Despite the internal commentary, which is mostly in jest, spending arbitrarily is going to get you fired pretty quick. But there is still a metric ton of pressure to find the right things to spend money on, and they struggle to do so in a lot of cases.

It's interesting to think about from an entrepreneurial perspective, that The Gates Foundation has plenty of capital to "invest" but the companies and programs are often not mature enough to warrant massive grants. There might be a ton of small NGOs doing awesome work all over the world, and they can take small grants (XX,000-XXX,000), but imagine what a nightmare it becomes for them if given the burden of tens of millions of dollars all the sudden. Money solves a lot of problems in the nonprofit world, but sudden cash infusions can often create a lot of bizarre problems.

And on the other side, even if The Gates Foundation gives thousands of six figure grants out, that's not going to make a dent in the overall pool of cash.

I wonder if an element of the foundation could be helping to scale or "staff up" these NGO's to be able to scale/deal with an influx of funding?

Obviously, "staffing up" is time intensive, but I would think they would need an alternative approach if finding worthy organizations becomes difficult.

I do think there is a pretty big incentive now for really smart people to work on the world's most important problems (disease, famine, poverty, education, etc) knowing there is a lot of capital to back it up. I know internally at TGF they've been working to market their grant programs better to encourage more young "startup" companies apply.

I got the impression more that the Gates' were eager to devote more money to the foundation, and the hurry is placed on finding worthwile ways to spend that money, rather than literally 'give this to anyone who will take it!'

Bill's still Bill. He's always been conservative with resource allocation.

The old story that he always had a year of wages for every employee in the company liquid at Microsoft from day 1.