Let’s take a look at how startups are being funded in things like the 500 Flagship Accelerator Program or Techstars or Y Combinator or AngelList or Venture Hacks or Crunchbase or CB Insights …

Or, we could look at what trends we see in the current crop of unicorns look like

Maybe we can use LinkedIn Premium? Or maybe we can use the LinkedIn API to get a lists of the kinds of companies that are doing the kind of philanthropic work that we want to do?

Our niche is soils … specifically, we are interested in the ecologies of soils and that takes us into the realm of transciptomics and CRISPR and other things that might not typically be associated pure philanthropy that we are interested in. The POINT of the Soil Quality Laboratory philanthropy venture is to radically boost the healthfulness and productivity of soils for raising higher quality, healthier foods … but it’s also about all living matter, including the antimicrobials and other living things, found in soils that we [as humans] have not begun to understand or use … the point of quality in general is about fitness for use; the aim of the SQL venture is to make soil more fit, more productive for more valuable and healthier living soil ecoystems.

Sequester C as Life

There are many who believe that taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a laudable goal and it may be, but of course, this is not ONLY about carbon sequestration … it’s just that sequestering C as life is the best way to do carbon sequestration.

Taking CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it as mulch cover for soils that are transferred through a variety of practices … which might involve grazing herbivores … OR using herbivores like goats which can digest woody biomass … OR using mushrooms to digest woody biomass … with insects and a wide variety of burrowing animals transporting the carbonaceous residue deeper into the soil OR relying upon trees to or deeprooted perennials to vertically sequester the carbon … the point of soil quality LABORATORY is really about radically amping up the value of the life that is in the soil or on the top few feet of the soil surface. The lifeforms that we are after includes things like antibiotics … but antibiotics are only the tip of an incredibly large LIVING iceberg that has not yet been tapped.