Nan Ransohoff: Power Laws for Philanthropy

**Nan Ransohoff** (0:00)
I kind of get nerd sniped by problems that are important for the world. And when I get down the rabbit hole, and I'm like, okay, who's working on this? Who feels that it's their job to see this problem through? And I don't find anyone, I kind of panic. I read the 2018 IPCC report in 2019, relearning the climate math, saw we need a lot of carbon removal. It took me like three weeks to talk to everyone in the field, which freaked me out and was like, okay, I'm gonna quit my job and work on this. In basically all of the cases, I am not the best person to work on it, but it's kind of like you go to war with the army you have. The first wave of philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers. But the second wave of philanthropy is very measurement oriented. It was sort of like dailies and cost-benefit analysis. In my opinion, a lot of the questions that we're gonna be grappling with now from a public sort of goods and moral perspective are harder to quantify. What does meaning look like? What does good look like? What does beauty look like? They don't lend themselves very well to cost-benefit analysis. I would definitely have like self-described as like, I was like really good at playing the game. You know, I was good at the gold stars and the sort of fear around getting off the path was incredibly overwhelming for me. If you step off the path, like nobody really cares that much and nobody's really paying attention and it feels better because it feels more you.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:15)
Welcome to Dialectic, episode 51 with Nan Ransohoff. Nan is the head of climate at Stripe and she is also the founder of Frontier, an organization within Stripe that has coordinated a number of parties to pre-buy an advanced market commitment of a billion dollars of carbon removal before 2030 Nan is also working on a recently announced effort to target and eliminate respiratory illness. Her ambition when it comes to what you would call public good or philanthropic efforts, rivals that of some of the most ambitious founders in technology in Silicon Valley. What I was most interested in talking to Nan about, was not only her work here at Stripe and on Frontier, but how we might have more Nans.
What it would take to have more GMs as she calls them, focused on some of the world's most important and pressing challenges that don't currently have owners. Nan suggests that we ought to take an approach more like founders and company building to attacking these problems, not just by slice, but as a whole, and have some of our smartest people break them apart and systematically target them and track them down and make real progress on them. I think we tend to assume that there are adults in the room who are going to solve these things, and in many cases, there isn't. We also talk about Nan's recent post on the third wave of philanthropy, as she calls it, essentially the near $40 billion of philanthropic funding that is about to come into the ecosystem. Keep in mind, I think modern American philanthropic funding annually right now is about $600 billion, and between just OpenAI and Anthropic, we can expect something like $40 billion a year, fairly conservatively. And so this money is going to have to be allocated by people. It's going to have to go to ambitious efforts, and we're going to need a lot more. And Nan, I think, has been really thoughtful about the way that this is going to look different from previous eras of philanthropy, and the level of ambition and entrepreneurial people we're going to need. It was really fun to talk to her about it, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. You can find all the links and references for the episode at dialectic.fm slash nananan. Before we end the episode, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. Notion has reinvented itself for the AI age, and built the product from the ground up around combining all of you and your team's work, documents, context with the new capabilities that are possible, thanks to AI and agents. This takes a few forms, including Notion's primary AI, which allows you to use any model within their harness to custom agents, which allow you to have little guys in the workspace who are working all the time for you, and workers, which are part of Notion's developer platform, which allows you to have maximum leverage, flexibility and customization in building cloud-hosted service providers who can work for you and your team. It's been fun to have a front row seat to Notion's transformation over the last several months as we've been working together and the founders' absolute commitment to both transforming the company for the era that is to come and ultimately being disciplined and tasteful and focused on the ways that AI can be a part of our work without automating the human parts.