The Best Charity of the Next 50 Years Might Be a Company
Nan Ransohoff (Head of Public Goods at Stripe) recently published a sharp piece on what she calls the third wave of American philanthropy: the tidal change coming as AI wealth becomes liquid and a generation of founders gives it away.
It’s a generous, clear-eyed essay about a real institutional mismatch: an enormous new pool of capital is forming, but the systems built to turn that capital into lasting public good have not caught up. Nan’s point is that the next generation of givers may need new vehicles, new norms, and new institutions to make that money matter.
I agree with all of it. But the piece also surfaced an adjacent question I keep coming back to:
What if the most important social institutions of the next 50 years aren’t nonprofits at all?
The Two-Ledger System
For most of modern philanthropy, the sequence was simple: build the company, make the fortune, then decide what the fortune should repair.
Andrew Carnegie endowed infrastructure for self-improvement after he built U.S. Steel. John D. Rockefeller funded medical research after he built Standard Oil. Both were unusually systematic for their era. Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” (1889) argued that the rich had a duty to give in their lifetimes and to do so strategically — “The man who dies rich dies disgraced” — not through charity, which he openly disdained as wasteful, but through institutions that would endure (libraries, universities, museums, research).
Rockefeller went further on the operational side. He hired Frederick Gates (no relation to Bill) as essentially the first professional philanthropic strategist, and Gates ran the giving like a research operation: identify root causes, fund the underlying science, measure outcomes. The Rockefeller Foundation’s work on hookworm eradication in the American South and yellow fever globally was “outcomes-driven public health” decades before that was a phrase.
The pattern was straightforward: industry created enormous wealth and enormous externalities, and philanthropy emerged to repair what industry broke. Make money first. Give later. The two halves were kept on separate ledgers. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the seeds of Effective Altruism in this early philanthropy: earn as much as you can, then deploy it where the math says it matters most.
Squint a little harder and you can see the same shape in a much newer idea: that some of the largest companies in the world might hand shares directly to the next generation. It may be the most promising thing the two-ledger model has produced.
But the architecture never changed. The company is the instrument, the impact is the output, and the two only meet at the end.
I don’t think this new generation of founders sees it that way anymore.
When Mission Becomes a Moat
The most ambitious founders building companies now draw no clean line between “what the company does” and “what the company is for.” They want the operating model itself to carry the values. If a company’s success requires people to be healthier, better educated, breathing cleaner air, or more financially secure, then every dollar of revenue is also a unit of the good it claims to want in the world. The two ledgers collapse into one.
The skeptical read is that “mission-driven companies” are a marketing pose — purpose-washing layered over a normal P&L. We see it all the time. A company discovers that virtue is good for customer acquisition, or that the language of impact helps it recruit, raise capital, or soften the edges of an otherwise conventional business. Anyone investing through this lens has to develop a pretty sensitive ear for the difference between mission as decoration and mission as design.
The strongest version of a mission-driven company is not one that donates a percentage of profits after the fact. It is one where the business can only get bigger if the stated mission becomes more true—even if aligned incentives have to be constructed against entrenched ones. A health company should thrive when people get well, not when they stay sick. A climate company should make money as emissions fall. A financial company should grow when customers build wealth, not when they fall into debt. In those cases, the social good is the unit economics.
You can see companies running this experiment right now. WHOOP only grows if their members actually sleep, recover, and live better (i.e. the subscription renews on results). Redwood Materials gets bigger as more batteries come back around instead of ending up in landfills. Base Power scales as the grid gets cleaner and more resilient. Etsy grows only as independent makers earn a living. Periodic Labs is making the wildest bet of all: that accelerating scientific discovery itself can be the business. The list should be much longer.
Call it the Villain Test, the Miracle on 34th St., the Warren Buffett See’s Candy manifesto. The strongest businesses don’t sell what they make; they sell what they mean. The companies most likely to matter in fifty years — the companies with lasting impact — will be the ones whose meaning is indistinguishable from their work.
The Other Third Wave
Nan is right that we’re short of philanthropic startups and capital allocators, and that those gaps need to be filled fast. She is, in fact, doing just that—Stripe recently announced the Intercept Fund, a $500m philanthropic initiative to eradicate respiratory infections. They write: “There are many important products (public goods!) that would improve the world but don’t exist because the commercial motivations aren’t yet sufficient.” I couldn’t agree more, and I’m proud to serve as an Advisor to this initiative.
But not everything will look like philanthropy.
Some of the most important problems of the next 50 years — health, climate, civic trust, the cultural conditions of a good life — won’t be solved by foundations alone, or by nonprofits alone, or even mostly. They’ll be solved by companies that were never asked to choose between profit and progress in the first place.
This is not a claim that every problem has a market solution. Many do not. Some of the most important work in the world will always depend on gifts, public funding, religious institutions, universities, mutual aid, and nonprofits willing to serve people and problems no market will reward. If anything, that need is about to grow: as AI reshapes work faster than institutions can adapt, the safety nets markets don’t provide will matter even more.
But when a problem can be addressed by a company whose incentives are aligned with the outcome we want, that should count as part of the philanthropic imagination too — not a substitute for giving, but as a reminder that the check is not the only vehicle.
That’s the version of the third wave I’m most interested in: not just more wealth moving into philanthropy after the fact, but more founders refusing to separate the wealth from the good in the first place.