Johannes Lenhard

Johannes Lenhard is an Affiliate of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

He is an ethnographer of inequality researching both homelessness and technology investors.

He has since 2011 focused on understanding people sleeping rough and begging in London, Paris and Cambridge.

His monograph Making Better Lives based on his PhD research in Paris was published in 2022 following an edited collection on Home. For his second research project, Johannes has since becoming the Centre Coordinator of the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change in Cambridge in 2017, focused on venture capital investors.

Based on intermittent fieldwork between Silicon Valley, New York, London and Berlin, he is currently writing his second monograph (The Kingmakers, under contract with Columbia UP) explaining VCs’ investment ethics. He writes regularly for journalistic outlets such as Sifted, Prospect and Techcrunch and is the co-author of Better Venture, a trade book on diversity and inclusion in tech and VC.

Johannes is committed to translating his research findings into direct policy application and has recently co-founded CHIRN (Cambridge Homelessness Impact and Research Network) to facilitate impacting homeless policy and VentureESG to support the integration of Environment, Social and Governance principles in the VC ecosystem.