In 2007, Andrew Kassoy was at the peak of the wrong mountain. He’d spent 16 years in private equity and managed a billion dollars of real estate assets. But a career that looked good on paper had started to feel bad in his soul.
Photo: Courtesy Brandenburg-Kassoy Family
“I think one of the things that makes capitalism not work as a system is it was built on the idea of carelessness,” Kassoy said in a conversation filmed while he was in hospice. “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.”
When Kassoy was 37, he and his Stanford fraternity brothers Jay Coen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan co-founded B Lab, a nonprofit reimagining capitalism as “a force for good.” B Lab came up with the concept of public benefit corporations, which balance profit with the well-being of any people or places they affect. Forty-three states have adopted statutes that authorize incorporation as a public benefit corporation. In addition to their legal status, public benefit corporations can choose to undergo B Lab’s B Corp certification process, which grants points for actions from the employee-focused—say, offering on-site childcare—to the societal, which are achieved via business practices or donations.
Andrew Renard Kassoy, ’91, a business visionary who worked to make capitalism better serve everyone, died on June 22 of prostate cancer. He was 55.
Kassoy grew up in Boulder, Colo., where his father was a mechanical engineering professor and his mother served on nonprofit boards. “The seeds of service were for sure planted by his family,” says his wife, Margot Brandenburg, ’01. As a grade schooler, Kassoy wanted to be an elected official or a policymaker.
He met Coen Gilbert and Houlahan, both ’89, during Kappa Sigma recruitment, which put them all on the volleyball court together. “[Kassoy] was both the most competitive and the most joyful person that I met that day,” Coen Gilbert says. During his sophomore year, Kassoy interned for Colorado congressman David Skaggs, who suggested he gain real-world experience before becoming a public servant. Kassoy went on to work in private equity for firms such as commercial real estate developer Trammell Crow, Goldman Sachs, and MSD Capital.
According to his co-founders, the same skills that had made Kassoy a good investor made him a valuable leader at B Lab: his social savvy, understanding of capital markets, and extensive network. “He left an amazingly successful private equity career to co-found a start-up whose ridiculous, hubristic vision was to change the economic system,” says Houlahan, who remains on the B Lab board. “Twenty years later, he helped to move the needle.” Today, more than 10,000 businesses in 102 countries are B corporations, including Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, and Coursera.
In addition to his wife, Kassoy is survived by his children, Jed, ’29, Xavier, Etta, and Max; parents, David and Carol; and sister, Erin Kassoy Falquier, ’98, MS ’99.
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
