The Jared Foundation is a small, private initiative named for Jared Sherwood, a founder and managing partner at Fancy Hat, a boutique venture capital firm in Gilbert, Arizona. It is based in Arizona, and it is interested in a fairly narrow set of questions: how opportunity actually reaches people, what makes a place worth staying in, and why the most durable things tend to be built slowly by people nobody is watching.
It is not an operating organisation. It runs no programmes, employs no field staff, and holds no events. What it does is think in public — a modest collection of essays about enterprise, mentorship, community and the long horizon, written from a particular corner of the American Southwest and shaped by it.
Why a foundation, and why so little of one
The word foundation gets used two ways. Most often it means an institution that gives money away and publishes a report about it. Older than that, though, is the plain sense of the word: the part of a structure that sits underground, that nobody admires, and without which nothing above it stands. That second meaning is the one this initiative is named after.
It is a useful discipline. A foundation, in the structural sense, is judged by exactly one thing — whether what sits on top of it stays up. It doesn't get credit. It doesn't get photographed. It is bought once, buried, and then relied upon for decades. A great deal of the most valuable work in any community looks like that: the person who kept a shop open through a bad decade, the tradesperson who trained four apprentices, the family that stayed.
Three commitments
Everything here comes back to three convictions, which are set out at length in what we believe.
- Opportunity is concrete. It is not a mood or a slogan. It arrives as a specific person, offering a specific opening, to someone who could not otherwise have reached it — and it usually arrives through someone willing to teach what they know.
- Enterprise deserves more respect than it gets. Most of the economy is not the part that makes headlines. It is small firms, thin margins, long hours, and an owner who is also the bookkeeper.
- Time horizons should be longer than they are. Almost every serious mistake, in a business or a town, comes from optimising a quarter at the expense of a generation.
A place, not a backdrop
This initiative is Arizona's, and it is not incidental. The Sonoran Desert is an unusually good teacher of the things above: it rewards patience, punishes waste, and keeps a rigorous account of water. Living with that as the daily weather changes how you think about time, risk and enough. Rooted in Arizona and Lessons from the Sonoran Desert take that up properly.
What you will not find here
There is nothing to sign up for. There is no appeal, no campaign, no membership, no mailing list, and no form of any kind on this website. We do not publish a list of what this initiative supports, and we do not intend to — the reasoning for that is set out in Quiet Generosity, and it is a matter of conviction rather than discretion.
If you would rather have the plain version of all of this, the questions and answers page states it flatly, including what this initiative is not.
The essays
- 01What We Believe
Four claims, stated plainly enough to be argued with.
- 02Arizona
A state that keeps a strict account of water will teach you something about every other kind of account.
- 03Long Horizons
Nobody chooses the bad long-run outcome. They choose a good short-run outcome, repeatedly.
- 04Small Business
The most representative business in the country is one location, a few employees, and an owner who does the books on Sunday.
- 05Mentorship
The main obstacle is not selfishness. It is that competent people assume what they know is obvious.
- 06Community
Resilience is not a mood. It is redundancy that was already there before anything went wrong.
- 07Quiet Generosity
Publicity attached to a gift is at best irrelevant to its effect, and at worst a charge levied on the person receiving it.
- 08Desert Lessons
A place where nothing marginal survives is a strict but honest teacher.
- 09Further Reading
Short, annotated, and confined to sources that publish their own data.