Q and A with EC’s Founder and President Laurene Powell Jobs
Laurene Powell Jobs is the Founder and President of Emerson Collective, where since 2011 she has paired philanthropy with venture capital investing to support entrepreneurs tackling complex global challenges. She believes that investing in education, economic mobility, immigration, and energy can expand opportunity for the next generation and that high-quality independent journalism is essential to a functioning democracy.
Through Emerson Collective, she is the lead investor of Concordia Studio and the lead investor in and a board member of Anonymous Content. She is also majority investor and board chair of The Atlantic, a publication dedicated to producing world-class long-form journalism.
Laurene co-founded and serves on the boards of the Waverley Street Foundation, College Track, and the XQ Institute, advancing community-led climate solutions and strengthening educational outcomes.
Laurene also serves on the boards of Chicago CRED, the Ford Foundation, and Skydance. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Ernest C. Arbuckle Award for excellence in the field of management leadership.
Photography by Craig McDean. Licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Why did you create Emerson Collective and what is the meaning behind the name?
I founded Emerson Collective as a place for great leaders to come together to do difficult things. Fueled by purpose and passion, we hope to shape a world where people are not bound by the circumstances of their birth. Instead, they have the ability and agency to design their own paths—aligned with their highest and best purposes. The name Emerson Collective comes from two words that are very meaningful to me. I’m deeply inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings on our ability to transcend limitations that are placed on us by society. I love the word collective because it acknowledges that we are all at our best when we learn from – and work with – teammates who share a sense of purpose and possibility. Like steel sharpens steel, we make each other better. At Emerson Collective, we believe that humanity is bound together, and that by drawing on one another’s gifts and talents we can create a world of abundant opportunity for future generations.
Emerson Collective is structured as an LLC, rather than a non-profit, like traditional philanthropic foundations. Why is that structure important to the way EC works?
Dr. Martin Luther King said that philanthropy is a very useful and good tool, but it can’t ignore the conditions that created it. I believe that philanthropy is a very powerful tool for good, but it’s not the only powerful tool. Mission driven investing is a tool for good. Art and activism and storytelling are tools for good. The LLC structure allows us the flexibility to creatively use the best attributes of all these models to address emerging needs and opportunities.
Before there was Emerson Collective, there was College Track, another organization you founded. How did College Track inform Emerson Collective?
Working with the students, families and staff of College Track enriched my understanding of our country and the many systems within it. At its best, the public education system is an engine for social and economic mobility. But we all know it doesn’t always work that way. Education is not an isolated or siloed domain. It connects to a broader set of systems that touch people’s lives, including immigration, health, environment and economic opportunities. The understanding of just how interconnected these issues are was fundamental to the creation of Emerson Collective.
Why are multi-disciplinary solutions important to addressing society’s challenges?
None of the issues we are trying to address have easy solutions and making progress on them requires hard work, humility, rigorous thinking and a variety of approaches. We work with domain experts in education, climate change, health care, and immigration to gain a holistic view of the challenges and a ground-up view of the solutions. Then we bring to bear a range of tools, including philanthropy, investing, convening, and storytelling. We build broad coalitions. As challenges evolve, we are nimble in our response and have seen that a cross-functional approach often yields powerful results.
How do journalism, media, and storytelling fit into Emerson Collective’s work?
High-quality journalism and storytelling are crucial to a healthy democracy. In our media work, we support a range of for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations, from local news outlets focused on statehouse coverage and accountability journalism to TV and film companies. We also partner with the American Journalism Project, whose work to strengthen and sustain local newsrooms is essential to ensuring communities have access to accurate, nonpartisan, and fact-based reporting.