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.