Tech founders are fast becoming one of the most influential forces in Australian philanthropy. With bold ambitions, a bias for action, and billions already committed, this new wave of major donors is emerging as a powerful force for change.
This webinar, hosted by the Centre for Social Impact on 9 September 2025, unpacked findings from the Australian Tech Giving Report, developed by StartGiving and the Centre for Social Impact UWA.
Guest speakers Antonia Ruffell (CEO, StartGiving), Dr Leanne Lester (Research Manager, CSI UWA) and Anthony Woods (Tech giver and co-founder, Grafana Labs) shared exclusive insights with host Arminé Nalbandian (CEO, CSI) into what drives tech givers, how their approach differs from traditional philanthropy, and what this shift means for not-for-profits looking to engage with tomorrow’s major donors.
Watch a full recording of the webinar below and read a selection of the most popular questions posed to the panellists.
watch the recording
Tech giver faqs
What advice could you give the charities looking for funding from self-made founders?
[Antonia Ruffell] The research is hugely optimistic about the potential for unleashing billions of new funding. We see this potential pipeline of future funding that is coming that’s going to transform the face of philanthropy in Australia.
However, the tension or the challenge that is worth being aware of for charities, is that often for founders in the early years of building the company and before they exit, much of their wealth will be tied up in shares in their company, in unlisted equity.
For quite a period of time, founders will be very wealthy on paper. They might even show up in the top 500 rich lists, but in actual fact, that’s not very liquid cash, until they have some sort of liquidity event, like the sale of their company.
So, for you as a charity or as a fundraiser, there’s a question to consider about how much time you’re going to invest in nurturing those relationships early, knowing that they might not have a significant financial reward in terms of donations, for a few years, until that company realises its success.
So, find smaller opportunities for tech founders to get engaged and get to know you, in the hopes that that it’s going to lead to further support down the track.
By their nature, a lot of tech founders do like data and evidence and have both an emotional but also an irrational approach to their giving. So, of course you want to have great, inspiring stories in your fundraising, we know that. It’s good to look in this sector for evidence, particularly about impact, or what sort of impact is being desired. Presenting this in a reasonably easy to digest pitch deck is probably going to resonate a bit better than a very lengthy, dry style of application.
Tech founders are also digital first. Traditionally in fundraising, certainly 20 years ago, it was all about big fancy gala dinners and taking people out for coffee and lunches if you were doing major gift. With tech founders, often their preference will be for a Zoom meeting over an in-person meeting, and certainly over a gala dinner.
Is tech giving best characterised by saying impact is more important than legacy?
[Antonia Ruffell] Yes, absolutely, I think that is the case. Traditionally, particularly with very wealthy families, philanthropy has been seen as an opportunity to create an intergenerational vehicle that’s going to go on forever.
But those ideas of creating some sort of dynastic intergenerational wealth vehicle resonate much less strongly with this community. It really is about having an impact in their lifetime.
Because tech founders are younger when they have an exit, hopefully put a load of that money aside in a foundation, but then it’s not about just keeping that in there as the one lump sum that’s going to stay in the foundation forever. They’ll often then just see that as a great holding pot or forcing mechanism for their philanthropy. They’ve set the money aside, but then they want to give it away much more quickly, not just, say, at 5% a year, but at higher levels, so they can see the impact.
And of course, because they’ve been successful earlier in life, they’re not done. Tech founders, avid learners, want to do something now. They’re much more likely, in time, to go and set up another startup, often an impact-driven startup. But they certainly have an expectation, that they’re going to create more wealth in the future which drives this desire to get money out the door faster, have an impact now.
Data and evidence is an important factor for tech entrepreneurs as they think about their giving. How important is the human impact story? Is data king, or how do you balance those two?
[Anthony Woods] Definitely a combination of them. The heartstrings, obviously, always resonates. We like to know, what is the impact?
I’m also a big believer that it’s the people who drive change. People are the ones that lead to success. And when I think about philanthropy, it’s the same thing. It’s the people that we’re investing in, and less about specific programs. So, the key for us is really to go and find those passionate people who have a vision for what it is they want to achieve, but also that they’ve got the ability to go and execute on it.
When I think about philanthropy, I’m investing in people to drive change. I want to do that in a way where they’ve got flexibility. It’s very similar to the startup scene. When you go and raise money from a VC, typically they’re investing in the individual, and it’s less about the specific product. Because I know even our journey, the product that we set out to build is certainly not the product we ended up building. Because things change along the way. You want to be able to be flexible and be able to move around where the needs are at a certain time. For philanthropy, it’s the same thing. We don’t want to burden people with sticking to a specific plan that they might have had, knowing that the world has changed, and they need to adapt to change with it.
We want them to have that flexibility to go and do that, and so betting on those people becomes really important.
What do you think are the biggest barriers (political, legislative or regulatory) to philanthropic giving from this cohort of givers in Australia?
[Antonia Ruffell] One of the things that we’ve done a lot of work around at StartGiving is to make it easier for founders to be able to donate unlisted equity in their company into a foundation.
It is getting easier to do at the moment, but I think that’s one of the things that can make a huge difference in finance. If people move a bit of unlisted equity in an early-stage company into a foundation, that might be worth a small amount now, but in five years’ time, it’s been set aside already, and it might be worth millions, or hopefully even billions.
The other thing that I think people often talk about in a philanthropy space that could be a barrier, or an incentive is around tax. But interestingly, I found that tax is less of a driver, or tax minimisation is less of a driver for this community, and Australia does have pretty good tax incentives around philanthropy.
Lastly, there are limitations if you’ve got a private ancillary fund about giving to deductible gift recipient organisations. Through this research, we can see that a lot of tech givers do have an international lens, so it’s trying to find ways for them to easily be able to give internationally, or to some exciting newer initiatives that might sit slightly outside of the DGR framework.
But broadly, I think that the tax regime and the private ancillary fund regime that we have here encourages and makes it easier for people to set aside assets for future philanthropy.
How do you connect to tech founders?
[Anthony Woods] It’s surprisingly difficult as a funder to find organisations. It’s really going out and meeting people and engaging with the different community groups. We do a lot of work with Philanthropy Australia. They run a lot of meetups and help doing that bridging and connecting between funders and different charities.
I’m certainly motivated to find technology solutions for these kinds of things. There’s a few different ones trying to improve that experience of bringing together funders with the charities that are looking for the money. Right now, it’s a bit challenging.
The ACNC website have some tools to be able to go and search through the data, but it’s not fantastic. But because our giving is based on the people, we find it more effective just to go out and meet them.
[Antonia Ruffell] It’s always one of those difficult things, I think, when you’re fundraising, full stop, is how to get in front of people who aren’t necessarily just wealthy, but also have an interest and an appetite to fund whatever area it is that you’re working in. There is a magic in fundraising of bringing those two together. It can be challenging.
I spend a lot of time simply looking at the media, and you would be surprised how many tech founders are on LinkedIn. So, if you do find someone who you think has the capability and is likely to genuinely have the interest in funding what you’re doing, there’s no harm in trying to reach out through LinkedIn as well.
Are founders more likely to support projects and programs or systems change?
[Antonia Ruffell] My sense is this community are interested in what systemic change looks like.
Broadly, they want to know how change happens. But the reality is that if you’re just getting started, and you have a much more modest amount generally when you’re just getting started, it can be overwhelming to leap straight into trying to make great, bold claims that you’re going to change an entire system. People will often start with very focused tactical interventions backing organisations that play an important part in creating change. So, there’s a bit of both.
We see an interest in the big bets and how you change issues, but very much when people get started, they’re often backing those organisations with great leadership, great, programs behind them and supporting them.
[Anthony Woods] That’s certainly my perspective as well. We’re engaged in education, there’s a lot of tactical things that we’re supporting because there is demand and there’s need today. But also, we see the need for systemic change. Our approach is the love sandwich, let’s just do both.
We’ll start with the bottom-up approach, and we’ll also try and do the top-down approach, and hopefully we’ll get the success in the future. But it is challenging. Especially for me, because tech moves very quickly. I want to see results quite quickly. Systemic change doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a long, long time.
But also, I’m a believer of investing in systemic change, because who will? It feels like the government’s not doing that anymore. We want to drive that change. I’ve got money available to invest in that, and I’m going to be able to do that for a long time. I’m going to be able to keep investing, and I’m going to be able to commit to these long-term plans, to drive the systemic change. So, I’ll do both.
How open do you think tech givers are to risk, especially when backing innovative or new solutions?
[Anthony Woods] I think most tech founders obviously have to embrace risk, otherwise you wouldn’t start a company. But it’s about measured risk. The data helps with that. Rather than just blindly trying to achieve something, you have to have a hypothesis of what you want to go and change. The way you mitigate the risk is by investing in great people.
Plans change, and that’s okay. Things go wrong, that’s okay. Failure is an okay thing. It’s a great way to learn what not to do. It’s through those failures that you’re able to discover new things, either about yourself or about what it is that you’re trying to achieve that helps you be more effective in the future. I definitely have a very good risk appetite.
I don’t expect that all of the organisations that I support are going to be successful in their endeavors, and that’s okay. Because whatever reasons for things not working this time will be a learning, and that will enable them to do better next time.
For a person who lives right on the threshold of risk all the time, I think I certainly have a greater appreciation for that.
Are tech givers mainly giving through a PAF (private ancillary fund), or is it also through corporate giving?
[Antonia Ruffell] All of the above, and I think it’s certainly not only private ancillary funds. The exciting statistics in this report are obviously around the billionaires and how they’re giving, but we are seeing this trend right the way across people working in the tech sector to have a desire to give. Often that’s just straightforward cash donations as well.
It might be setting up sub-funds in a public ancillary fund, it might be a private ancillary fund.
And then we also see with some of the larger foundations, it might be a structure that’s not as traditional as a PAF, that might be setting up their own PBI or some other sort of charity that gives them a broad remit of charitable purposes that they can support.
That’s on the personal side of giving, but corporate philanthropy is also a very important part of the opportunity in the tech space. So StartGiving works alongside another organisation called Pledge 1%, which encourages companies to bake social impact into their DNA from the beginning. It encourages companies to give away 1% of profits, 1% of staff time, 1% of product, and ultimately 1% of equity, to charitable purposes. And we see that as a very popular way for tech founders and tech companies to dip their toe in giving from a very early stage, before they’ve perhaps even realised any of their personal wealth.
How do you go about being an informed giver? How can tech givers practice intersectional giving, so their philanthropy disrupts inequities instead of unintentionally reinforcing current systems?
[Anthony Woods] I think it comes down to what individuals are passionate about. Certainly, from our perspective, inequality is a big part of the challenges in the world that we want to go and tackle. There’s a lot of work that we do that supports that kind of across the board in different organisations.
One of the great things that Jo and I did on our journey was a program called Finding Your Focus. It was sitting down and articulating what your core values are. Because I think one of the challenges that comes philanthropy is knowing where to go and invest. That was a really good experience to go through and be able to kind of articulate what was important to us so that we could build out a draft mission statement around where is it that we want to go and drive change, and what is needed in the world.
I think that’s a good tool to help people articulate that, so that they can be introspective and think about what is actually important to the world today.
[Antonia Ruffell] The question that I always try and get people to contemplate is not always
what is it that they’re passionate about and want to fund, but what is it that the world most needs from them? And I think that can change people’s lens sometimes onto really thinking through those questions of inequity and inequality and underfunded areas.
It is a challenge, of course. There are gaps and challenges in philanthropy, but I hope that this sector is broadly aware and in tune with issues of inequality and are very keen to learn. It’s certainly not something to fix by ourselves. There are a number of people in the philanthropy ecosystem trying to address these issues, and my hope is that there is a certainly a greater willingness to fund beyond the most obvious places within this community.
Is there interest from tech givers in supporting for-profit, for-purpose social enterprises?
[Anthony Woods] Personally, yes. I’m a big fan of impact investing. So, finding, not-for-profit organisations that are looking to drive change by building products or building services, I think it’s a great. It’s a win. Not everything’s a charity, not everything’s a business, and there’s this kind of group that kind of sits in the middle that are doing amazing things.
We have to be a little bit more careful about what we’re doing with the foundation’s funds. But on a personal side, that’s where we see we have that opportunity to go and work. And I think also, certainly as a tech founder, one of the things I think that’s opportunistic with these organisations is that I can get involved to be able to go and support them and give them more than just the money.
[Antonia Ruffell] We often talk to founders there are more ways to have a positive impact than philanthropy. It’s often about this portfolio of good that they have. They’ve got their philanthropy that they’re doing, but they’re also likely to be having an impact through their company with corporate philanthropy, and certainly at the point that they’re stepping out of their company and realising their wealth, I would say that most founders are looking at different types of impact investing and angel investing and investing in other early-stage startups. Many of which will have an impact focus within them. So, it’s not purely limited to philanthropy, it’s the whole spectrum of different ways that they can have a positive impact.