He was a founder of B Lab, a nonprofit network whose lofty mission is “transforming the global economy to benefit all people, communities and the planet.”
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.”
