Andrew Kassoy, who left a career in private equity to help start an international movement to reconsider capitalism as a force for social good and not merely for profit, died on June 22 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 55.
His death came after two and a half years of treatment for metastatic prostate cancer, said his wife, Margot Brandenburg, a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation.
Shortly before he died, Mr. Kassoy said in a videotaped conversation with Jay Coen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan, two business partners and longtime friends from their fraternity days at Stanford University: “I think one of the things that makes capitalism not work as a system is, it was built on the idea of carelessness. Like, literally, the entire purpose of it was that people should build wealth for themselves and that other people didn’t matter, you couldn’t care about them.”
His contradictory philosophy, Mr. Kassoy continued, was that “you’re here to care, to care for your workers, your community, the planet, the other people that you do business with in your supply chain.”
In 2006, Mr. Kassoy, Mr. Coen Gilbert and Mr. Houlahan left the corporate world and jointly founded B Lab, a nonprofit network whose lofty mission is “transforming the global economy to benefit all people, communities and the planet.”
To accomplish its goal, B Lab certifies companies, known as B Corps, that meet verified standards of social and environmental performance. These include pay and working conditions for employees; ethical marketing and data privacy for customers; hiring practices and charitable causes in neighborhoods where businesses are situated; the sourcing of raw materials; and the impact of energy use on the air and water in those communities.
Among the 9,979 certified B Corps companies that employ more than one million people in 103 countries, according to B Lab, are Patagonia, the outdoor apparel maker; Danone Yogurt; and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Advocacy by Mr. Kassoy and others also led to the creation over the last 15 years of so-called public benefit corporations — required to consider the public good in their business decisions, not just the interests of shareholders as in a standard corporation — through legislation in 42 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Those states include Delaware, where most public companies are incorporated.
While business language can rife with jargon, Mr. Kassoy spoke plainly about wanting to “put purpose and profit on a level playing field.”
In a 2020 Q&A with the Shared Future Fund, which finances projects that address climate change, Mr. Kassoy noted that it was the 50th anniversary of an influential article by the economist Milton Friedman, published in The New York Times on Sept. 13, 1970, with the headline “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”
That view had been baked into corporate law in Delaware and the teachings of Harvard Business School, Mr. Kassoy said, but it failed to make companies as sustainable as possible. “I think the opportunity is to reverse all that,” he said.
Many young people, he said, “don’t believe in capitalism. They feel like they don’t have the same kinds of opportunities, that companies don’t look at them as anything other than a resource to be exploited.”
Countering such cynicism, he said, required reimagining capitalism.
To convey his message, Mr. Kassoy didn’t always quote Mr. Friedman’s doctrine, or “The Great Gatsby” and its portrayal of the irresponsibility of elite wealth. As a father of four, he also found incisive meaning in animated feature films and was fond of an aphorism from the “Kung Fu Panda” movies: “One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.”
Andrew Renard Kassoy was born on July 8, 1969, in the La Jolla area of San Diego and grew up in Boulder, Colo., where his father, David Kassoy, is an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado. His mother, Carol (Fuchs) Kassoy, a former music teacher, is a board member of the Colorado Music Festival.
In a 2019 series in The Times about visionaries, Mr. Kassoy said that by the time he was in fourth or fifth grade he wanted to be an elected official or a policymaker. An early influence on the need for social justice and opportunity for all was his maternal grandfather, Reuben Fuchs, known as Ruby, who was then the principal at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn and started public-private partnerships to train vocational students.
“Ruby instilled in Andrew a view that the world and its systems could always be improved,” Mr. Kassoy’s sister, Erin Falquier, a clean energy consultant, said in a text message. “Like Ruby, Andrew saw challenges as exciting opportunities rather than barriers.”
While on a grant from Stanford, he worked on his senior thesis on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where he was mentored by an elder named Basil Brave Heart. It is one of the poorest communities in the United States, and Ms. Brandenburg, Mr. Kassoy’s wife, said the challenges of extreme poverty that Mr. Kassoy witnessed “really drove home the stark inequalities in this country” and were “eye-opening in a way previous experiences hadn’t been.”
He also served an internship with David Skaggs, then a congressman from Colorado. When Mr. Kassoy sought to return to work for him after graduating with a degree in political science in 1991, he recalled to The Times, Mr. Skaggs’s response was “Maybe, but I think not yet.”
Mr. Skaggs advised him to do something in the world, like exploring the workings of the economy. Mr. Kassoy ended up working in private equity for 16 years and realized that he could create change without being a politician.
But he began to re-evaluate his career path after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and, he said, ultimately found Wall Street too focused on “how quickly you could leverage something up and sell it with little interest” in the underlying business “or the humans involved.”
There had to be a better way, he thought, of running capitalism to “benefit society and not just a few shareholders.”
He was driven in his work, in the way he cooked — his motto, his wife said, was “Go big or order pizza” — and in the way he exercised. He rode a bicycle up Mont Ventoux, a famously steep climb on the Tour de France course. Numerous times he climbed Longs Peak in Colorado, at 14,259 feet the tallest peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, Ms. Brandenburg said, though on occasion his ambition overcame his endurance.
After Mr. Kassoy underwent his first round of chemotherapy in 2023, she said, he and friends hiked Colorado’s Arapaho Pass to 11,906 feet before his stamina waned. He had to be helped down and was taken to an emergency room.
“He never shied away from a challenge,” Ms. Brandenburg said. “Shoot for the moon, and sometimes you get there and sometimes you don’t. You flame out. He wasn’t afraid of that.”
Mr. Kassoy left his daily involvement in B Lab in 2022. Over the past year, he wrote a critique of OpenAI and served as a senior adviser to a holding company, started last month, called Nine Dean, whose aim is to acquire midlevel businesses and hold them for the long term, relieving the immediate pressure to maximize profits.
In addition to his wife and his sister, Mr. Kassoy is survived by his parents; a daughter, Etta, and a son, Xavier, from his marriage to Ms. Brandenburg; and two sons, Max and Jed, from his marriage to the writer and therapist Kamy Wicoff, which ended in divorce.
“I think the problems we face as a society, they’re enormous and they can be totally overwhelming,” Mr. Kassoy said in a 2021 video. He often awoke in the middle of the night, he said, thinking, “Climate change, we’re screwed.”
What is there to do? he asked in the video. Do something, he answered.
“At a minimum, just by taking action, it gives you a sense of meaning in your life.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
The post Andrew Kassoy, 55, Dies; Saw Capitalism as a Force for Social Good appeared first on New York Times.
