As a private equity investor, New England-based Will Thorndike followed a simple philosophy: identify promising young entrepreneurs — typically just a year or two out of business school — and provide the capital and guidance for them to start and run companies. The approach worked: Thorndike and his firms made money, and many of the companies they backed thrived long term.
Now, with the scale-up of his Cromwell Harbor Foundation, Thorndike is applying the same search for emerging talent to philanthropy, supporting innovative academics practicing a decidedly cross-disciplinary style of investigation.
A graduate of Harvard and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Thorndike is currently managing partner of The Cromwell Harbor Partnership, a private investment company with a focus on long-term holdings. Earlier in his career, he founded Housatonic Partners, a well-known private equity firm with offices in Boston and San Francisco. Now in his 60s, Thorndike launched the Cromwell Harbor Foundation with approximately $100 million, but intends to direct more of his wealth and time to the foundation over the coming years.
The foundation, based on Mount Desert Island, Maine, recently announced the first recipients of its Chrysalis Prize, currently its primary program. Intended as an annual award, the prize provides $250,000 to academics specializing in archaeology, evolutionary biology and philosophy — areas of study, according to the foundation, that “explore the deep foundations of what it means to be human.”
The inaugural recipients are Dakota McCoy, an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and Natalie Mueller, an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. The prizes are, more or less, no strings attached.
The Chrysalis Prize: “The opposite of a lifetime achievement award”
These first two winners of the Chrysalis Prize, Thorndike said, exemplify the sort of multidisciplinary approach that Cromwell Harbor wants to foster — that is, incorporating new ideas in various fields — including evolutionary theory, computational biology, archaeology and ecology, to develop new insights and knowledge. And the fact that they aren’t yet established figures in academia is a feature, not a bug.
There are, of course, a variety of prizes in the sciences and academia. But the best known, such as the Nobel (the most famous of them all) are usually awarded in recognition of years-ago achievement, not as support during the ongoing, hothouse period of discovery. Thorndike wants to help younger scholars do the work and make the discoveries that may one day prove valuable to society.
“If you look at the ages when Nobel Prizes are awarded it’s remarkably consistent, with the mean age around 38 or 39 years old,” Thorndike told me. But that period is the time in an academic’s career when it is hardest to attract funding — just as fresh B-school grads can have trouble raising start-up investments.
This was the basis of the Chrysalis prize concept itself. “It’s the academic version of being a great CEO,” Thorndike said. “Basically, the idea was to get talented young people at a moment of inflection in their own work — very definitely the opposite of a lifetime achievement award.”
Will Thorndike’s past philanthropic work and current outlook
In his private equity career, Thorndike pioneered what’s known as the search fund, an investment method that focuses on finding and backing younger entrepreneurs and providing funding and advice as they start and run their own companies. “It breaks lots of the conventions in private equity, in that we’re actively seeking inexperienced CEOs,” said Thorndike.
Thorndike explored the nature of fresh approaches in business in his successful 2012 book, “The Outsiders,” which explored how eight CEOs with admirable track records allocated capital to manage their businesses. “Probably the most surprising finding in the book was that all eight of those CEOs were first-time CEOs,” he said. Similar insights now guide his growing giving.
Thorndike is himself at a bit of an inflection point in his philanthropy; previous efforts have involved serving as a former trustee of the Groton School as well as Boston’s WGBH public radio. He is a trustee of the Land & Garden Preserve, and has cofounded two ideas festivals — The Summer Institute at the College of the Atlantic and the Authors Guild’s Words, Ideas and Thinkers Festival.
He’s also a former trustee and chair of the Maine-based College of the Atlantic, and his involvement with that school played a role in the evolution of Cromwell Harbor Foundation’s current work. He’d been mulling the creation of a philanthropic foundation for several years but efforts to get it operational intensified about a year and a half ago when he asked Darron Collins — who had been president of COA for 13 years — to come on board as executive director.
It was at COA that Thorndike got to know Collins — in fact, Thorndike was instrumental in bringing Collins to the school, where, in Thorndikian fashion, he became at 41 one of the youngest college presidents in the country. While at COA, Collins, who previously served as managing director with the World Wildlife Fund, helped establish the school’s leadership in environmental studies.
For the immediate future, Cromwell Harbor will continue to expand the number of Chrysalis Prize winners, Collins said. “The plan over the short and medium term is to grow the number of areas within academia,” he said. The foundation doesn’t accept applications for the prizes; it relies on nominations from its own selection committee of academics and other experts.
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While the foundation and its selection committees won’t avoid hard sciences, the Chrysalis Prize will retain a humanistic slant. “We are interested in areas of thought that ask deep, fundamental questions about our humanity,” Collins said, “and by looking backward, being able to glean things out of humanity’s past to help direct our future.”
Eventually, the foundation intends to expand its funding beyond academics into other nonprofit areas. Neither Collins nor Thorndike gave specifics about what these other areas might be, but a reasonable guess is that some might involve environmental or ecological activity.
Meanwhile, in an era that has seen increasing threats to public support for scientific and academic research, with an administration demonstrating active disdain for rationality, it’s welcome news when new support for creative thought becomes available.
The Cromwell Harbor Foundation team believes that there’s a particular need to support and encourage the work of cross-disciplinary thinkers — in part, said Collins, because it’s tougher to land funding for such work under traditional academic grantmaking, which typically prioritizes a narrow, within-the-field focus. In addition, those whose work crosses typical departmental boundaries can help inform discussion as society at large wrestles with so much abrupt change. “Yes, we need specialists, but what we lack are generalists — people with syncretic approaches to asking and answering questions,” he said.
