The Business of Changing Lives

So you've helped build the backbone of the internet, created millions of dollars in shareholder value, not to mention the architecture of mass global connection. What do you do next? If you're Allan Weis, the answer is that you dedicate yourself to using technology to advance education and unleash the creativity of the next generation of young people. This is the story Weis tells in his new book The Business of Changing Lives.

Allan was the founder of Advanced Network & Services. Launched in the early 1990s, ANS was one of the organizations most responsible for forming the partnerships between corporations, government and nonprofits to take the internet from a defense communication network to general, commercial access. Over the course of the next few years, ANS built out thousands of connections to millions of users. Eventually, they sold their commercial assets to America Online and reinvested their work in education.

From the very beginning, Weis was thinking about how to make sure the internet was a tool that could benefit people from all walks of life. ANS was set up as a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit. When they sold their commercial assets to AOL, they were able to keep working on the mission behind the money.

In fact, one of the things that's most interesting about ANS' approach to "charity" has been their desire to use as much of their capital for the here and now as possible. As Weis put it in a conversation a couple weeks ago, "[they] were here, [they] had energy now, so let's do it." By the end of 2010, they will have given away over $128 million of their resources.

The projects that they have participated in have not been the normal "find a project, donate some money" fair. One of their initiatives, ThinkQuest, is an "educational Olympics" for the web that has put thousands of educational resources for students online, and helped young people from 100 countries access the educational power of the net. It eventually donated ThinkQuest to the Oracle Foundation, where it continues to thrive.

I think that more than any one part of the story, the message that will be most compelling for social entrepreneurs in this story is the quite different way in which Weis and his partners have pursued their version of philanthropy. It's more engaged, harnesses their living energy and smarts, and is designed not to create nonprofit foundations that persist for perpetuity, but instead, to do their best to solve problems today. I definitely recommend checking out the book, which you can find from our friends at Better World Books here.