Mars is one of France’s most successful technology entrepreneurs. He’s launched a series of businesses, beginning with a concert promotion company in the early 1990s and proceeding through each of the major digital waves, from web design services, to online advertising, to mobile, to social media. He credits his early entrepreneurial drive in part to his parents’ divorce. Although he was always well cared for, by the time he was a teenager, he had taken it upon himself to become a safety net for his mother who raised him. “At 17, I wanted to protect my mom,” Alexandre says. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to find your mission. Sometimes the mission is hard to get or hard to define. My mission was clear…that I wanted to do whatever it takes to protect her.”

This desire to “protect mom” eventually morphed into an all-consuming mission to spread a culture of philanthropy around the world, and Mars launched Epic in 2014, modeling the nonprofit on his venture capital firm blisce/. Whereas the VC firm performs deep analysis on potential investments, which have included Pinterest, Casper, Spotify and Bird, Epic does the same, but for nonprofits of all sizes. Mars and his staff spend their days traveling around the world and visiting thousands of nonprofits annually. The Epic team then creates reports on these nonprofits based on 45 data points, eventually recommending a small handful to the likes of the Gates Foundation for investment.

Read the full article about building a global culture of philanthropy by Benjamin Reeves at Worth.