The Guru of Google

"It's a matter of human will," he says. "And that's where my optimism comes from, because I've seen awful things that were solved by the projection of a positive, and I would say loving, human will."

But mankind's loving human will was not immediately apparent among the sharks at the Fortune round table. This was all business. Not long after the discussion began, the assembled CEOs and VCs soon found themselves talking about what would happen to social-networking sites like Facebook if there were a widespread work stoppage due to, say, a natural disaster. Would people go to the sites to make connections, even if they weren't at work? Or would online revenues tank?

After a few minutes of debate, the moderator turned to Brilliant and asked if he had any thoughts.

"This is stupid," Brilliant said bluntly. "If you want to talk about a disaster of that magnitude, then we should be talking about the disaster itself, not about what it might do to our ad revenues." Then he ran through some issues the CEOs might consider: the impact of climate change on poor people, dwindling water supplies in the developing world, the rising risk of pandemic.

"There's a lot of smart people in this room," Brilliant said, trying but failing to avoid a scolding tone. "We need to think about more than just our own industry."

Eyes dropped. The room quieted. This was not a crowd accustomed to being poked as narrow-minded and greedy. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, later called it "heart-stopping." Says another participant, "This was a very high-powered group, and Larry whacked us for being selfish and small-minded. He was right, of course. I don't know anyone else in the Valley who could pull that off — or would have the guts to try."

Ever since a young Steve Jobs called the personal computer "a bicycle for our minds," Silicon Valley has promised to change the world. And by and large, it has. You can download music at Starbucks now. You can trade stocks on your BlackBerry. You can edit Wikipedia from virtually anywhere on the planet. But it is clear now that the problems we face as a civilization — global warming, resource depletion, war, famine, poverty — will not be solved by Mac OS X version 10.9. Changing the world, it turns out, isn't quite enough. The real question is, can Silicon Valley-style capitalism save the world?

Google is founded on the belief that it can: The company's unofficial motto is "Don't be evil." But a more accurate mantra might be "Fuck with the system." And there is no system more ready for fucking with than the sleepy old world of philanthropy. "When they speak frankly, most people who work in philanthropy today will admit that the system isn't working very well," says Google co-founder Sergey Brin. As William Easterly points out in The White Man's Burden, a scathing indictment of the World Bank and other institutional do-gooders, the West has spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades — yet still can't deliver twelve-cent medicines to prevent children from dying of malaria. "The big problem with foreign aid," Easterly concludes, "is that the people paying the bills are rich people who have very little knowledge of poor people."

There's nothing geeks like more than a big problem to solve, and in recent years, a new generation of so-called "philanthropreneurs" has emerged. Their goal: Apply the lessons of Silicon Valley-style capitalism to intractable social and environmental problems. From Bill Gates to Richard Branson, these new do-gooders are spending tens of billions to transform the developing world. "Sustainability, innovation and scale are specialties of the private sector," says Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, whose philanthropy encourages entrepreneurialism in the world's poorest nations. "They are critical to addressing the challenges we face today."