The Berggruen Institute is a Los Angeles-based think tank and philanthropic organization founded by investor Nicolas Berggruen, focused on philosophy, governance, and long-term thinking about societal transformation. Venkatesh Rao held a fellowship with the Berggruen Institute, representing one of several institutional affiliations in the post-ribbonfarm era of his career.
Berggruen's intellectual mission
The Berggruen Institute operates at the intersection of philosophy and practical governance, funding the journal Noema (which covers technology, philosophy, and society at a high intellectual level), running fellowship programs, and convening dialogues between thinkers and policymakers. Its intellectual orientation — serious philosophical engagement with the governance and social implications of technological change — is congruent with Rao's post-Ribbonfarm focus on protocol-thinking, the-clockless-clock-series, and the broader questions about how human institutions adapt to rapid technological change.
The institute's Noema magazine has published Rao's writing, making it one of the external publication venues where Rao has appeared during the post-ribbonfarm period. Noema's combination of intellectual seriousness and public accessibility matches the register Rao has developed for audiences outside the Ribbonfarm community.
The fellowship relationship
The Berggruen fellowship gave Rao institutional affiliation and some degree of financial support for intellectual work during a period of transition from the Ribbonfarm model to new platforms and projects. The fellowship model — providing a thinker with resources without requiring them to produce specific deliverables for an institutional employer — is one of the patronage structures Rao has engaged with alongside the a16z residency and the summer-of-protocols directorship.
The Berggruen connection is less central to Rao's intellectual biography than either ribbonfarm or summer-of-protocols, but it represents the broader pattern of the post-ribbonfarm era: Rao engaging with a range of institutional contexts on project-specific terms rather than maintaining a single primary affiliation. Each institutional engagement — a16z, Berggruen, Ethereum Foundation — provided resources and audience access in exchange for intellectual work aligned with the institution's interests, while Rao maintained intellectual independence through his own publishing channels.