Dialectic 51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy
20 Lessons from Nan Ransohoff on Championing Orphaned Problems, Philanthropy’s Talent Shortage, and Refusing to Snap to Grid
Orphaned problems need owners. Nan gets nerd-sniped by important problems, then follows the rabbit hole until she finds the person responsible for seeing them through. With carbon removal, three weeks of calls exposed a strange void: lots of people were working in the field, but nobody felt responsible for delivering the outcome. If someone excellent has already stepped up, help them. If not, stop waiting: “Who else is going to do it?”
Go to war with the army you have. Nan was not a carbon-removal expert when she entered the field, and she is not a respiratory-infection expert now. She started anyway. Stripe’s first carbon purchase was $1M. Very small, but a thread. Even civilization-scale solutions have to start somewhere.
Marry the outcome, date everything else. A startup can begin with a thesis and pivot toward wherever the market leads. Nan’s GM philosophy begins with a specific change the world needs, then lets the strategy, organization, funding, and job description flex around it.
Find the altitude where you can grip the problem. “Finding the right problem and defining it at the right altitude is the whole thing.“ Too high and it’s an abstraction nobody can hold; too low and solving it barely matters. Decompose the mess into supply, demand, and ecosystem, and keep slicing until a piece becomes concrete enough to own and attack.
Dial up your inner Larry David. Good problem selection begins with annoyance. Find the thing that makes you say, “It’s crazy we’re still dealing with this.” Annoyance is underrated data: it points at what everyone else has learned to tolerate.
Choose a problem that fits your hands. Importance, tractability, and neglect matter, but Nan adds a more personal test: does it light you up, and can you see a lever you might actually pull? Governments were the obvious owner of a public good like carbon removal, but policy, in her words, didn’t feel “me-shaped.” Markets did, so she engineered the demand herself.
Vision is in short supply. We are fluent critics and strangely inarticulate when asked what should exist instead. Nan’s lunch-table prompt, “How would you spend a billion dollars on good things?” reveals a lot of not knowing in all of us. Even politicians rarely articulate a positive vision you could repeat back. The rare quadrant is optimistic and specific.
Think in decades. Plan the week. Frontier can hold the need for roughly a trillion tons of carbon removal over 150 years, a picture of what should be true by 2030, annual OKRs, and this week’s work all at once. The distant finish line supplies direction, while the weekly plan helps us put one foot in front of the other.
Invent the customer. Carbon removal companies had nobody to sell to, so builders wouldn’t build and investors wouldn’t invest. Nan’s team broke the deadlock with an advance market commitment: money waiting at the finish line for any company that could hit the spec. Sometimes the missing technology is demand itself.
Explore the space between the grant and the unicorn. If a world-changing outcome can support a durable business, Nan thinks you should build one. If markets cannot support the work, move down the stack toward philanthropy. Between those poles is a field of abandoned possibilities: companies that should exist but promise too little upside for venture capital, look too commercial for a grant, and fit no familiar private-equity box.
Philanthropy needs power laws too. Venture capital accepts that many ambitious bets will fail because a few successes can transform the entire portfolio. Public-goods funding becomes timid when it demands predictable returns from the very problems whose upside could be historic, almost as if it does not quite believe they can be solved.
The next philanthropic shortage is talent. Nan sees enormous new pools of philanthropic capital approaching an ecosystem without enough legible problems, capable allocators, or founder-shaped people ready to own them. The money may arrive suddenly; the people and institutions will not. Start now.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you what is beautiful. The measurement-heavy era of philanthropy became extraordinarily good at comparing lives saved and dollars spent. The coming questions about meaning, beauty, and life after abundance will not fit neatly into cost-benefit analysis. We will need new ways to judge progress here, and lots of time to do so.
Make the do-gooders rich. Working on philanthropic problems has usually meant taking a pay cut. Nan thinks that if you can deliver a great outcome for humanity, you should be wildly rewarded. This wave of philanthropy even has a potential tool: its money is sitting in some of the world’s most coveted equity. Pay a high-performing founder or GM a bonus in AI-lab stock.
A company can house a moonshot. Frontier lives inside Stripe on purpose: Patrick Collison argued that Stripe could shepherd it for the long run and pay tech salaries, attracting people traditional philanthropy never could. Together, protection from bureaucracy, competitive pay, and long-term commitment create what Nan calls a “sneaky huge arbitrage” that other companies could copy.
Don’t snap to grid by default. Nan was good at gold stars: the right schools, the right jobs, marriage, doing life as prescribed. Then a sick parent, the end of a fifteen-year relationship, and COVID arrived at once, but the total collapse she’d braced for never came. Nobody was really paying attention, and what grew in the cleared space felt more like her.
Study the things you’re supposed to feel out. In academic subjects, Nan thinks we overstudy and under-experience; in the subjects that govern a life, we over-experience and understudy. She wants syllabi for friendship, partnership, marriage, and raising children, partly so we can see that the arrangement we inherited is not the only one available.
Friendship deserves more than leftovers. We bring planning, attention, and shared projects to work, then expect friendship to flourish on whatever time and intentionality remain. Nan’s modest prescription is not to turn relationships into meetings, but to bring even ten percent more care to the people who otherwise receive our leftovers.
Making something together is an intimate act. Nan read John & Paul as a love story: two people building things neither could have made alone. She thinks creative partnership deserves some of the vocabulary we reserve for romance and that shared work may be the deepest form of friendship we have little language for.
Sketch your own obituary. Five years ago, when Nan was trying to figure out which way was up, she drafted her obit and used it as a compass: do good things, help people see the best versions of themselves, and make decisions that are deeply yours. And have fun, because we’re not here that long.
Description
Nan Ransohoff (X, Substack, Website) is Head of Public Goods and former Head of Climate at Stripe. This includes Frontier (which she co-founded): an advance market commitment that accelerates carbon removal by guaranteeing demand for it before it exists. They also recently launched Intercept Fund, a new effort to end respiratory infections, led by Nan and Charlie Petty.
Nan has written extensively about Stripe’s efforts and philanthropy broadly, including her call for general managers for the world’s pressing problems, and on what she calls the third wave of American philanthropy.
We talk about what a “Nan” is and why we need GM’s: ambitious founder-like people who obsess over an outcome and work backwards from it, wearing whatever hat the problem requires. We discuss taste in big problems, slicing them up and making them tractable, and why vision is in short supply. We also discuss the coming wave of new philanthropic dollars (est. ~$40B/year), primarily driven by The OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic Founders, and Anthropic employee matching, and how the ecosystem will need to mature to effectively deploy this much capital. Nan also reflects on her unlikely turn toward philanthropy and what it felt like to get off the ladder of a specific kind of ambition. We wrap up with a range of miscellanea and some fun debates. I hope you are inspired to notice problems you can’t ignore, be optimistic and specific about the world you hope for, and choose an (unlikely) path that you are proud of.
Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Watch here for more on Notion’s new developer platform and workers. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.
Timestamps
(0:00) Opening Highlights
(1:15) Intro to Nan
(3:18) Thanks to Notion
(4:53) Start: What is a Nan? Nerd-Sniped by Orphaned Problems
(12:39) GMs, Seeing the Chessboard, and Working Backwards from Outcomes
(18:55) Good Taste in Problems, Vision, and Good Finish Lines
(35:43) Advance Market Commitments Tactically Solving Carbon Removal
(41:35) Focus and Sketching Out or Slicing Up Messy Problems
(49:39) Legibility, Public Rallying, and Ambition in Philanthropy
(54:38) Third Wave Philanthropy and Hard to Quantify Problems
(1:06:50) Risk Tolerance in Philanthropy and Scarcity of Funders and Allocators
(1:15:22) The $40B Tidal Wave of New AI-Money and Why Start Now
(1:19:53) Amount of Capital, Government Philanthropy, and Making Philanthropic Founders Rich
(1:31:44) Nan’s Mid-Career Inflection Point and Getting Off the Obvious Path
(1:39:47) Grab-bag: Why Stripe Funds Public Goods, Making Things with Friends, Creative Partnership, Iceland Drone, and Scone Heads
(1:49:39) Syllabi for the Squishy Topics & Study vs. Experience
(1:57:01) Inputs & Outputs and GLPs for Attention
(2:04:38) Closing: Interviewing Parents and Imagining an Obituary
(2:09:58) Thanks Again to Notion
Links
Transcript & all links: https://dialectic.fm/nan
