Holden Karnofsky

Holden Karnofsky

Holden Karnofsky is a co-founder and co-executive director of charity evaluator GiveWell and one of three managing directors of the Open Philanthropy Project, which was originally a collaboration between GiveWell and Good Ventures.

Karnofsky graduated from Harvard University with a degree in social science in 2003. At Harvard, he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon. He then went on to work at the Westport, Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Some of his work at the hedge fund was mentioned in financial newspaper Barron's.

At Bridgewater Associates, Karnofsky met his future GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld. In 2006, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld started a charity club where they and other Bridgewater employees pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to. In mid-2007, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed a fund called the Clear Fund, using donations from their colleagues, and quit their jobs to work full time on GiveWell, whose goal was to allocate the money in the Clear Fund to the best charities.

In June 2012, GiveWell announced a close partnership with Good Ventures, the philanthropic foundation tasked with giving away Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz's wealth. Good Ventures has been one of GiveWell's main funders since then as well as a major donor to GiveWell-recommended charities.

Under Karnofsky's leadership, the annual money moved to GiveWell-recommended charities increased from $1.6 million in 2010 to $110 million in 2015.

In December 2007, Karnofsky was discovered posting a question about the organization to MetaFilter using another individual's name, and then posting an answer about GiveWell with his own name but without disclosing his affiliation with GiveWell. The negative publicity led Karnofsky to resign from the role of executive director, though he was later reinstated. The board cut $5000 from his salary to pay for a professional development course he would be required to take. The incident had negative repercussions on GiveWell's reputation. Karnofsky's claim that the incident had been due to sleep deprivation and offer to donate to MetaFilter were mocked by users of the site.

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