"These social problems are massive in scale, Our (non-profit) organisations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the non-profit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the non-profit sector in five different areas."

"The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue. So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general. But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question. So non-profits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavours, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue; if you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow; and if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems."

"The fourth area (of discrimination) is time. So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patience. They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line, of building market dominance. But if a non-profit organisation ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion."

"Well, you put those five things (five areas of discrimination) together - you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector; you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers; you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes; you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector; and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place - and you've just put the non-profit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every level. If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of non-profits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144. In the same time, the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136. So we're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale, and our organisations can't generate any scale. All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King."

"This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we're missing the most important piece of information, which is: What is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it's tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer?"

"So the next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams. How they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is. Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved?"