Life On The Pledge: Sarah Grogan & Phil Mohr

Please share a bit about yourself

Phil is the co-founder and CEO of Metica, a company building machine-learning systems for mobile games. He started it after two earlier exits, also in gaming. Sarah spent almost ten years in equity sales on the trading floors of large investment banks before leaving to retrain as a yoga teacher and build a business in wellness. That is where she and Phil met. We lived in the UK for over fifteen years before recently moving to Cyprus with our baby boy for Phil’s work and more of an island life.

Two things changed how we see our responsibility to give. The first was losing someone close to us to malaria. It is preventable and treatable, yet it still kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, most of them children. The second was watching the scale of civilian death in Gaza, much of it in real time on our phones. We were already very focused on global health in our giving, but seeing this level of suffering made us want to focus on medical humanitarian work in conflict zones as well.

What first drew you to Founders Pledge and what motivated you to pledge?

Three things. First, the people at Founders Pledge are excellent and genuinely passionate about what they do.

Second, they made it possible to commit to giving at a point when Phil did not yet know how much he would be able to give. The pledge let us make the decision first and work out the details later. That mattered because it came during a period consumed by a company exit, when there was no capacity to research charities or set up the mechanics. They took all of that off our plate and made it happen at a point when it otherwise would not have.

Finally, they draw in a community of bright, ambitious people who want to have an impact through the businesses they run and through their giving, which has been a real privilege to be part of.

Has your Founders Pledge experience changed the way you think about impact?

Yes, and the clearest example is lead exposure. We had no idea how much preventable harm it causes, or that so much of the damage – including the lasting effect on children's development – can be avoided through education, advocacy, and pressure on policymakers rather than expensive medical treatment.

Learning through Founders Pledge shifted how we think. We used to think about giving to causes that felt very close or local to us. Now, we also look at where the same money can do the most good, especially in neglected areas where a relatively small amount of money can change a lot of lives. Now, we think a balance of both is very important: giving that you can feel, see, and perhaps be directly involved with, alongside giving that might feel more distant but is incredibly impactful.

What have you most valued about being a Founders Pledge member?

The guidance that turned our intentions into a specific and thoughtful decision. For example, we knew we wanted to fund research on tropical diseases, since prevention beats reacting after the fact, but we did not know where to direct it. Founders Pledge helped us narrow down our choice of topic by giving us one piece of advice that really stuck in our minds and informed our decision: fund a research topic that could have a large impact but will not get funded unless you back it.

On that basis, we set up the Grogan-Mohr scholarship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, backing a PhD focused on the Wolbachia bacterium as a way to block mosquitoes' ability to transmit pathogens. The approach is already proven to work for diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, but not yet for malaria. That gap – high potential and underfunded – is exactly what they steered us toward.

What charitable organisations do you support and what motivated you to do so?

We have funded many things, but the five main ones are:

• Malaria nets, because they are cheap, they work, and they stop a disease that took someone close to us.
• The Grogan-Mohr scholarship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, funding a PhD student researching Wolbachia as a means of preventing mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria. It is the kind of work that does not get done unless someone funds it, and it is personal to us.
• Lead exposure work, because the harm is almost entirely preventable and a small amount of money goes a long way, especially for children. This is what changed our thinking in the first place.
• Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). After watching the toll on civilians in Gaza and elsewhere, we wanted to back frontline medical humanitarian work that goes directly to people in conflict zones and crises, wherever they are.
• The Young Vic Theatre in Lambeth, London, which was a neighbour of ours and is an invaluable resource for the local community and London more broadly. Not only does it nurture new talent, but it also employs many local people and provides a huge amount of hands-on support to underprivileged people in the community.