By Guest Blogger Kevin Jones:
Kevin Jones is a founding partner at Good Capital, an organization that works to accelerate the flow of capital to innovative ventures and initiatives to create sustainable solutions to some of society’s most challenging problems. In this first of an ongoing series, Kevin interviews Andrew Kassoy about giving up the cush life and finding his labor of love. You can read my initial interview with Kevin, Bad vs. Good Capital.
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When you jump of the fast track, most of the people still running no longer know what to do with you. Andrew Kassoy, partner at the newly formed B Corporation, found that out first hand when he announced recently that he was walking away from his lucrative job managing a chunk of billionaire Michael Dell’s money to join a new venture where money comes second to meaning.

B Corporation, an early stage startup, is a rating agency that evaluates socially conscious businesses which are mixing “doing good with making a profit”. When Kassoy announced to his friends and colleagues his plan to join B Corp., he found their reactions fell into a few camps.

One group assumed that Kassoy, 38, left the hard charging world of Manhattan finance for a slower paced non profit, and consigned him to the category of people you don’t take quite as seriously any more.

For these folks, the transition just didn’t make sense. “Great that you’re pursuing your passion”, they would say, “but aren’t you doing it a little early? You’re jumping off just when you’ve made it to the point where the upward curve (to financial success) is so steep”. Says Kassoy, 38, “to them it literally didn’t compute. The traditional view of private enterprise is that you accumulate wealth as long as you can, as much as you can, and then you start being philanthropic (with the excess),” His colleagues wanted to know “why now?”. To them, the thought is that you accumulate a lot more for the next year 10 years and then give back later.

It was, according to Kassoy, a particularly Wall Street reaction. “In the tech world, there are a lot of people who made a decent amount of money from the Internet who are now in their early 40’s and pursuing their passion for changing the world. They’ve got money and now they feel a need to create a healthy dose of meaning in what they do.”

But these tech cash-outs who want to change the world are often people who have built businesses and have those successes to look back on as validation. When they make the jump into some kind of social enterprise or take a deeply engaged role at some innovative non profit, they don’t instantly lose status the way financial industry people do.

“In the finance world, there’s no way to measure it other than dollars,” Kassoy said. “The only process they think about is dollars. The traditional course is to stop and do 80 percent golf and 20 percent philanthropy.”

The second camp consisted primarily of folks responding to Kassoy’s announcement by looking to “justify their own existence”. “There were a lot of emails that said “It’s great you’re doing that,” Kassoy said. “’I do a lot of things like that myself.’ Then they’d include the list of the boards they’re on and the charities they give to. There was a little bit of discomfort. They were saying ‘I’m not a greedy bastard, I’m more like you.’”

“Other people said things like, “I’m not far behind you.” That was another big bucket, Kassoy said. That response was countered by a man who came to see him in his office in Manhattan. “Everybody talks about doing this, but no one ever actually does it,” the friend told him. “For 98 percent of the people it stays just talk. The pull to stay in is just too powerful.”

So why did Kassoy walk away from a fortune in the making, and what is it about what he’s doing that makes so many of his peers uncomfortable in a squirming variety of ways? And what is so compelling about what he and his two partners, Jay Coen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan are doing that he opted to go against the grain and do something radically different?

Since we are looking at one man’s journey and secondarily at the business he’s going to, let’s answer the question of why Kassoy did it first. Trust me, B Corporation is important; at Good Capital it’s the only partnership we are devoting staff resources to, rather than just letting the partners maintain relationships.

But for Kassoy, dealing with the question “Why leave?” was much more profound than which particular startup he joined. Finding an outlet once he’d made the decision to change his life was simpler than deciding he really was going to change the way he spent his time, putting finances second to purpose.

“It started a couple of years ago, it’s not like there was an epiphany and I found something I was passionate about in the non profit world and changed my life the next day. I was more deliberative. This stuff is on a lot of people’s minds but they’re uncomfortable talking about it. I started putting more and more of my time in the social entrepreneurship world, spending more time with groups, seeing which things struck me as having an impact. It became a spiritual journey, too,” Kassoy confessed. “The more I rolled up my sleeves, the more passionate I was.”

“I realized this stuff was what I wanted to be doing when I woke up every morning.” He also awoke to the idea of enough. “I realized I had enough, that I might move the (financial) bar a lot in the next 10 years and you can keep moving it forever. But there is such a thing as enough, and I will be OK and the kids will be OK and if there’s some family health crisis we can deal with it.”

That different definition of the phrase “financial comfort” enabled Kassoy to think seriously about actually acting out his dream. Once a financial engineer, he changed to becoming a societal and economic engineer, using the same potential value analysis approach coupled with social impact potential as the third variable besides risk and return. He was looking for the “net present value of his future impact”. He’d started to measure things differently, or maybe, it’s hard to say, he let in other things that really had counted for much in the balance before. Things that he said were important began to actually be more important.

Working in a broader arena, he used a familiar systemic analysis to try to find where he could have the biggest impact, make the biggest difference. “I decided I was interested in systemic social change.” For Kassoy that meant looking at “what new models break down barriers that exist between the private, public and non profit sectors and where lack of cooperation between those sectors is an impedance.”

“I got excited about supporting social entrepreneurs and helping to create a capital market that would allow them, whether for- or non- profit, to function in the efficient and productive ways that the traditional capital markets allow other businesses to function, allowing them to grow rapidly and efficiently,” Kassoy said. “That’s the greatest opportunity for systemic change.

“Accelerating the capital market’s (ability to help social enterprises grow) is the most powerful problem there is to solve. You don’t have to use an ethical or moral overlay, say it’s good or bad (to come to that conclusion). You can just look at positive externalities,” Kassoy said.

Deciding that systemic change in the capital markets was going to be the way he made a difference led Kassoy to become the third partner at B Corporation. Kassoy’s story highlights perhaps one of the most effective means of bringing society into The Social Age — personal transformation. His dedication and hard work at B Corporation will most certainly prove impactful… but that, of course, is the next part of the story.