The Foundation will likely pursue several different investment types, in order to achieve our strategic objectives. GitLab Foundation is not accepting unsolicited proposals or funding requests at this time.

Some of the investment mechanisms we may use are as follows:

1. Incubation: philanthropy is uniquely suited to de-risk, incubate, and pilot new ideas that likely would not attract traditional capital nor government funding; we will invest in and incubate within GitLab Foundation these types of projects, aiming to test new hypotheses and transparently share learnings with the field, while encouraging investment in moonshot ideas.
2. Pilots: where external organizations exist with the capacity to begin a new, innovative activity, we will fund test and learn pilots, with the objective that they continue and potentially scale those activities if successful
3. Scaling: we can play a role in helping successful nonprofit models scale via:
   1. Acquiring ongoing government funding
   2. Designing self-sustaining, business models (revenue-generating), or
   3. Helping grantees improve their fundraising capabilities (donor relations, social media fundraising, securing bequests)
4. Systems change: making an impact on lifetime earnings growth is a complex, multi-faceted challenge that will require removing barriers and resolving market inefficiencies; we believe we can make a difference by identifying and addressing systemic problems to shift market incentives - for example by:
   1. Funding research, measurement, technology and other “basic infrastructure” to improve the knowledge and coordination of actors within the system (e.g., funding an assessment of the highest-quality tech bootcamps)
   2. Advocating for increased supply, potentially including shifts in regulation (e.g., increasing supply of training opportunities, convincing local governments to pay for high-performing services, tax treatment)
   3. Building demand by shifting behaviors (e.g., convincing employers to hire for skills, rather than degrees)