Nicole Shanahan

SOURCE OF WEALTH: ClearAccessIP, Google

FUNDING AREAS: Bay Area Community, Reproductive Longevity & Equality, Criminal Justice Reform, Healthy and Livable Planet

OVERVIEW: Nicole Shanahan does her grantmaking through the Bia-Echo Foundation, which she launched in 2019, and via which she intends to give $100 million to philanthropy by 2024. The foundation focuses on women’s reproductive longevity and equality, criminal justice reform and the environment. Shanahan is the ex-wife of Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, and she was a driving force in the Sergey Brin Family Foundation until her divorce.

BACKGROUND: Raised in Oakland, Nicole Shanahan graduated with a B.A. from University of Puget Sound in 2007, and with a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law. She worked as an intellectual property paralegal and patent specialist. In 2013, she launched ClearAccessIP, a purpose-built solution for reducing the transaction costs associated with building, managing and distributing patents and patent rights. She is also a former fellow of CodeX, the Stanford Center of Legal Informatics, “where she launched the Smart Prosecution project, a multi-disciplinary effort applying data science to the prosecutorial process, involving partnerships with district attorneys and community organizations.”

ISSUES: 

WOMEN & REPRODUCTIVE EQUALITY: Shanahan’s Bia-Echo Foundation supports reproductive health and women’s reproductive longevity, a cause in which Shanahan has personal experience. An early grantee of Bia-Echo is the Buck Institute’s Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM: Bia-Echo is also “committed to initiatives in support of an equal and fair justice system that is accessible to all, regardless of gender, race or socio-economic status.” The foundation has supported the Stanford Computational Policy Lab to drive social impact on criminal justice reform via data analysis and technical innovation. It has also given $5 million to Silicon Valley Community Foundation and $500,000 each to Edward Charles Foundation and Good Films Impact to support criminal justice reform and human rights initiatives.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENT: Bia-Echo’s environmental funding focuses on climate change and averting climate disaster. The foundation has supported the San Francisco-based Planet Labs, a for-profit company that creates information images related to disaster and climate response, crop yield predictions and urban planning. Brin has also demonstrated interest in climate change, having funded research at Maastricht University on lab-created beef in the early 2010s.

OTHER: She has supported democratic and center-left political candidates and issues in the past and has hinted that she will continue to do so; however, about her political donations, she’s said: “I don’t think about it in terms of party. I think about it in terms of people, places and ideas.”

LOOKING FORWARD: Shanahan’s giving is just beginning. And while the effects of her divorce from Brin will take time to fully become known, expect her to remain laser-focused reproductive sciences, criminal justice, and the environment for the foreseeable future. Like MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates, Shanahan has the potential to become a billionaire philanthropist of considerable significance.

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