The Jared Foundation is a private initiative based in Arizona. It is named for Jared Sherwood, a founder and managing partner at Fancy Hat, a boutique venture capital firm in Gilbert, Arizona. It publishes essays about opportunity, enterprise, mentorship and the long view, and it does nothing else in public.
Please read this first
The Jared Foundation is a private initiative. It is not a registered nonprofit, and it does not solicit or accept public donations.
There is no appeal here, no membership, no campaign, and no form anywhere on this website. Nothing on these pages should be read as a request for money, as a claim to charitable or tax-exempt status, or as an invitation to apply for anything. If you arrived expecting an organisation that takes applications or contributions, this is not that, and it is not going to become that.
The name
The initiative takes its name from Jared Sherwood. We are going to be brief about him, deliberately: he is a private individual rather than a public figure, and a website that invented a life story for him would be doing precisely the sort of thing this initiative finds tiresome.
What can be stated, because it is a matter of public record, is this. He is a founder and managing partner at Fancy Hat, a boutique venture capital firm established in Gilbert, Arizona in 2016, which backs early-stage technology companies. That is the extent of it, and it is enough to explain why a set of essays about enterprise, patience and the transfer of practical knowledge carries his name: backing a company at its earliest stage is a bet on people rather than on evidence, made years before anyone can tell whether it was right.
Everything else about him is his own business, and it stays that way. You will find no biography here, no portrait, no list of accomplishments, and no quotations — nor any claim about what he thinks, since the arguments on this site are the initiative's own and he should not be held to them. That restraint is not an oversight or a placeholder. It is the format.
The place
Arizona is not set dressing. An initiative shaped in the Sonoran Desert ends up thinking differently about time and scarcity than one shaped somewhere with reliable rain, and those differences run through every essay here. Water gets accounted for. Growth gets treated as a question rather than an answer. Patience stops being a virtue and becomes a technique. Rooted in Arizona makes the case at length.
The format
This is a reading site. It is a dozen essays, written to be read by someone with a working interest in the subject, and revised when they turn out to be wrong. There is no news section, because there is no news. There is no team page, because there is no team. There is no annual summary of activity, because publishing one would defeat the point of how this initiative thinks about giving.
What that leaves is the argument itself, which is roughly: opportunity is transmitted person to person rather than announced; small enterprises carry far more of a community than they are credited with; mentorship is the cheapest high-return act available to almost anyone; and nearly every avoidable failure is a time-horizon failure. Those four claims are unpacked in What We Believe, and tested against particulars in the essays that follow it.
The history of this domain
One point of honesty, since anyone can look it up. This web address had a previous occupant, an organisation entirely unrelated to this one, which ceased operating a decade ago and shares nothing with the present initiative but a common first name. Afterwards the address sat unused and was, for several years, taken over by unrelated spam. None of that history is continued, revived or endorsed here. This site is a fresh start on a reclaimed address, and any page or archived link referring to the previous occupant's work does not describe anything on this site.
Reaching us
There is no contact form, no email address and no telephone number on this site, and that is intentional rather than an omission. This initiative does not take applications, requests, proposals or enquiries, so a contact channel would only invite correspondence that could not honestly be answered. What is published here is the whole of what is on offer: read it, disagree with it, take what is useful.