Nan Ransohoff: Power Laws for Philanthropy

Show Notes

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.

Transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/nan

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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