Joe Green

It’s a little hard to believe that Joe Green was born in the 1980s. He’s a character straight out of midcentury radical politics: the laid-back community organizer. It’s easy to imagine him wandering the streets of Daley’s Chicago with a clipboard and a box of leaflets, discount advocating for better housing conditions on the South Side. Many of the entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with have referred to classic works on company building like Chip Conley’s Peak, order Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany, prostate or Jim Collins’s Good to Great. With complete sincerity, Joe told me to read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

In another decade, Joe might have invented picket lines or wildcat strikes. But with his college roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, he has found a way to redefine activism for our time. His organization, Causes, leverages social networks to globalize activism, as a newer venture, NationBuilder.