EV Atlas — every Emergent Ventures grantee, in one place

David Perell was in the very first Emergent Ventures cohort in November 2018, when his project was 'podcasting and social media.' At the time he hosted the North Star podcast and was an early writer-on-Twitter explaining what a 'personal monopoly' looked like in the creator economy. He channelled that into Write of Passage, an online writing course that has since become one of the larger writer-training operations on the internet — running cohort-based programs that teach the craft of writing for the web. The school operates out of Austin and has trained thousands of students across multiple cohorts. Perell has continued to be plugged into the EV ecosystem: cohort 47 (Oct 2025) lists Sheehan Quirke — better known as The Cultural Tutor — receiving a grant to work *with* David Perell on 'why beauty has disappeared in the modern world,' which is exactly the kind of long-tail compounding the program was designed to produce.