51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy

[00:00] 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 it 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. [00:30] a war with the army you have. The first wave of philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's. 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 going to 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, [01:00] 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. Welcome to Dialectic episode 51 with Nan Ransahoff. Nan is the head of climate at Stripe, and she is also the founder of Frontier, [01:30] 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, [02:00] more GMs as she calls them, focused on some of the world's most... [02:04] 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... [02:19] 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. [02:49] 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 areas 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 [03:19] you into the episode, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectics 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 your workspace who are [03:49] 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 founder's absolute commitment to both transforming the company for the era that is to come and ultimately being disciplined and [04:19] on the ways that AI can be a part of our work without automating the, [04:24] human parts. Ultimately, Notion's goal is to help us think together [04:28] both with each other and with the range of new intelligences that are now at our disposal. You can learn more at

com slash dialectic. And if you haven't checked out Notion in a while, I would strongly encourage you to check out particularly the way that AI has been embedded into Notion in a way that feels intuitive and obvious and also deeply, deeply useful. With that, here's my conversation with Nan. All right, Nan Rantzahal, thank you for joining me. This is so [04:58] time in the, uh, in the, there were some interns walking through and they were like, this is where they make the videos and it's, we're doing it. We're here. Uh, I want to start with a question that you might find slightly annoying, but I'm going to ask it anyway, which is when I first met you, we had a conversation about some of what you do, less so the frontier stuff and more of the [05:16] stuff you've been writing about a little bit lately, GMs and new philanthropy and so on.

[05:20] And one of the things I wrote down was, we need to figure out how to have more NANs in the world. And in some sense, I think part of what you've been writing about, or at least thinking about, is a little bit of GMing the GMs. How do we have more of these people? [05:35] And so if you'll indulge the kind of silly frame... [05:39] What is an Anne? What is it that you kind of have found yourself doing? And... [05:45] Thank you. [05:46] Why do you think this sort of shape is fairly unusual?

[05:51] I kind of get nerd sniped by problems that... [05:56] are important for the world and... [06:00] I go down a rabbit hole because I'm just interested in the thing. 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? [06:10] to see this problem through, [06:12] and I don't find anyone, I kind of panic. And [06:16] It's that just seems to be like... [06:20] a pattern for me. And that is exactly what happened with carbon removal. I read the 2018 IPCC report in 2019, was learning about

[06:30] sort of relearning the climate math [06:32] Saw we need a lot of carbon removal. It took me like three weeks to talk to everyone in the field. [06:38] which freaked me out and was like, "Okay, I'm gonna quit my job and work on this." So, and that's again happened with this new thing on respiratory infections, which we can talk about. I think I basically find a problem that seems important to the world. I can't get out of my head. [06:52] And, [06:53] In basically all of the cases, I am not the best person to work on it.

I was not an expert in carbon removal. I'm not an expert in respiratory infections. But... [07:03] It's kind of like you go to war with the army you have. And like, if no one else is going to take responsibility for it, I just find myself like I want to work on this. And that's not to say there's lots of other people who also can take responsibility for it. It's just this sort of like almost feeling of like. [07:18] Yeah. [07:20] like shock or outrage or like awe that like these big problems are going unmanned and wishing I could work on all of them, but like not being able to.

So picking a couple of them and then you realize, OK, well, geez, there are like so many different problems to work on. So how can we get more people thinking about this? [07:39] Finding a really big problem and taking ownership over it. And not just working on the problem, but like really obsessing about the outcome. How do I deliver the outcome? [07:47] for the world. And that can exist at a lot of different altitudes. It can exist at like, really big ones and more micro ones. And all of those are fair game and finding the right problem and defining it the right altitude is a whole thing.

But yeah, I think when you say GMing the GMs, I... [08:01] I think a thing that gets me really excited is how do we like identify these big problems that should have people working on them and find awesome people and match those sort of problem people together and do that increasingly. [08:14] larger and larger scales. [08:16] There's an element of this that's like, surely the adults in the room are working on this. Most people sort of bounce off these intractable problems. Most people, when they learn about [08:30] whatever you have some math somewhere.

It's like the trillion dollars for the terror trillion dollars a year of spend to remove a terror ton of carbon. Most people don't go spend three weeks talking to everyone in the field. [08:43] Um, [08:45] and maybe you're just super high agency and la la la, and you clearly are super ambitious. Perhaps the problem is that most very ambitious people work on other types of problems. But do you have any sense of like either... [08:56] Was that always the case for you when you've seen it in other people? Like what trait wise causes you to be attracted to these types of problems that normally go?

You talk about it like they they're orphaned or they're invisible or they're just like so large that there's not even a finish line in sight. So it seems really hard. [09:13] Thank you. [09:14] Hmm. [09:16] Thank you. [09:17] I don't know. I don't know... [09:21] I feel like I've become progressively more that way over time. Yeah. Um, [09:25] So, [09:26] And I am trying to sort of think about why that might be the case. I think, um, [09:32] Yeah. [09:33] I think maybe some of it is just like natural career progression.

You kind of like start working on a project and then you're working on a product and you're trying to build a company and now we're trying to build an ecosystem and now we're trying to build an ecosystem on top of an ecosystem. It's sort of like... [09:45] In my head, that is a little bit how it ladders up. So I don't think I've like... [09:51] always been thinking at the scale that I am. And I hope that I'm thinking at a bigger scale. And, you know, the future future version of myself is thinking at a bigger scale.

But I think I think maybe another piece is like, [10:03] I don't feel actually that I let myself kind of follow my... [10:07] own interests and curiosities for a really long time. And I've increasingly let myself do that. And they've led me in more interesting directions that feel more authentic to, um, [10:17] who I am and what I want to be thinking about and what lights me up. But I, that was a muscle that I had to build over time. And I don't feel that for the first, like, I, [10:27] 25 to 30 years of my life, I did a very good job.

[10:30] building that. And now I've just like, yeah, I've given a little bit more space. It's a bit of a woo answer, but I think that is, is part of it. [10:39] You've always been ambitious. Was there an element of this that was... [10:44] these problems are lower status or like, that doesn't seem quite right, but like, I think it was maybe more historically was sort of like a little bit chasing the things that one is supposed to do. And was probably more, a little bit more box checky. Like I did the whole PM thing and, you know, um, I did consulting after a hundred grand minute of the PM thing.

And those are great. Um, but I think I just got a little bit bored with that. Um, and now, um, I, [11:11] Which came first, by the way, getting bored and then finding the climate thing or finding the climate thing and making it realize you were bored with the other stuff? I did consulting for a few years after undergrad and got, I was like interesting on a, [11:23] skill level, but then boring on a why am I working until two in the morning on like a random. But maybe Uber, like you then went to Uber, which is less boring.

Not boring, for sure. [11:35] Yeah, I don't know. I guess I felt maybe I like I got like more confidence to diverge from a more traditional path or something like that. Like, [11:44] I, [11:45] Genuinely, when people ask what I do now, I sometimes struggle to describe it like it is a little confusing even to me. And the fact that I work in a version of philanthropy is not in line with like where. [11:58] I ever expected I would be like, I feel that I actually kind of was a little dismissive of it historically and am still in some capacity.

And like, it doesn't quite match my mental model of myself. But I think it's where important problems and interesting work are. And if you can come up with creative mechanisms to do the to sort of do that work, then I'm [12:19] it's a really fertile space. Yeah, there's something about just getting more comfortable with, [12:26] More off the beaten track stuff that has maybe come with age and other facts of life that is like, let me pay more attention to what I'm actually interested in solving rather than like what I should be working on.

[12:38] There's an element of this that I think, and you have an amazing post on this GM idea, but there's an element of this... [12:45] that is part problem selection, which I want to talk about, but it's also part like seeing the chessboard. [12:51] Um... [12:52] Maybe unlike, and not all of technology is like this, but a lot of tech startups, like the Y Combinator tech startup is very much like find one loose thread and just pull that thread. And don't worry too much about the chessboard. It doesn't seem that, [13:06] carbon renewal is that type of problem.

It is like very much like seeing holes and understanding coordination problems and understanding market forces and figuring out how to induce demand where there isn't demand. Is that skill set something that you developed like aspects of in other jobs? It's something you kind of had to learn on the fly. Is it something that's kind of intuitive? Part of the reason I'm asking is I'm curious about like other types of people who would be good at this type of problem. Like where might they be coming from? [13:33] I [13:35] I think that the, maybe like a difference between...

[13:39] a YC type of approach and like a GM type of approach is in a GM type of approach, you are obsessed with the outcome that you want to deliver and you're working backwards from the outcome. Whereas oftentimes in startups, you're sort of like, yeah, as you said, starting somewhere and like pivoting your way to the outcome, but you're maybe less, you're less specific or you care less exactly where you end up. It's more emergent and you're more bottom up. Exactly. It's more bottom up. And I think that for GM type of outcomes, you're sort of like, this is the

[14:09] What I do is everything else. Everything else. And I think that people but I actually think that the traits that you need for both of those different things are are maybe quite similar because in founder, you know, when you're starting a company, you often have to play. [14:25] a lot of different roles. You're wearing a lot of different hats. You're like a policy person one day and you're an engineer one other day and you're a designer another day and you're taking out their hash another day. And the case of, you know, a GM, it's very similar.

You're kind of pulling whatever lever you need to pull. And, you know, [14:40] And you're like obsessed with... [14:44] a thing, however you define that thing. And so I think that those traits and you're sort of like, because in both worlds, you're sort of having to respond dynamically to the environment around you and to the world around you. You have to adapt quickly. You have to be really nimble. You have to reason through things on the fly when you get new information. And those are traits that I think are quite similar to both in both cases, but [15:10] Which is all to say, I think there is a huge potential for the shapes of people that would sort of otherwise be founders to make for really good GMs.

And [15:20] That is a bit of a paradigm shift in... [15:23] how we think about [15:25] people working in philanthropy because and also ambition and broadly what's the same more about that um [15:31] You started to allude to this when you were talking about kind of the feeling you had towards philanthropy, which is sort of like – [15:39] Serious people work on companies. Totally. Which is obviously, that's not true in every part of the world. That's probably broadly true in San Francisco and especially in the kind of like, [15:49] high tech startup kind of ambition part of the world.

And so there's an element of this that's like, [15:54] Being able to... [15:57] take the force of ambition and also just like all the other things associated with it, the opportunity and the status and the challenge and the maybe the opportunity to get rich and all these other things that often aren't. [16:09] Connected. Yes. I... Okay, two things. One... [16:13] I a little bit even still now bristle the word philanthropy because I think the thing that we want to deliver is good outcomes for the world. And that are sort of like we want to think about public goods or.

[16:23] They don't even have to be public goods, but like things that... [16:25] - What are public goods? - I think they're broadly speaking, they're like things that benefit [16:33] many or most people. And so is scale critical to that? [16:38] Thank you. [16:39] What would an economist say? I think it's part of it, but I don't think it's like it doesn't have to benefit every single person. But like a canonical public good would be carbon removal, which does benefit everybody because we all share the air. Maybe the most important.

Yeah, it's a big one. But I think that like we should choose the most capital efficient mechanism to solve the problem. So if you can deliver a great outcome for the world and make money from it and build a business around it. Great. Do that. Only do we sort of move into like pure philanthropy if you can't figure out. [17:09] So I just want to say that I'm like, I think that like capitalism is great. And if we can build great companies to solve world problems, we should do that first.

[17:19] Yeah, so philanthropy is sort of a subset of building good things for the world to sort of like, yeah, improve the world. I think that's a... [17:28] Maybe an important point because there's a lot of different kinds of companies in between pure philanthropy and business. [17:33] you know, [17:34] maximizing profit. And I think those are all should be, in my opinion, on the table and considered and just like move down the stack. [17:40] as needed, but like start by trying to make money. Yes. There's also a, I would, I would, the tech world, I think tends to barbell, which is either like most ambitious possible version of a company or like pure nonprofit philanthropy thing.

That's like charity basically. Totally. And I think that like, there's a really interesting space in the middle where, [17:58] But that needs creative funders and that needs people who are going to consider the [18:04] allocating capital in this sort of like squishy middle. Anastasia Gomic has written a bunch about this. These sort of like companies that should exist that don't because the sort of risk reward doesn't fit into venture or private equity or philanthropy. And they kind of, so they go on sort of unworked on. But I think that that's like an also...

[18:22] important space to hunt. Sort of like a philanthropic lifestyle business. Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly. It's not venture scale returns, but it's also not a grant. [18:32] The big idea here, I think, for both the GM thing [18:35] And the broader point is... [18:37] all of these things, the type of, whether it's a business or a nonprofit, the approach, whatever it might be, is downstream of like, what is the best way to attack this problem? Yeah, yeah. And the GM orientation is like less about, I'm going to start, if a founder is oriented around a company, the GM is oriented around the problem.

Yes, that's a really... [18:54] pithy and good way to describe it. [18:55] What makes for good taste in problems? [18:59] Thank you. [19:01] One of the things you write about is like, it's, [19:04] there's an interesting sort of spectrum of... [19:07] problems that tend to go unsolved. And it ranges from things that we don't really see because they're kind of illegible to like... [19:14] climate, which is just like impossibly big to things that surely other people must be working on. You even have a point where you say some are perhaps better described as things we want to be true rather than problems.

Right. [19:25] I have some experiences, but not a ton of experience in this. I would like more. But yeah, I think that there are, I think like a good... [19:33] A good forcing function or, like, a good prompt for people to sort of think about is, like, [19:39] in what way would I like the world to be different? Like, what do I look at in the world and say to myself, like, that is crazy that we're still dealing with that. Or like, I cannot believe, like, the just sort of, [19:50] Yeah, this sort of like shock and awe that it is, that the world is a certain way.

That's like a good place to start of like kind of – and you can kind of feel it in yourself. I think part of important problem selection is does it light me up? Like does it get me fired up? Yeah. And that's maybe like an initial good filter. [20:08] which requires, by the way, to even get to that point, I think, like, [20:13] at... [20:14] kind of like dialing up our Larry David sort of annoyance with things or something like that. You have to see the water on the... To go back to climate, my presumption would be that you had some

[20:24] care or thought or interest in the climate stuff. And then there was some ignition point, either in reading that 2018 data or something else that like caused it to be a hair on fire problem. Whereas for me, I'm like, I intellectually know the climate stuff matters, but I like, nothing's burning. It doesn't do anything for you. [20:40] What are examples of problems that elicit that reaction for you? Well, I think part of the interesting thing about this is that we are... When I was listening to you, you hear you talk about we are...

[20:51] trained to, like, we grow to not see the water on some of these types of things. I think, maybe this is too meta, but I probably tend to orient towards most of my interests through people. So, like, if I met someone who was firing up, like, I wasn't that interested in philanthropy, frankly, until I met you. And there was an articulation of it that, like... [21:11] partly was your energy, partly was your articulation, partly maybe it was framed. It's framed around GMs, which are the people who are going to solve these problems.

So it's like, it was a receptacle for me. [21:22] So maybe, I guess there's two ways to ask the problem taste question, which is like, actually, just what are the types of problems that are really important? And maybe there's a separate thing, which is like, [21:33] Yeah, the problem matters, but also choose a problem that fits you. Yes, right. There's like there. Yeah, I think there's like there are different ways into the problem piece and maybe to sort of finish laying out. It's not really a framework, but like good proxies for this is like the thing that kind of gets you upset or riles you up is like a is a good lens.

I think that the the tractability piece is a really tough one to assess because there [22:03] but like how... [22:04] how to tackle, like figuring out the right altitude to define the problem at and come up with some solutions to, you know, [22:13] actually move the ball forward is really tough. So in that category of thing, I think that's where like, [22:20] Either one is already an expert and they can sort of see the levers to pull or you become an expert or you talk to experts and try to ramp yourself up to see if there's a there there.

And then I think another bucket here is the kind of neglected piece. Like, is there a. [22:34] Anybody else working on it? And if so, like kind of in some sense, yeah. [22:39] If there's already someone great working on it or you can find someone great working on it, like get them to do it. Like it's sort of I don't know. Or go help them or help them. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like oneself is last resort or something like that. Yeah, some combination of like, yeah, is the problem big and important?

Does it light you up? Is it tractable? [22:58] you know, the neglectedness. [23:00] piece of it. I kind of sneaky think that most people don't even get to the second two because... [23:06] They're [23:07] It's. [23:09] I think we can all pay more attention to the kinds of problems that – pay more attention to, like – [23:16] defining more in a more normative way, like our vision for the world and like, what do we want to see the world look like? And that can be in so many different domains. But I think that exercise that we are very.

[23:29] quick to be able to critique the world. And it is harder to establish a vision or to ask a question that is sort of like, what is the way that you want the world to be? What do you want to be true? Yes. Yes. There's an interesting... [23:41] I've talked about this with a few runs. There's a lot of people with very specific negative orientations in the world, specific and pessimistic. And a lot of people who are vague and optimistic. But the part of that matrix that's rare is optimistic and specific.

Totally. I think that's a really I think that's a really important point. Um. [23:58] And I think that specificity is like what... [24:01] makes it believable that something can be solved. [24:04] Hmm. [24:05] Yes. And it certainly makes it much easier for someone to join you, which is one of the things that the startup world has gotten really good at. It's like, how do we engineer the gravity and interest? Um, [24:15] Speaking of vision, you have a great older post on... [24:19] like which moral virtue is in short supply, and you're talking about vision?

[24:25] either what makes for really... [24:27] compelling visions and or... [24:30] if that's not the right question, like who's good at this? I think we can all be better at it. I think that is like my honest take. Or how does one get better at this? [24:40] Vision can, in my opinion, can exist at... [24:44] you know, it sounds like this big, bold thing, but, and it is, but I think it can exist at the level of like the world. It can exist at the level of a family. It can exist at the level of a self.

[24:55] What imagining what oneself looks like in 10 years, imagining what one wants their relationship with another person they care about to look like in 10 years, imagining what one wants carbon removal to look like in 10 years or the city of San Francisco. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to scope that, but we can see. [25:15] practice on maybe like [25:16] I think practice at the level that you feel most comfortable with is maybe a way to think about it is – [25:23] I was sort of thinking about this in the context of like we were asking ourselves at our at the lunch table for on the climate team, you know, a couple of months ago, like, how would you spend if you had like a billion dollars to spend unrestricted on.

[25:36] good things for the world, what would you do? [25:38] And I think that kind of prompt, like, reveals a lot of not knowing in all of us of like, how would I spend that? Like, what are the things that I care about? And how would I allocate capital towards those things? [25:52] Or practicing it on the level of San Francisco, like, or the city that you live in, sort of like, I love this city. Okay, what would I want it to look like in 10 years? Okay, well, what does good look like to me?

How would I sort of reason through that? And maybe it's talking through it with your friends, but... [26:07] Lots of ways to skin the cat, but I think those prompts for me are like really expansive and force a lot of questions around like, [26:15] both, [26:15] the values that [26:17] would drive the end vision and then also like... [26:20] tactically and specifically to your point, what are the levers that you can pull and like things you can do? [26:26] I don't know, does that resonate at all? - Yes, you had some prompt somewhere where it was like, [26:31] what would you do if you were mayor of San Francisco?

Yeah. And it's, and you also are somewhere else that like most politicians actually don't have a vision. Like we don't really exercise this muscle. [26:42] Yeah. Well, why is that? Why aren't we as citizens demanding this of... [26:47] Like the fact that we're electing people in any, I mean, not to say nobody has vision, but I'm just like, if one asked me, [26:54] if somebody asked me to like clearly articulate, like, [26:57] what was the vision for the last ex-presidents about where they wanted America to be at the end of their term?

I couldn't do it. And this is not the area that I'm most educated in. So maybe other people could do it. [27:09] don't we think that the average [27:11] citizens should be able to repeat that. [27:14] back. I [27:17] - Yeah, why is vision in short supply? I don't really know. - It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend, I then talked about on an earlier podcast this year, which is she had asked me, [27:27] What do you really want? [27:29] And I couldn't answer. [27:32] - Yeah.

- And there was an element of it-- - How do you define that? - Well, one of the mental images that we had, and one of the conversations was like, [27:39] it's sort of like when a kid really wants ice cream. Yeah. This sort of like, you can feel it in your body, you're bouncing, you're bounding down the street. And so I almost wonder if part of this is like in adulthood, [27:50] Society definitely trains you to critique and it doesn't really train you to be like, that thing is over there and I'm going to go get it.

Yes. Which is a sort of silly version of the agency thing. And I almost wonder if there's some aspect of that that is this, which is like, to your point, [28:04] Being able to even say, and maybe it takes some silly prompt, like, there's a billion dollars. [28:11] It's funny. This makes me think... [28:13] there's the classic question, which is like, what would you do if you had a billion dollars? And I think it's Jeremy Gaffan or Davidson, or one of the two has this inversion of that prompt, which is what would you not stop doing for a billion dollars?

If I offered you a billion dollars to stop doing everything you do, what would you not stop doing? It's easier for people to answer that, which almost is pointing at like some of the... [28:30] And so I think... [28:33] I almost wonder, like, were you someone who, are you someone either growing up or now, like, were you someone who, like... [28:40] does annual planning or like set annual goals or like any of these types of things? I do a version of that now, but it's not like... [28:48] an OKR thing.

It's more like, it's like squishier than that, I guess. But yeah, I do sort of [28:55] I do now try to force myself to like think like, what do I want to be true by the end of the year for myself? And like last year I had a section on like, [29:03] there's like a few projects and like things, more specific things I wanted to do. And then some of them were kind of, [29:08] Like, like, [29:09] more vibes or more like character development kind of things. But I do think that just articulating that is helpful.

Like that is some version of like manifesting or something is just being able to like, you know, [29:25] Athletes do this all the time, right? That is like they're sort of picturing themselves in – [29:30] the sort of winning state or their pick and they're picturing like Michael Phelps, he's picturing himself, all the things that could go wrong, his goggles, you know, get water in them. He's still swimming his suit rips. He's still swimming. He's sort of going through all these scenarios so that when he's never surprised and I'm sort of.

[29:47] There's something to the visualizing of... [29:52] of a future scenario that... [29:55] makes it more likely to happen. Michael Phelps has the advantage though, and this, maybe this goes to your example. Um, in your work life, you have very specific, some aspects of it are complex, but, um, there's aspects of it that can be a finish line. And that's what Michael Phelps has. Um, whereas maybe like emotional goals for your life or your relationships are hazier. And so I almost wonder if part there was, um, you mentioned Anastasia, um, Anastasia, Anastasia, one of the points she makes in, in, in at least one of the

[30:25] And it feels like that is also very critical to the GMing thing broadly. It's like somewhere you say like it's not like a slice of the problem. It's the thing. It's the outcome. And so maybe the challenge is like when we don't – sports has an easy finish line. I always give an example. Last year I had two very – not very big goals. I had two goals, which is one was – [30:44] to do 21 episodes of this podcast before I could quit halfway through the year. And the other was run the New York Marathon.

Okay. And like... Yeah, those are very clear... Clear finish line were way better for me than like, I want to run more... Any of these hazier things. [30:57] What... [30:58] Um... [30:59] When it comes to, like, maybe it's worth using either the Frontier example or the new respiratory example, like, [31:06] Carbon removable of all the things that can have like an impossibly large finish line. It's probably, uh, it's among the biggest, um, [31:14] Maybe like making sure the AIs don't kill us. [31:18] When it comes to a problem like that, a respiratory illness, presumably you have some big finish line in the future, which is the taraton of carbon removed.

Are you then like breaking off little other finish lines? And if so, like how does that work? Like what makes a good finish line? Yeah. I mean, so we... [31:35] You know, talk about planning, but basically we have, you know, for Frontier, which we started in 2022, we have this sort of like end goal, like you said, in 150 years, we need to do a trillion tons of carbon removal. [31:46] roughly in 100, 150 years. And then you say, okay, well, how much money is going to be needed to do that?

Okay, it's between this and this much. And then you kind of work backwards. So you don't, [31:55] I don't think one needs the [31:57] specifics of the whole plant. But very, very tactically, we have the kind of [32:01] End goal. Then we have, when we started, a vision for where we wanted the field to be in 2030. So we wrote a set of statements of what do we want to be true. That was almost the real finish line. Like, yes, the other one, but that 100 years. Yeah, I mean, maybe it'll be a lot.

But yeah, it was sort of what do we want to be true in 2030? That was the kind of vision. Then we have a strategy, which is our best guess at any given point in time of like, [32:24] how we think we are going to get there or what we're going to do versus letting other people in the field do things. That breaks down into an annual plan. So we do annual OKR planning. And when the world changes, we will change the plan. Then that translates into what we call ships.

And then that translates into a weekly plan. [32:43] it's very concrete and tactical of like just reasoning backwards from the outcome. And then the world changes and it gives you new information and your plan changes. And that's okay. That should change. That is fine. But like, [32:56] If you don't have a plan, it's pretty unlikely you're going to do it. How did you... [32:59] - Very broad strokes, how did you arrive from like, you joined Stripe in 2020? - Yeah. [33:04] from 2020 to [33:07] 2022 that [33:09] vision and plan.

Like at some point, because presumably there's a mix of like, like, [33:14] What is actually the right finish line and goal? What is the right way to, we haven't even talked about, like, advanced market commitments and all the sort of structural things. Again, to maybe go back to the original point, which is, like, everything is downstream of problem solve. But, like, how does that, I think part of the reason this is so hard is, like, we have a lot of templates of what this kind of looks like in a company building.

And this feels like going from, I mean, yes, it's amazing you did it. And you've published a lot of this. So people could go back. But, like. [33:40] compressing that [33:42] you could see how someone would bounce off it. I don't think it's that different from the company perspective. [33:50] planning piece like [33:52] I think maybe it's different from, you know, [33:57] For a mature company that has a, or like a, [34:00] growth stage startup. There are, they have, you know, most companies have, well-run companies have like, [34:08] a vision of where they are, the things that they want to be true, where they want to be in X years.

And the OKR planning process or whatever planning process one decides to use is a way to take that [34:20] sort of end goal and work backwards from that. Maybe this is where I'm getting hung up actually, which is, [34:26] Thank you. [34:27] In this case, and granted, you were doing it from a very strong foundation in your case, which was Stripe. Yeah. So we made it, in that way, it wasn't like a startup. Yeah. But in other ways, it's actually a lot more... [34:38] like going zero to one, you have to do both things.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do. - The best comp would be like Elon's Tesla master plan, or the SpaceX master plan, which is like, you have to go zero to one a whole bunch of different times and do all the like, OKR level strategic planning that a mature company would do. And so that's why it feels so big. - That's fair. [34:56] I think that's fair. And you're just like, well, be more ambitious. Well, I mean, I just like, I think that more... [35:04] I don't think it's rocket science. I just don't.

Like, I think that, like, um. How hard was it to become an expert in this if you presumably talk to all the experts in three weeks? Because that would be, maybe that's another part of this, which is like, oh, like, I'm learning about climate in 2018. Like, this, it would take me five years to even get up to speed. You don't have to learn the whole thing. Like, I think it's like you're scoping the thing that you are learning. And for me, a very motivating thing. And to be clear, there were other people working in the field.

There was, you know, this is not just, um, uh, just me by any stretch. [35:34] part of a really motivating thing is like, [35:37] Who else is going to do it? And that is a real take. It's specifically this slice of. This slice of it. [35:43] How early was the... [35:45] And maybe this is an opportunity to go a little more specific. Another frame of sort of what you do is like, [35:50] it may not everything you do, but part of what you do is identifying areas where, [35:55] market forces or market demand would be really valuable, but there isn't, [36:01] any yet, or there isn't enough of it yet.

And so in that sense, it was maybe a vertical, a specific kind of cut on the climate problem, which is like, I'm not going to solve all the climate, but there's a specific opportunity or the specific wedge. What did it look like to arrive on that? And why is this sort of like orientation around what an advanced market commitment, like, how did that become this sort of like elegant opportunity? [36:22] blade or tool in this problem? The short answer is that I think it's just to the point of what's the end goal that we're working on and how do we reason our way back from it?

That is the compressed version of it. The longer version of it is... [36:39] Okay, so with carbon removal, [36:41] It is the canonical public good. You're sucking CO2 out of the air. You're storing it somewhere. Nobody wants to pay for that because the customer doesn't get a benefit from it. [36:51] And... [36:52] When you have no market of customers, you have very few companies that want to build anything because who they're going to sell their product to. You've got very few investors because who they're going to invest in. So then you say, okay, well, who's responsible for solving public goods?

Well, it should be governments. But I'm not a policymaker. So I was like, I probably can't do anything there. In the end, it's going to be really important, but that's not where my – [37:12] skill set is. You weren't a... [37:15] public goods philanthropist. I was working self-driving at the time. [37:19] I see. Yes. So there was enough similarity. It felt you shaped enough. Well, the policy did not feel me shaped. The thing I was trying to reason through was... [37:29] you read the IPCC report and you're like, okay, we're going to need like, [37:33] gigatons and eventually a teratron of carbon removal, who's going to do that?

Okay, well, why doesn't it exist? Well, who's going to pay for it? There's nobody to pay for it. Can we get governments to pay for it? Okay, I can't because I don't know how to do that. So who's the next best thing? Well, it's individuals or companies that have disposable income. [37:50] who has disposable income while SaaS businesses have pretty good margin. And at the time, Stripe had published this blog post, Buy Carbon Rule for a Million Dollars. Cool. [38:00] How much? A million dollars. Very small. [38:05] - A thread.

- A thread. And the theory of change around that was the right theory of change. Christian Anderson, who started Watershed, wrote this post at the time. [38:13] My friend Clay at lower carbon was like, okay, like watching me go down the rabbit hole. And he was like, you should talk to these guys. [38:20] And... [38:22] The interesting thing about Stripe was, yes, a million dollars is a good start, but Stripe has millions of businesses all over the world that are high-margin-staff businesses, so the distribution is there. And if you can convince them to give a small fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, you can potentially aggregate a lot more and use that to buy even more carbon removal down the cost curve.

So that was my logic through – You're squinting and seeing the flywheel. Totally, totally. [38:52] the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. When I joined Stripe, I did not know what an advanced market commitment was. [38:58] That was not a pre, I could see the Stripe climate piece of how do we make this a product for Stripe businesses. That was the thing that got me really excited. Hmm. [39:07] But we did that. [39:08] And it went really well. We got to tens of millions of dollars.

And then we all sat in a room and we're like, okay, well, what do we do next? Like, that's nice, but we got to get this, add another zero to this thing. [39:18] And so... [39:19] AMCs, Advanced Market Commitments, had been, is a concept that was developed in the context of global health. And the sort of general idea is... [39:28] There's a thing that you want to exist. And part of the reason that it doesn't exist in the case in the original case, it was for the pneumococcal vaccine for low and middle income countries.

And we wanted pharma companies to work on this, but they didn't because who's going to pay for that? [39:40] There are poor people in countries that won't have enough money to actually pay for it. And so the idea behind the AMC was – [39:47] to pull a bunch of money from, in this case, [39:50] the Gates Foundation and a bunch of other countries to say, hey, pharma companies, if you can... [39:56] Make a vaccine to spec. [39:58] There's a billion and a half dollars waiting for you. Yeah. And it works.

And so I cold emailed the economists who... [40:06] worked on [40:07] The original AMC, Michael Kramer, Rachel Glenister, Chris Snyder, Susan Ape. There had just been one. [40:14] Basically? There had been one and a half. So that was the first one. And then there was sort of part of Operation Warp Speed that was also an AMC. And those same economists also worked out. And that was a different shape problem in that – [40:26] There was obviously... [40:27] lots of dollars for that vaccine, but there's this risk of... [40:31] Pfizer develops it first.

That's exactly right. But it's all about this sort of like playing with, it's like helping markets sort of, [40:38] Collate on this equilibrium or something. No, exactly. It's fixing it saying, OK, we want this thing to exist. It doesn't because there is some incentive problem around the demand. And what is the intervention that will fix the incentive problem to get the suppliers or the developers to build the thing we want them to build? Yeah. [40:58] And everyone is exactly like you said, it's a little different. Like the original AMC was different.

Operation Warp was different. Frontier is a little different. And [41:06] That is... [41:08] I think just goes to show that, like... [41:11] You just have to study your problem and make a solution that works for your problem. And if it's like the sort of theory and practice are very messy and that's OK because problems are messy. Yes. But I think that's the that's sort of what we tried to really workshop with Frontier is like in what ways does it differ and how do we modify the core model for. [41:34] The problem at hand.

[41:35] So speaking of messiness, what is... [41:40] This... [41:42] maybe to go back to the sort of mature company versus early stage company comparison, in a new company or a small company, the only thing that matters is focus on a single thing. Get the product market fit and then grow it or whatever. Obviously Patrick Collison has a lot of different areas of focus. [42:00] In some sense, your problem, especially in the early days of a new effort like this, is probably closer to the early startup founder. But the set of possible things to do, [42:11] is closer to like mature Patrick Collison.

Yeah. And so I'm curious, even now, like with frontier and some of these other efforts, like, [42:18] What does "focus" mean? [42:20] you somewhere else you talk about like making sure all of the most promising ideas are being worked on, which is like, [42:26] knowing the unknown unknowns, which just feels very... Broad or something. Yeah. There are theoretically an unknown amount of important aspects of the... [42:38] climate stuff for you to be working on right now. Okay. Well, when we say all the most important problems, I think in that context is probably in the context of carbon removal.

Yeah. And yeah, let's say carbon, let's make it a little more narrow. [42:51] So I've been working on carbon removal since 2020. [42:54] And we've been working on Car Frontier since 2022. So like that is... [43:00] in some sense, a lot of focus. It's been six years of figuring out what this thing is and getting it off the ground. We now have an incredible team. [43:08] The team is like cruising. And there's a, maybe not a playbook, but there's a... [43:13] There's a coherent strategy that needs to be updated, but it is moving.

It has momentum. Totally. It has momentum, and there are still, not to sort of discount, a ton of [43:24] kind of open existential questions and largely on the side of, um, [43:29] getting governments involved at the scale and speed that they are needed to be involved in. But like, yeah, carbon removal is, is doing really well. And this woman on my team, Hannah, who basically founded Frontier, you know, we found a Frontier together. She's amazing. She's been, you know, we've been working on this for five years. She's basically running Frontier at this point.

So like she, and, and has been for, you know, for a little while. So like, I think part of the reason that I can think about other things is because I [43:59] she's jamming it. She's really, really good. And [44:04] as is the rest of the team. [44:07] Only when those things are true [44:09] does one like earn the ability to think about other things? And I think that that would be true for most leaders. Like, you know, yeah, like Stripe is doing, you know, is run amazingly well. And so like that affords one the ability to like, [44:23] poke around in other areas, but you've got to get the core thing done.

[44:28] Humming first. [44:29] I don't know if that answers your question. [44:32] I think I was trying to ask a slightly different question, but that is actually very helpful. I was sort of trying to say, and maybe it's worth jumping ahead, which is like, [44:41] part of what seems like you're good at, and you even talk about this in the new philanthropy context too, which is like one of the single highest leverage, if not the single highest leverage thing you can do with dollars, and ultimately usually a relatively small amount of dollars, is get the snowball rolling.

Yeah. Is the ignition piece of it. Yeah. And so I was actually asking the question about like focus on the ignition piece. Like maybe it's worth using some of the respiratory stuff as an example. Yeah. [45:07] I know we're rehashing it, but again, it's like a really big problem. You're sort of like surveying, you're patrolling the waters and looking for a place to go deeper on. [45:17] But again, with a company, it's sort of like find some area of product market fit and then just like pull on it for a long period of time.

Whereas this, it's like it feels like you have to have a constant awareness of other better strategies, especially in an area like maybe showing my ignorance here. But in an area like respiratory illness, presumably the field is changing. [45:37] biotech's evolving, like there's all these new AI, like, and so it was kind of a question about like focus in that sense, which is like knowing... [45:46] Um... [45:49] Knowing where to best allocate resources in this continuous way, it's almost like you have to be way more paranoid. Yeah, but again, I don't know if that is like...

[45:58] I'm just like pushing back because I don't know if that is like that different from... [46:02] a company like the payments world is changing a lot right now too with ai and agents and it's like you know there's a ton of paranoia and um you know this is not my all my area of expertise but like everybody's having to adapt and and sort of [46:17] in every business, like how do I pivot my or how do I sort of adapt my business to – [46:24] AI and the way the world's changing.

So I don't know if that's so unique to... [46:29] Yeah. To this, I mean... [46:32] I think the difference, I guess like a difference maybe in some areas is, [46:37] like carbon removal, is like... [46:40] But [46:41] And maybe this is more you're getting at. Like in carbon removal, carbon removal is a specific problem in that it was – [46:47] Kind of starting from zero, like nobody in the world realized that this was a thing that we were going to have to do at the scale we needed to until the 2018 EPCC report came out.

So you're like, okay, sorry, we have to get from zero to what? And how what? And so you're trying to figure out. And all of those people are like, okay, we need to think about supply and we need to think about demand. And we had to think about the markets that bring them together. And the thing that maybe feels overwhelming is the ecosystem. This is what I'm trying to get. It's structurally overwhelming. [47:17] you're giving examples of respiratory illness, some of the stuff, some of the ideas Jacob has on, but like, it's just like, oh my gosh, how do I even have a chance of starting?

[47:26] Yeah, and I think it's a great question. And I think a lot of them, in some sense, it's easier to, in my opinion, it's easier to start with a problem that has nothing because nobody's entrenched in any worldview. Like carbon removal was a little easier in that sense. In some sense, like the respiratory infections piece is a bit harder because you have different people who have different sort of fundamental beliefs. Or this has been tried. Yeah, exactly. And like, this is sort of like carte blanche. Like, yeah. [47:54] We'll see what happens.

[47:57] So, [47:58] Yeah, and I think that's actually like a really fun creative exercise of like, how do you decompose the problem into its component pieces? It's like, there's a supply piece, and there's a demand piece, and there's the ecosystem piece. And so each year, we have OKRs in each of those buckets. But like, I think that one can... [48:14] That to me seems like the central GM skill, by the way. It's like the decomposition of messy problems. It's like slicing it up. Yeah. I think that's a good point. Like bringing – yeah, I think bringing structure to the messiness of these problems and making them feel tractable because I think a lot of problems – [48:33] big problems you see and you're like, okay, yeah, I'm going to write this off because it's impossible.

But if you give somebody a [48:39] even yourself, a sketch of like, just sketch it out. This goes back to our vision conversation. Yeah. It's almost like if you could have a perfectly written memo, 20-page memo on any problem in the world, like it would be way more likely to be solved. Totally. I think that's, yeah, I think that's, I think that's a really good, I think that's a great point. And there's a rule for, I think people, I think there's probably a rule for more people who are doing the sketching.

Yes. [49:09] always be the same people. So like, people who know a field and see are good at the decomposition piece, and are good at sort of setting out what should the world look like, and what's a rough path to get there. And maybe it's wrong, but it gives people something to react to, right? [49:23] Right, right. [49:25] Also, just frankly, even in companies, [49:27] Amazing tacticians and strategists are... [49:31] Often not the people with grand visions. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing if you can find them in the same people, but sometimes they're not.

And, you know, it's okay. Is it important for... [49:41] people like this to... [49:44] for lack of a better way of putting it, be a mascot for it. Increasingly, you have... [49:49] You have dialed up how public you are about some of this. And frankly, some of your other work around more recently on philanthropy and GMs, like... [49:59] Maybe it may be a different way of asking the question, but how important is like, [50:02] the legibility aspect of it. [50:04] Which was the legibility of which part? [50:06] A problem having a flag bearer who's doing...

Part of this is the person who wrote the memo. Like the Lewis Bollard of ending factory farming or something like that. [50:17] Are you going on enough podcasts is a silly way of asking this. [50:23] I... [50:24] Think that it depends on... [50:27] The like... [50:29] I don't mean for us to be caught by, but I think it's just sort of like working backwards from what is the thing you're trying to do? Yeah. [50:36] is going on podcasts and is like... [50:39] the comms and marketing piece a really important piece of it.

I would argue in the case of like, you know, [50:45] factory farming or something, getting more broad... [50:48] sort of like, [50:50] individual support and political support for that cause is a part of the strategy. Yes. Does that matter as much in carbon removal? [50:59] I don't know. Does it matter in getting more people working on interesting problems? Yes. The thing that motivates me to write is usually when... [51:07] I think there's like, yeah, there's like a thing I want to happen because of it or something like that. And I think a thing I do feel really fired up about sort of these days right now is finding really awesome people to work on, like more important for the world problems.

There's so much money coming in to philanthropy in general. And I think we are really short. [51:28] founder-shaped GM people to man those problems. And so I feel... [51:34] more urgency to bring attention to that because I want more great people working on more great problems. But it's not from a... [51:42] I guess it's the legibility, I think, is downstream of... [51:47] The... [51:48] problem or something. Um, [51:52] I guess part of the thinking behind my question is like Silicon Valley is quite good at [51:56] Take someone like Mark Andreessen.

Yeah. One of Mark's centrally, singularly great skills, may not singularly, but rare and important is his ability to create a meme around a thing. Software's eating the world, American dynamism, whatever. And you can make a pretty strong case that Mark's often not first to these things. Like Founders Fund was investing in whatever. But he's good at creating this gravity engine around it, even something like...