translate it into actionable intelligence for practitioners, and tighten the link between scientific evidence and product roadmaps. By embedding research rigor into everyday workflows, every development cycle is rooted in proven impact.

Our goal with Cobalt is to stay true to our venture roots and help teams build efficacy practices early rather than anointing champions. Cobalt will do this by providing funding, access to talent, and expertise to help builders measure and grow their impact. Cobalt will be releasing a call for ideas in the coming weeks for organizations building innovations in education, health, and work.

We’re honored to have Clark McKown lead Cobalt as its Founding Executive Director. Clark is the embodiment of everything above — he brings a rare combination as a nationally recognized behavioral scientist, innovator, and entrepreneur with real-world experience bridging science and business to take high-quality products to scale.

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