AI-generated wealth could unlock tens of billions in new annual philanthropic spending over the next decade. So why does Jed Emerson think the real question isn't how fast that money moves, but what it's actually for?

Jed Emerson is one of the longest-standing voices in impact investing and the originator of the "blended value" framework — but he didn't come up through a trading desk or a venture fund. He started in social work, ran the Larkin Street Youth Center in San Francisco, and helped launch REDF (now Redefine Alliance) with KKR co-founder George Roberts, making it one of the first venture philanthropy funds in the country.

Rodney and Lucas sat down with Jed for a wide-ranging conversation on where the field got stuck, and what decades of this work have actually taught him.

We talked about:

• Why "doing good vs. doing well" is a false choice, and what it costs the field to keep asking it
• Why Jed stopped starting with structure — grant, debt, equity, hybrid — and started with purpose instead
• Microfinance as a case study in how philanthropic capital gets mispriced as "risky" until it isn't
• Whether a new wave of AI-driven philanthropic wealth will reproduce old patterns of concentrated ownership, or actually build shared agency
• Jed's shift from "being the rock to being the river," and what that means for a field addicted to its own frameworks

GLOSSARY:

Blended Value
Technical: The idea that all capital and all enterprises generate a mix of economic, social, and environmental value simultaneously — value isn't separable into a "financial" bucket and an "impact" bucket.

In practice: Jed's framework rejects the premise that you have to choose between a grant and an investment, or between mission and return. Every dollar deployed is already doing all three kinds of value-creation at once, whether or not anyone is tracking it.

Why it matters: Once you accept blended value, the question stops being "is this concessionary or market-rate?" and becomes "what value are we actually trying to create, and for whom?" That reframing is what lets the right tool — grant, equity, guarantee, hybrid — follow the purpose instead of the other way around.

Absorptive Capacity
Technical: The ability of a field, sector, or set of institutions to effectively deploy a given amount of capital — measured in things like grantmaking staff, due diligence capability, and institutional infrastructure.

In practice: If AI wealth adds tens of billions in new annual philanthropic spending, someone has to actually move that money well: more grants, more allocators, more operating talent, more institutions capable of doing it with speed and discipline.

Why it matters: Jed pushes back on treating this purely as a technical staffing problem. Capacity is also a power problem — plenty of organizations already have the ambition and trust built up in their communities, but lack flexible, patient capital. Asking "do we have enough capacity" without asking "whose capacity are we willing to see" risks building new infrastructure around the same old gatekeepers.