Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four topical stories focused on healthspan, systems change and AI for impact. Enjoy!
1. Rockefeller and Open AI a $50m call for city innovation
Nearly half of humanity lives in cities, yet high costs and data worries hold city halls back from AI. The Rockefeller Foundation and OpenAI Foundation have launched a $50m open call, offering grants of $500k to $2m to nonprofits that work with city governments on health, jobs, climate resilience and civic engagement, aiming to reach 100m residents.
Applications close on November 29th. The pitch rests on early pilots: Cali forecasts dengue three weeks ahead, Rio warns residents of floods by WhatsApp, Cape Town talks to residents in their own languages. Grantees don’t have to use OpenAI’s models, a nice touch.
The So What: Philanthropy is paying for the part cities can’t, the first expensive, risky deployment, so the proof exists before the procurement does.
2. Abolish all the business schools?
This one got shared quite a few times within my peer groups. I was one of the few who tended to agree with the author, at least in terms of needing a root-and-branch transformation of the current economic orthodoxy, of which the MBA is the enduring delivery vehicle.
Academics rarely campaign for their own redundancy, so it’s intriguing by that standard alone. Christopher Marquis of Cambridge Judge Business School (a fellow Jesuan in fact), who has spent more than 20 years teaching MBAs at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, argues the institution cannot be saved by a bolted-on ethics module or a sustainability centre.
His charge sheet: intellectual monocultures, tidy case studies for messy problems, and a conveyor belt to the big consultancies and banks. Critics point out that his own school’s 2024-25 cohort sent 55% into industry, with only 23% to finance and 19% to consulting. Marquis concedes the abolition headline was an editor’s choice; his real ask is reinvention, from curriculum to faculty incentives.
The So What: Longer careers and messier problems demand leaders trained in systems thinking, not spreadsheets.
3. Turning CO2 into stone - 50,000 tonnes a year
The advance market commitment is growing up. Frontier, the carbon-removal buyers’ club backed by Stripe, Google and Shopify, has signed its first deal for in-situ mineralisation: US$11.7m to carbon removal company 44.01 for 20,932 tonnes of CO2, delivered between 2028 and 2031. The process dissolves CO2 captured from biogas in water and injects it into peridotite, where the gas turns to stone within one to three years. The prize is geography: operational sites store under 50,000 tonnes a year this way, but the rock formations it targets could hold 5 billion tonnes or more annually, by a Rocky Mountain Institute estimate. Frontier’s collective commitment is now US$1.8 billion after Anthropic joined over the summer, and this is only its second offtake this year.
The So What: The buyers’ club is becoming the market-maker for technologies with no natural customer.
4. Retiring boomers are selling America’s small businesses to private equity
America’s baby boomers are heading for the exit, and private equity is holding the door.
More than half of America’s small businesses have owners over 55, together generating some $6.5 trillion in annual revenue, and many of those owners have no succession plan. This is a massive opportunity emerging in plain sight, and the buyout firms have noticed: they completed more than 1,500 acquisitions under $25m in 2024, up over 40% on a decade earlier.
Alpine Investors, an $18.5bn firm, launched Apex Service Partners in 2019 and now owns around 75 local HVAC, plumbing and electrical brands across 46 states. The silver tsunami is less a transfer of wealth between generations than a transfer of Main Street to Wall Street.
And for the next twist in the tale, follow what Long Lake is doing - building an AI layer to transform traditional businesses into AI-forward operating companies.
The So What: Longevity’s least-discussed asset class is the ageing owner’s business, and buyout firms got there first.
That’s all for now — happy, safe weekend, everyone.
Stephen