There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems

There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety. Lots of people talk about the problem, and often many work on slices of it. But if you asked: ‘is there a hyper-competent person waking up every day feeling accountable for making sure this gets solved?’—the answer is very often, ‘no.’

These problems exist across domains and at a variety of ‘altitudes.’ Indeed, some are perhaps better described as ‘things we want to be true’ rather than ‘problems.’ In any event, a few examples that have been on my mind recently:

1. Can we prevent infection from all respiratory pathogens (including the common cold)?

2. Can we make every new building in SF both serve its function and be beautiful?

3. Can we permanently fix the American west’s water problem?

4. Can we halve X risk?

5. Can we eliminate single-use plastic globally without making convenience trade-offs?

6. Can we make childcare costs so low that they’re a non-factor in deciding whether to have kids?

In my opinion, there should be ‘general managers’—GMs—for problems like these. These are founder-types who feel personally responsible for delivering a specific outcome (vs field-building generally); hyper-competent leaders who will pull whatever levers necessary to achieve the defined outcome. Most companies wouldn’t let an important initiative go unmanned or without a ‘directly responsible individual’ — why are we OK not having GMs for even more wide-reaching problems?

To make this concrete, I’ll start by giving four examples of GMing in practice—two past and two current. I’ll then turn to why there are so few GMs (in theory, aren’t nonprofits supposed to do this?) and what we can do to get more GMs working on more of the world’s problems.

Past examples

There’s precedent for great people successfully GMing important problems.

D.A. Henderson - Smallpox

The goal of globally eradicating smallpox was first articulated by WHO in 1959, but with no serious funding, weak operational plans, and little confidence it would succeed. In 1966, after limited success, WHO and partner governments wanted someone who could run a program to achieve this goal and hired D.A. Henderson, an epidemiologist working at the CDC known for his comfort operating in chaotic field conditions, his blunt, results-oriented management style, and deep belief in accountability and speed.

Henderson didn’t discover anything—the first smallpox vaccine existed for 170 years before eradication. The gap was strategy, coordination, and will.

When the original strategy of mass vaccination wasn’t working, he switched to a ‘ring vaccination’ and surveillance approach. He ran the program like a wartime operation: he traveled constantly to endemic countries, demanded real-time data so that they could quickly adapt strategy and tactics as needed, empowered young field staff over senior bureaucrats, fought WHO HQ inertia, pressured governments publicly, and occasionally bypassed them altogether. By the late 1960s, Henderson believed that failure was unacceptable and that time mattered morally, a mindset that spread through the program.

The last natural case of smallpox was in 1977, and while many others were involved, Henderson is largely credited for leading—or “GMing”—the successful 11-year effort.

Evan Wolfson - Marriage equality

In 1983, Evan Wolfson wrote his Harvard Law thesis arguing for marriage equality grounded in a deep, early belief that exclusion from marriage was a fundamental denial of dignity and citizenship, and that winning it would unlock broader equality.

In 2003, he founded Freedom to Marry, an organization with a clear, specific goal: Full legal access to civil marriage for same-sex couples in every U.S. state, on the same terms and with the same recognition as different-sex couples. And, he articulated a clear strategy for Freedom to Marry: win enough states to create momentum, shift public opinion, then get a Supreme Court ruling (and importantly, don’t push for national resolution until public opinion had shifted enough).

Wolfson wore many hats. He reviewed polling and message-testing constantly, coached spokespeople before media appearances, intervened in state campaigns when messaging drifted, fundraised relentlessly, and mediated disputes between national and local groups. He decided not to litigate cases that others wanted if public sentiment wasn’t far enough along. He was disciplined, unsentimental, willing to be disliked, and focused on a single, verifiable outcome. In short, Wolfson developed a theory of change and executed it for 30 years.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v Hodges., requiring states to license marriages between same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed in other states.

Current examples

Current GMs are still in the thick of it, so it’s too early to say if they will ultimately be successful. Nonetheless, I think it’s useful to see that this approach to problems remains relevant and applicable to many of today’s challenges.

Frontier - Carbon removal

I can speak in the most detail about this one since it’s what I work on.

In 2022 we started Frontier, an advance market commitment to buy $1B of durable carbon removal. The idea was to send a loud demand signal to potential entrepreneurs and investors that there was a market for carbon removal (a public good). At the time, $1B in demand for carbon removal was, on the one hand, a lot (at the end of 2021, $30M total had been spent buying carbon removal). On the other hand, $1B is obviously nowhere near enough to get carbon removal to a climate-relevant scale.

Our mission at Frontier is to get the world on track to deliver ~1 teraton of carbon removal over the next ~100 years—the rough total amount scientists say is needed to stabilize global temperatures (in addition to the radical emissions reductions that are also needed). While Frontier is housed within Stripe, we view ourselves as working on behalf of the field writ large. While we don’t need to do everything ourselves (and in fact, cannot do everything ourselves), we do view it as our responsibility to maximize the likelihood that this future materializes.

Our main role at Frontier is that of a buyer: we find, diligence, and write offtake agreements with the most promising carbon removal companies. Over the years, we’ve diligenced hundreds of companies and so far contracted $668M across 60 companies. But, as mentioned, a $1B advance market commitment is merely a step on the way to our stated goal. To that end, we spend a huge amount of time hunting for and trying to solve current and anticipated bottlenecks. A few examples to illustrate:

• Doing policy work to build a long-term market. Our $1B will run out. Microsoft, an even bigger buyer, will eventually buy enough to meet its net-zero goal. Then what? Removing 1 teraton of carbon dioxide over ~100 years at $100/ton, would be ~$1T a year, or ~1% of today’s global GDP, for 100 years (less if we can get it to be cheaper and if the world gets richer, more on this here). Government involvement—either direct procurement or policy-driven compliance markets—will be critical to get anywhere near these numbers. As a result, we spend a lot of time working out how to accelerate global policy and create a portfolio of demand ‘bets’ around the world. In 2023, we co-founded the Carbon Removal Alliance to accelerate carbon removal policy in the US. In 2024, we started Stripe Climate Fellows to seed more policy-driven demand initiatives outside of the US. We worked with the Linden Trust and others on designing and securing support for a tax credit that would begin to create a large-scale market for carbon removal in the US (this is unlikely to pass in this administration, but that’s life). Last year we made progress on a multi-national AMC for carbon removal, though this will take time and may or may not work. We try our best to both play the long game and adapt quickly as the world changes.

• Making sure all of the most promising ideas are being worked on. We regularly hunt for ‘missed’ ideas that could be big. Last year, we spent meaningful time digging into two pathways we thought were especially promising but very underexplored. In the end, we killed one of them, and the other we’re very excited about and resourcing even more this year.

• Identifying cruxy questions and funding R&D to answer them. What technical questions, if answered, would most dramatically clarify what approaches will/won’t work at scale? In 2023 we published a database of knowledge gaps (though now a bit outdated) to increase the likelihood they’d get answered. Every year, we try to identify the most critical R&D questions for the field that would help us, and others, spend limited funding more efficiently, and then fund the best groups that can help answer those questions.

• Publishing learnings & resources that make it easier for other companies to buy carbon removal. We regularly publish resources we think could be beneficial to others in the field, like the offtake agreement template we developed and is now used by dozens of other buyers.

• Red-teaming. Where could we be wrong? What might tank the field? What are the biggest risks at the moment? We regularly red team our strategy and change course based on what the field needs. We hunt for bottlenecks and gaps, and try to proactively fill gaps when we find them.

We’re of course still very much in the middle of it, and it’s too early to say if this effort will be successful. And, this is also not to suggest we’re the only ones who have ‘assigned’ ourselves this mandate (Carbon180 in particular has done field-critical work from very early on). But hopefully, this gives you a sense of how we are operationalizing the GM mentality. (If you’re curious to read a bit more about how we frame our mission, 2030 vision, and strategy, it’s here.)

Lewis Bollard - Factory farming

Lewis Bollard has been thinking about factory farming since he was a teenager. Through college and law school, he struggled to find effective ways to address factory farming: “One standard approach was litigation, but I realized this wasn’t working — we were just repeating the same playbook that had been failing us for years. What seemed to be missing was a framework for stepping back, looking at the big picture, and asking: which of these approaches actually makes sense?”

In 2015, he joined Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving), where he started and still leads the Farm Animal Welfare Program. The goal is clear and specific: end factory farming (and, while it persists, reduce the suffering of animals confined to it). His primary tool to achieve this is grantmaking—he’s now directed over $400 million to effective advocacy on factory farming globally. But he also actively shapes the movement and discussion around factory farming:

1. Catalyzing new initiatives: following the success of US corporate cage-free campaigns (Costco, McDonald’s, and many others are now cage-free), he helped expand this progress globally through the Open Wing Alliance, which unites 80+ groups across 70+ countries, and to new issues, for example by catalyzing the Better Chicken Commitment, which major retailers and fast food chains have adopted.

2. Driving increased funding: he co-founded Farmed Animal Funders (now Senterra Funders), which unites funders collectively giving >90% of global funding to fight factory farming. More recently, he joined with Dwarkesh to raise over $2.5M through a fundraiser Dwarkesh launched on his show.

3. Public narrative shaping: he’s also taken on an increasing role in aligning advocates and funders around successful advocacy, both through a Substack and, more recently, a TED talk.

His strategy rejects moral suasion and litigation as primary levers, instead treating animal suffering as an externality to be engineered out of the system. As a grantmaker and strategist, he focuses on interventions that change production norms at industrial scale—corporate welfare standards, regulatory lock-in, welfare science, and alternative proteins—aiming to end factory farming through superior alternatives and hardened standards.

Ten years in, Bollard’s work at Coefficient Giving has so far improved the lives of 3 billion farm animals, and he’s still at it.

So why isn’t this approach more common? Aren’t nonprofits supposed to do exactly this?

One might reasonably ask: in some sense, isn’t every nonprofit CEO of a specific cause basically a GM?

Certainly, some nonprofit leaders have a clear outcome they’re working towards and operate like GMs (i.e., Lewis Bollard), but in my observation, this is the exception rather than the rule. Why is that? There are at least a few reasons.

Most nonprofits aren’t scoped to solve ‘the whole thing.’

Many nonprofits scope themselves to a slice of a problem (i.e., focusing only on funding research, or focusing only on policy, etc.), rather than to ‘the whole thing.’ I’m not suggesting that every nonprofit needs to be scoped to the whole thing (there are many different valuable shapes of nonprofits), but I am suggesting that scoping to solve the problem in its entirety—and clearly defining the desired outcome—is rarer than it should be.

It’s rare for nonprofit leaders to actually have the flexibility and autonomy needed to achieve the goal.

Bezos famously said that being “stubborn on vision but flexible on the details” was key to Amazon’s success. The ability to quickly adapt to a dynamic world is critical in solving nearly any problem. Unfortunately, nonprofits seem to be especially susceptible to strategic ossification. There are at least a few contributing reasons. Nonprofit leaders are often constrained by funder ideology or by funding restrictions, meaning that in practice they’re unable to adapt their strategy and tactics as the problem evolves. Sometimes leaders lose flexibility for more inane reasons—their time gets gobbled up by the administrivia and stakeholder management so often required in the nonprofit world that they have little time leftover to actually solve the problem. These kinds of conditions are both unlikely to yield results and also are deeply frustrating to operate in (which then deters great people from wanting these jobs).

Nonprofit boards don’t typically hire GM-esque leaders.

A striking theme across all of the examples is that successful GMs look more like founders than ‘professional executive directors’—both in how they internalize the mission and in how they operate tactically. These people are deeply mission-oriented but also shrewd strategists and operators who will run through any and all walls necessary to achieve their goal. And yet, this isn’t the phenotype of most nonprofit leaders. Why? I suspect some of the more traditional funders are simply not selecting for this phenotype, preferring lower-risk, ‘seasoned’ nonprofit professionals. Perhaps a more common reason is that funders want to hire GM-caliber leaders but struggle to do so—probably in large part because of the previous point. I’ve observed excellent leaders to be especially sensitive to lack of autonomy. Even if they fall in love with the problem, they are wary of signing up to a lifetime of having their hands tied–especially when nonprofits don’t typically pay very well versus alternatives.

How do we get GMs working on many more of the world’s problems?

I’ll make three points for your consideration.

Big problems need a different type of leader than nonprofits typically hire.

As discussed, these problems demand hyper-competent, ‘founder-like’ leaders who possess both the talent and the drive to see a problem through to completion. They are obsessed with achieving the outcome but aren’t ideological as to how it gets done. They’re flexible on the details, constantly zooming in and out to readjust strategy and tactics as the problem evolves. They’re fast learners and quick to develop (or hire for) whatever skills are needed at the time. They feel deep personal responsibility to solve the problem, which means they’re likely to stick with it for years if not decades (the smallpox eradication effort took 11 years, marriage equality took 30). Great GMs have to carry the torch even when (especially when) political winds inevitably shift, public interest wanes, and funding environments worsen. They possess the conviction and stamina to lead through conditions both good and bad.

To attract a different kind of leader, we need a different type of funder.

In my opinion, funders have a huge opportunity to create the conditions to attract GM-caliber leaders to work on important problems. In practice this means funders who: (1) back an ambitious problem and want to solve ‘the whole thing’ vs a slice of it, (2) resource it well, (3) give their leaders genuine autonomy to do whatever is needed to solve the problem, (4) compensate these leaders competitively, and (5) commit to sticking with the problem for a very long time. This sounds basic, but in practice, this combination of conditions is very hard to find. There’s real opportunity for forward-thinking funders to create these opportunities.

Looking at our examples, we see that GMs can be ‘housed’ in different types of organizations. Sometimes there’s an existing organization to fund and support the GM (i.e., factory farming is housed within Coefficient Giving, carbon removal within Stripe, smallpox within WHO), and sometimes new, independent organizations need to be created (i.e., Freedom to Marry was founded for marriage equality). Both can work. The approach that makes the most sense is context-dependent.

Reflecting on my own experience, I feel extremely lucky that Stripe exhibits all the traits of an ideal funder, and I’m quite confident that this is a big part of why we’ve been able to hire such great people and retain them over the last 5 years. It’s also made me wonder why more private companies with philanthropic efforts don’t operate this way. Indeed, private companies already know how to spot GM-caliber people, they are familiar with what great execution looks like and how to enable it, and they can pay competitively. In short, I think there’s a sneaky huge opportunity for private company CEOs to create the conditions for an army of GMs working on important-but-orphaned problems of their choosing.

We can all be more observant of—and a little more indignant that—so many important problems don’t have GMs.

Even if every existing nonprofit started approaching their work this way (not saying they all should, but for argument’s sake), we’d still just be scratching the surface of important problems that need GMs. Indeed, attracting more philanthropic funding overall is part of changing that, but I don’t think that’s all of it.

I’d argue that a sneaky hard-but-critical part of getting more GMs working on these problems is simply noticing and defining the problems in the first place.

Some problems are orphaned because they’re almost invisible—they’re so widely accepted as commonplace that we hardly register them as a problem at all (example: the fact that most healthy people still get sick 2-4 times a year from respiratory viruses like the common cold).

Some problems are orphaned because they don’t initially code as being obviously ‘in scope’ for philanthropy (example: making every new building in SF both functional and beautiful).

And some problems are orphaned due to the Bystander Effect—they are so ‘obviously’ a problem that everyone thinks to themselves, “I’m sure someone else is working on that” (example: building a market for carbon removal). Counterintuitively, these ‘super obvious’ problems can frequently be ones where a GM mindset would be most additive because everyone else is hit with the bystander effect too. The world would probably be better off if smart people felt a bit more institutional distrust that popular problems are actually being solved.

In short, it is my belief that the world would be measurably better off, and progress would happen faster, with more GMs owning more of the world’s problems.

As a starting point, we can each get in the habit of more regularly asking, “Is there someone excellent who believes it’s their responsibility to solve this problem, and do I believe that they can do it?” And, if the answer is ‘no,’ consider making it our problem to change that.

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Thank you to Hannah Bebbington, Charlie Petty, Freddie Williams, Parth Ahya, Ryan Orbuch and Jacob Trefethen for discussions and feedback on this idea. All shortcomings are mine.