Patrick Diamond
Patrick Diamond knows what innovation looks like in different places, and something about Maine stands out. Place shapes innovation more than most people realize.
He spent five years building at MIT, learning how innovation works at the center. Patrick took the best of it and left to build from the edge. He founded Laurel to help philanthropists invest in technology and impact — work that takes him around the world and back to Maine.
His perspective reveals what makes Maine distinct. The people who choose to build here do so with intention, and that intention shows up in how and what they build. Purpose runs through the companies, the ideas, and the founders who could build anywhere. Still, they choose Maine.
Patrick thinks that intention is Maine’s advantage — small, peripheral places create precious space for ingenuity. The deliberateness required to build here produces a kind of savvy that faster places rarely reward.
Intention is the key to charting Maine’s future in innovation. Patrick is on the board of Startup Maine to help name it and build on it.
Background
Patrick’s career began at a community health center in Baltimore, helping improve care for poor and homeless neighbors. It sharpened something about what innovation means when the stakes are human. That led him to MIT Solve, where he joined the founding team. Over five years, he directed $26 million to social entrepreneurs working on the world’s hardest problems — partnering with the Gates Foundation, the head of Trinity College at Cambridge University, and others philanthropists on global health challenges.
At Laurel, he designed and operates SELF with Intuitive Foundation — a global training initiative changing how clinicians in low-resource settings learn surgical skills. He also co-designed the Catalyze Challenge, a $14 million funder collaborative supporting 60+ organizations reaching 45,000 learners across the US. This work has taken him to Ethiopia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Togo, Kenya, Malaysia, and Mexico.
He grew up in Portland, studied abroad in El Salvador, and renovated his own house in Portland before the market made that impossible for most. He writes about philanthropic practice at Modern Funder. He hopes the future looks more like Star Trek than Black Mirror.
