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Your guide to the people and tech fixing the world.
Every seat on the row99 works in one of them. Each arena has a snapshot: the outcome lines the field is driving toward and the teams indexed against them.
AI went from research project to global infrastructure in about three years, and the upside is already real: faster drug discovery, tutoring that adapts to one kid instead of thirty, code and analysis that used to take a team a week done in an afternoon. Nobody serious wants to slow that down for its own sake.
The same speed cuts the other way. The systems keep getting more capable before our institutions can fully digest them. The U.S. has leaned on voluntary commitments while individual states pass their own laws, and labs test their own systems and publish the results, which is better than nothing but not the independent oversight we need.
The technology moves fast. The rules don't keep up. That gap is what this arena is about: capturing the upside without losing control of the downside. Everything below is aimed at closing it.
More solar came online globally last year than every other energy source combined, and clean electricity is now the cheapest electricity in most of the world. Building the clean power itself is going well, but wiring it into the grid gets less attention. Our infrastructure is built on oil and gas, and transitioning will take time and tough choices.
Reliable and affordable are lagging behind. Most of the grid carrying that power was built for a different era. Policy support has also gotten less predictable, which makes the multi-year bets this work requires harder to place.
Everything below is aimed at moving clean, reliable, and affordable closer together instead of trading one for another.
We focus on a few critical mechanics: elections that produce results people accept, checks that keep any single branch from running unchecked, a Congress that can get legislation passed, and reining in money in politics.
Some of the work is protecting dynamics that already function: courts still ruling, agencies still enforcing the law, elections still getting certified.
The rest is building versions of those mechanics that hold up better under pressure than the current ones do.
The larger project is keeping a two-hundred-year-old system flexible enough to bend without breaking. Rules written for a slower era have to adapt to a faster one, and stay trustworthy along the way.
The downstream effects of a disconnected, squeezed culture show up everywhere: polarization, mental health strain, falling birth rates, people who can't quite say why they're not thriving. I picked the dynamics on this page because they felt load-bearing: meaning if we solve one, the pressure on the rest eases up.
None of this has a clean legislative fix. Nobody passes a bill that makes people feel less alone or more hopeful about their kids' future. The people working this arena are building better versions of community, care, and meaning, brick by brick.
Everything below is that shortlist: the handful of things that, if they get better, make the rest of a good life more possible.
We've lost the infrastructure for a shared, baseline understanding of the world. A healthy information environment gives people reporting they can trust: local coverage of their own communities, platforms that surface what's true instead of just what's engaging, and enough transparency to tell a credible source from a manufactured one.
Most of that infrastructure doesn't exist yet. It's on us to rebuild it.
The organizations here are working all three. Most are working one.
The information layer that holds democracy together is being built and demolished at the same time.
Government agencies, universities, and big foundations were built for a slower, more predictable century, and the pace of change is outrunning their ability to keep up.
That's the problem underneath all the others: how we solve problems matters as much as what we're solving. The people inside these institutions are usually excellent. What limits them is the shape of the institution itself, how it's funded, how fast it can move, and what it's legally allowed to do. The work here is inventing better shapes: new legal structures, new funding models, new ways to move money and talent, instead of defaulting to the traditional nonprofit playbook every time.
I've long held that the divided America the media describes doesn't match what I actually experience day to day.
That's not to say the divisions aren't real. They are. But in my experience, people who don't think like me are chasing the same things I am: a government that works, and a shot at their version of the good life.
This lab's work is hopeful and sobering at once. It's proof that the room for relative unity exists. We've just never had a way to reach it at scale. Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab has spent decades showing Americans can move toward each other in the right conditions. That earns the seat.
Every public company files a 10-K. One report every year in the same format, so anyone can see how they're performing. The United States government, with nearly 91,000 separate entities collecting and spending, has no such mechanism. Steve Ballmer went looking for it after he left Microsoft and spent his own money building it.
What earns the seat, though, is where USAFacts chooses NOT to go. Most of what gets built around government data is a thinly veiled political argument. USAFacts pulls the government's own numbers into one place, makes them readable, and hands the decision back to citizens. The only opinion they'll freely admit to is that the data should be easier to find. Dedicating a team to the job of keeping those numbers legible to regular people is some of the quietest, most important work in the arena.
Most corporate R&D exists to make the current product a little better. In 2010, Google set up a lab with a different brief: find a problem that touches millions of people, propose a fix that sounds like science fiction, and learn fast whether it can be built. Astro Teller has run it since 2012, and his best-known rule is the strange one. Teams that kill their own projects get a bonus. X starts more than a hundred ideas a year and about 2% make it out.
The ones that make it out are why this was an easy call. Waymo came out of this lab and now gives half a million paid rides a week, with 95% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers across 271 million miles. Tapestry, still inside X, just ran 9,312 application reviews for the grid operator serving 67 million Americans, at a median of about six minutes each. What I keep coming back to is the process underneath. X wrote down how it decides, and when a project dies it publishes what it learned so the next team doesn’t start from zero.
Oil does two jobs. While everyone focuses on energy, the lesser talked about function is oil as raw material: jet fuel, plastic, polyester, and thousands of other products. We can electrify everything on earth and still need to find a replacement for that role.
Twelve’s co-founders spent their PhDs in the same Stanford lab working on a catalyst that pulls CO2 apart with electricity. Eleven years later there's a plant in Moses Lake, Washington, running on Columbia River hydropower, taking CO2 from nearby ethanol producers, and working to turn it into jet fuel. There’s a long way to go, but a tangible plant doing this technical and future-forward work is what earns the seat.
Center for Humane Technology grew out of one Google employee's slide deck in 2013, arguing that the products his own company built were engineered to hold attention. He said it publicly, left Google in 2015, and spent the next decade building that argument into a legitimate institution. He was able to do the hard work of translating a message into something durable, outlasting the news cycle that claims (and retires) so many others.
Thirteen years later, we're seeing some of the outcomes. Two juries ruled against Meta and Google in the same week, one of Harris's own cofounders testified against the infinite-scroll mechanic he invented, and Meta had to rebuild its products for teenagers as part of a $16.7 billion settlement.
Helena is the organization that first got me excited about the people driving societal progress and the technologies underneath them. Their thesis is a clean read: modern problems demand fundamentally different institutions. Their approach backs it up. They work three layers of problem-solving, sourcing the ideas, running world-class diligence on the solutions, and then doing the implementation themselves, and they've done it across enough problems to show the model works. We need more organizations willing to operate outside the traditional boundaries and shape their structure to what the moment needs.
The membership is the other thing that sets them apart. More than a hundred experts across disciplines, in a society that keeps them siloed everywhere else, and the results speak for themselves. And they look and feel like the leader they are: clean brand, deep-dive content, and nuance running through all of the work.
Vehicle-Agnostic Operator. Starts from the problem instead of a program area, then picks the legal form that can carry the work: a nonprofit, an LLC, a poll, a bill, or an equity stake.
Stripe wasn't the first to set up an advance market commitment, but it did it the loudest. When they stood up Frontier to build a market for carbon removal, the headlines were deserved. What strikes me is what happened after. ESG and corporate social responsibility faded across the industry, and Stripe stayed the course and pushed further, growing the effort into what they now call Public Goods. The fundamentals of Frontier are simple: get a group of companies to promise, together, to buy carbon removal before it exists. A guaranteed customer is what lets a startup borrow the money to build the plant.
They're now running the same play on respiratory infections. Intercept launched in June with $500 million alongside Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation and Flu Lab, with the mission of making the common cold and flu a thing of the past. The founders seem to care about building something that actually works, and they've stayed at it long enough to prove it isn't performative. Stripe is the best model for a company truly operating a solution vs. donating to one and just hoping for the best.
Demand Guarantee. Turns scattered corporate climate budgets into one credible promise to buy, which is the thing that lets an unbuilt carbon removal plant raise money today.
The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman's argument starts with the math: a career is something like two thousand workweeks, and most of us never really choose how we spend them. We inherit a narrow menu of what ambition looks like, and it pulls talented people toward the same few destinations (finance, tech, consulting). So he built something to help recruit more ambitious people to work on society's hardest problems. In 2024 he opened a paid, seven-month fellowship where people can keep an income, spend a month training, then spend six months embedded inside an organization already working a neglected problem.
Two years in, that's 38 fellows placed inside 30 host organizations, drawn from 1,403 applications. Underneath it sits a wider net: more than 20,000 people across 140 countries have joined the community, and 1,400 of them are working through Circles, a shorter version of the same exercise run in small peer groups. Prestigious careers already come with recruiting pipelines and a clear next step. Bregman is building that same infrastructure around the problems people aren't as incentivized to work on.
Talent Bridge. Pays the gap between what a host organization can offer and what a lawyer, banker or consultant currently earns, so leaving a prestigious career for a neglected problem stops being a pure pay cut.
row is building an index of the teams doing the world's most consequential work so talent and funding know where to go.
If you want to know how the economy is doing, you look at the S&P 500. If you want to know who's playing good ball, you look at a league's standings. Restaurants have Michelin, movies have the box office.
Society's hardest problems have no such thing.
And the way most of us hear about these big problems hands us the downside with nothing to do with it. It's easy to know the climate is in trouble, hard to know the key players doing the best work to fix it. Same for AI, same for democracy. That gap is where a lot of the dread comes from, and I believe it's a fixable gap.
It shouldn't be hard to name the five best teams on AI safety. Or the grid. Or mental health. Or getting money out of politics. The information is out there, but it's scattered and quiet, making it tough for a normal person to engage with.
I think this is a huge miss. Partly because it keeps these problems and teams from being broadly legible, and partly because engaging with these organizations tends to inspire the kind of optimism and creativity we need more of.
The inaugural row99 has 99 seats across six arenas.
Each seat goes to one team fixing one of society's hardest problems. Right now that's AI, climate, democracy, culture, information, and what I'm calling "method," teams changing how we solve problems.
As the index grows, so does our picture of a field. "The people working on democracy" becomes something tangible. You can navigate it, compare teams, and argue about who should be in there. That argument is the sign it's working, btw.
A foundation and a private investment firm under one roof, backed by a membership of experts deeply fluent in societal challenges.
Right now it's just one guy's read. I research the players, look at what the work has produced, and make selections. For every seat, I do a 90-second explainer on who they are, why they're distinctive, and the outcomes they're driving.
For society to get its sh*t together on its hardest problems, we need a shared space to understand the problems and the key players. Row is building it.
Every seat on the row99 works at least one of these lines.
99 seats, filled one defense at a time. Here's the bar, so you can hold me to it.
Every seat attaches to at least one thing that has to become true. If I can't name the line an org moves, they don't get a seat — however famous they are.
A specific, dated thing they did. A mission statement is a plan; a receipt is proof. Every profile carries at least one.
If they stopped tomorrow, someone working this problem would feel it within a year. That's the difference between leading work and adjacent work.
Companies, nonprofits, funders, media — the grid holds all of them, because the problems don't care about corporate structure and the leading work is wherever it is.
Every seat comes with my reasoning, in writing, with my name on it. When I get one wrong, the correction ships with the same volume as the pick.