We've spent our careers inside the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, and we kept running into the same wall from both directions. Funders want to fund programs: the visible, countable, fundable work. Nobody wants to fund the back office. And the organizations doing the most important work in their communities are the ones most starved for the strategy, the financial systems, the data administration, the governance scaffolding.

Everybody talks about data and evaluation. Almost nobody talks about data administration. But that's the work that actually determines whether an organization survives its own good intentions.

We watched values-aligned organizations get locked out of restricted funding because of the legal form they happen to operate under, not because of the work they do—while fiscal sponsors charge 5 to 10 percent off the top and technical assistance gets priced for organizations that don't need the added cost.

Nonprofits trying to build capacity run into an unworkable contradiction: you can't bootstrap your way out of being under-resourced. Somebody has to provide the thing directly. That's what Hypha is for.