Meet the million dollar philanthropist who has Hollywood in his pocket

Matt Pohlson’s Instagram feed is considerably more impressive than most. Scattered among the sunsets, weddings and exotic holidays – and the many party pictures displaying a dedication to fancy dress – are starry snapshots alongside a roll call of Hollywood heavyweights. Here he is with Daniel Craig (and a litter of golden retriever puppies); there with Arnold Schwarzenegger (and an Austrian army tank), with Matt Damon, Jon Stewart, Bono and, um, the Pope.

But Pohlson is not an actor (although he was, briefly, in his early 20s) or some sort of Hollywood fixer, but an entrepreneur and fundraiser, disrupting philanthropy by harnessing the power of celebrity.

As the co-founder of Omaze, a Los Angeles-based start-up that offers the chance to win a date with George Clooney or Idris Elba, a mentoring session with Michelle Obama or wine tasting with Jennifer Lawrence, Pohlson has so far raised more than $130 million (£100 million) for over 350 charities.

Pohlson is a pioneer in the charity sector – although Omaze is not the first organisation to tap into a public thirst for celebrity one-on-ones, it is the first to democratise them. Until now, such opportunities came with a hefty price tag, at glitzy gala fundraisers for the one per cent.

‘The idea has permeated our culture that you can’t be rewarded for doing good,’ says 42-year-old Pohlson. He blames the Calvinists, who arrived in America in search of religious freedom, and became racked with guilt when they started to make money, so created the concept of charity as a penance for profit. (Charitable donations are still tax-deductible in the US.) ‘We think that idea hurts innovation and prevents entrepreneurs from coming up with effective ways to fundraise.’ To that end, it should be stressed that Omaze is very firmly a for-profit company. Pohlson is not Mother Teresa; the company he oversees keeps approximately 20 per cent of the money it raises and donates 80 per cent to charity. Which, when sums raised can amount to several million pounds per experience, is not an inconsiderable profit. Fast Company reports that Omaze had a turnover of $45 million in 2019.

The lucrative celebrity-charity partnership is not wholly endorsed by everyone, however. Martin Scott, a senior lecturer in media and international development at the University of East Anglia, who has openly criticised Comic Relief, believes celebrity auctions are ‘layers of bad’, and that ‘the celebrity culture and consumerism totally overrides the issue’. ‘Research has shown us that celebrity involvement does more for the celebrity than it does for the campaign,’ he has said. ‘People are likely to remember them more than the non-profits they were trying to support.’

Omaze isn’t only about hanging out with A-listers, however. Of the 200 or so prizes the organisation offers in a year – with winners chosen through lottery-style sweepstakes and tickets starting at just $10 – a growing number are more concrete: sports cars and campervans, luxury houses, cash prizes, childcare for a year or wiping out your student debt. Travel experiences were a major aspect of Omaze pre-pandemic, with winners jetting off to Borneo or Bora Bora.

And now, Omaze is launching its first UK fund, raising money for Teenage Cancer Trust with the chance to win a £1 million house in the leafy Cheshire town of Cheadle Hulme. The aim was to raise £4 million but it’s already on course to raise much more; the Million Pound House Draw is destined to be the single biggest fundraising project of Omaze’s eight years so far.

Pohlson and I meet for lunch in the courtyard of a hotel in New York’s SoHo. He’s more handsome in person than in the Instagram pictures I’ve pored over. Home is the glamorous oceanfront enclave of Venice, LA, where the majority of the 112-strong Omaze staff are, but he’s in town for a month of meetings, and to build up the expanding offices here and in London.

He explains the sweepstake model, which offers entrants more chances to win the more that is donated. For the Million Pound House Draw, participation starts at £5 for seven entries, with the most popular donation being £25 for 40 chances to win. The winner is then chosen by random.org, which also selects the winning numbers for the Irish and Scottish Children’s lotteries. ‘They’re obsessed with the concept of true randomness versus pseudo-randomness, and they detest computer-generated randomness [which is actually predetermined], because it doesn’t bring in the unpredictability of nature,’ says Pohlson. Accordingly, random.org has built an apparently ‘unhackable’ system that introduces elements from the atmospheric ‘noise’ created by electrical storms, and feeds it into a computer to generate true randomness.

Such fairness is crucial, of course, when vying for the chance of a date with Clooney. ‘People lost their minds over that one,’ chuckles Pohlson. One winner was a 40-year-old woman who had not been on a date since she separated from her husband three years earlier; she took her seven-year-old daughter with her. Even since the actor has been off the market after marrying human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2014, he’s continued to be a prize. ‘We offered an experience in which you got to go to their house on Lake Como – they were so incredibly kind to the winners,’ says Pohlson. The winners were wined and dined at a four-hour lunch chez Clooney, with George and Amal’s parents at the table, too, and a boat ride around the lake the next day.

Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has offered himself as a prize 11 times. The first time Pohlson met the Terminator, in his hangar-size office, he spotted a photograph of the actor beside a tank, which he’d driven in the Austrian army, and subsequently purchased. ‘Arnold said, “We’ll run over watermelons and a copy of [the film] Million Dollar Baby [as retribution] because it made me cry,”’ reports Pohlson. ‘The idea was he would just do the first 30 minutes in the tank and then we would sub in a stunt driver. But Arnold said he likes crushing things, so he drove for the next four hours.’

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were equally good sports, taking a winner on a best friend double date; Chris Hemsworth escorted a winner to the premiere of Men in Black: International, while others met the Spice Girls and Dolly Parton, and pumped iron with Michael B Jordan.

The 3,000 sq ft, four-bedroom Cheadle Hulme house doesn’t come with a celebrity attached (though the chances of bumping into a premiership footballer in the local pub run high) but it does boast an extensive kitchen, a huge standalone ‘garden room’ (larger than my New York apartment) and a hot tub big enough for an entire family. There’s no mortgage, no stamp duty, and no running costs for the first year. Eighty per cent of the profits go directly to Teenage Cancer Trust. Omaze is also currently building a homeless centre in LA and a children’s hospital in Orlando, Florida, fitted out with hi-tech ECMO heart machines.

The latter is something of a personal project for Pohlson, who in spite of being a keen runner and a newly enthusiastic tennis player, with a professed fondness for fancy $12 juices, was saved by such a machine when, two years ago, he was declared dead.

Born requiring surgery to remove two-thirds of his small intestine, Pohlson had lived with ‘stomach challenges’ his whole life, ‘but I didn’t know any different’. When a fragment of the 40-year-old scar tissue flaked off and caused a bowel obstruction, triggering sudden heart failure, he was rushed into surgery. Doctors removed the obstruction but his heart rate plummeted further post-surgery. While the medics attempted resuscitate him, Pohlson flatlined for four and a half minutes. There is, he admits, no scientific explanation for how, then, when the doctors believed there was no more they could do, his pulse returned, he opened his eyes, smiled, and, improbably, gave a thumbs-up sign.

Despite being officially dead for more than four minutes, he suffered no damage to his brain or vital organs. His explanation, and that, he says, of his doctors – who gave a presentation to the US Surgeon General about his case – is, ‘Love and optimism brought me back.’

‘I used to think it was a binary thing – you’re either an optimist or you’re a pessimist; you think things are going to work out or you don’t,’ he says. ‘Now I think optimism is a superpower and you can change the trajectory of things through an optimistic mindset.’

He sounds quite spiritual, I comment. ‘I am – much more than I was before,’ he nods. ‘I believe that we’re all connected, and there’s communications going on at levels, energetically. We’re limited by our language, we’re not good at describing these things, and that holds us back in terms of our consciousness.’ He pauses, grins, and puts down his fork. ‘I can’t imagine how all this stuff is going to sound in the UK.’

While, yes, some of it can come off a bit Gwyneth Paltrow, Pohlson mostly wears his spirituality, along with his philanthropic focus, pretty lightly – there’s no worthy, earnest intensity to his talk of charitable works. And he did die on the operating table, so is entitled to a little more mysticism than most. Plus, some predisposition towards spirituality is probably in the genes.

Pohlson grew up the eldest of three children in Laguna Niguel, a wealthy town in Orange County, south of LA, where his mother worked for a blood bank and an organisation called No One Dies Alone, which gives bedside support to patients. His father, now a judge, trained to be a Catholic priest until he met his best friend’s 19-year-old sister and abandoned the vocation. ‘He asked her to marry him five times, so persistence is in there too,’ laughs Pohlson, whose parents have been married for 45 years.

Pohlson himself is single, but would like a family of his own. ‘I used to worry about it a lot. Now, I think it’ll happen when it happens,’ he shrugs.

While at school, he played basketball for a team in Compton, the deprived LA district infamous for gang violence. ‘This country is not a meritocracy,’ he says. ‘For a while I was the only white player on the team, and I saw that my friends from the team had a very different set of opportunities than my friends from Laguna Niguel. It made me aware pretty young that this game isn’t fair and so we all have to give back to try to make it fair.’

He studied economics and political science at Stanford University, and had ambitions to go into politics, interning for Vice President Al Gore in the autumn of 1998, while Bill Clinton was gearing up to face impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. ‘Chelsea was in my class at Stanford and was a friend of mine. So that was a weird dynamic,’ Pohlson notes. ‘But in Washington, DC, I realised that wasn’t my path. I have great respect for people who go into public service, I think politicians start out because they want to make a difference, but then there’s a lot of forces that are hard.’

So he became an actor. ‘I remember talking to Chelsea about that. She said there’s a lot of overlap,’ he laughs.

He had roles on series including the hospital comedy Scrubs and the drama Everwood, ‘and then realised I wasn’t that good at it’, he says candidly. He moved into writing, then into making films for charitable organisations, including the Clinton Foundation and water.org. ‘We were creating a lot of awareness, but we weren’t creating a lot of impact,’ he says. ‘The traditional fundraising methodologies weren’t working, partly because we have rules for non-profits that don’t apply to for-profits, so what they’re able to raise is fairly limited.’ Pohlson took himself off to Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, to try to learn how he might do it better.

At a charity fundraiser during his studies, the light-bulb moment arrived. ‘I had never been to one of those things. There’s [LA Lakers legend] Magic Johnson, my childhood hero, offering the chance to play basketball with him, and we watched the bidding go straight to $15,000 – we were not able to be part of that at all.’ He realised that democratising the high-rolling culture of philanthropy could benefit everyone. ‘If we made it available to all of the fans, online, with a real chance to win, we could raise so much more money.’

But even plundering their Hollywood contacts, Omaze wasn’t an immediate success. The first experience offered, to be a guest judge on the TV show Cupcake Wars, raised $780. But once their videos of Damon, Schwarzenegger et al began to go viral, stars were approaching them to take part.

After Bono – who he’d met via a previous competition – put Pohlson in touch with ‘the Vatican team’, he was invited to Rome to ‘pitch to the Pope’. ‘It was so surreal,’ he laughs. Pope Francis agreed to be part of a prize in which he blessed a Lamborghini and handed the keys to the winner.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, in the past six months since coronavirus swept the globe, Omaze has seen donations rise, rather than fall. In the long months of lockdown and separation, people also ‘want to dream more’, Pohlson says. ‘They want to escape. They want to think about winning a house or a car or a trip.’ And why, he believes, shouldn’t we?

maze board member Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton, and ‘the next Malcolm Gladwell’ according to Pohlson, is the author of the book Give and Take, which proposes ‘that people who give are more successful over time than people that take’. ‘Things should be win-win,’ reasons Pohlson. ‘You should be able to do something great and still give back.

‘Part of what we want to change is mindsets, so both more consumers and entrepreneurs will realise, oh, I don’t have to make that binary choice – I can do both those things.’

Draw details are now available at omaze.co.uk; the Omaze Million Pound House Draw is open until midnight on Friday 13 November