Cari Tuna (born 1986) is an American journalist and philanthropist. She is the co-founder and president of Good Ventures, the president of Open Philanthropy, and a board member of GiveWell.

Background

Tuna grew up in Evansville, Indiana. Both of her parents were medical doctors (Cha 2014). She studied political science at Yale University, where she received a BA degree in 2008 (Callahan 2013).

Journalism career

While pursuing her undergraduate studies, Tuna wrote extensively for Yale Daily News. She subsequently contributed to the Evansville Courier & Press, interned at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and, between 2008 and 2011, was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered the California economy, the real-estate market, and the higher-education system (Callahan 2013; Cha 2014).

Philanthropic career

Tuna started dating Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook and Asana, around 2009. On December 2010, Tuna and Moskovitz signed the Giving Pledge , becoming the youngest couple ever to do so (Cha 2014). To fulfil that commitment, they established the foundation Good Ventures, of which Tuna became its president. At around that time, while preparing to transition from journalism to philanthropy, Tuna read Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save, which introduced her "to the idea of not just trying to do some good with your giving, but doing as much good as you can." (Tuna 2011; Preston 2012; Gunther 2018) It was also from that book that Tuna first learned about GiveWell. Shortly thereafter, she and Moskovitz met Holden Karnofsky, who was then GiveWell's co-executive director. Tuna was impressed by GiveWell's commitment to both transparency and cause neutrality, and a collaboration between Good Ventures and GiveWell ensued. In April 2011, Tuna joined GiveWell's board of directors (Preston 2012); in December that year, Good Ventures gave substantial grants to GiveWell's top-rated organizations (Tuna 2011); and in June 2012, Karnofsky announced that GiveWell and Good Ventures planned to "act as a single team" (Karnofsky 2012), which resulted in the creation of GiveWell Labs and, in August 2014, of the Open Philanthropy Project (Karnofsky 2014).

Under Tuna's leadership, Good Ventures has, as of August 2021, granted over $1.37 billion to organizations working in global health and development, farmed animal welfare, global catastrophic risks, and other cause areas (Good Ventures 2021b).