Q&A with Google energy czar Bill Weihl in the NY Times, talking about Google.org’s goal of making alternative energy sources cheaper than coal.

This passage highlights the combination of deeper purpose and profit motive (and explains the necessary organizational setup to do it effectively):

The reason Google.org is not just a foundation is that lots of people believe that if you want to have a big impact at scale on the world, then you need to go beyond what a 501(c)3 can do, which is to make charitable grants, so you need the ability to invest in companies, to do engineering projects, to do things that might at some point actually make money.

We’d be delighted if some of this stuff actually made money, obviously; it is not our goal to not make money. All else being equal, we’d like to make as much money as we can, but the principal goal is to have a big impact for good.

That could almost be read right out of the John Mackey playbook.

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