Nancy Lublin

This entrepreneur raised $140M for a suicide prevention startup that somehow had no doctors, no offices, and no calls.

At 23, Nancy Lublin took a $5,000 inheritance and launched Dress for Success out of a church basement in Harlem.

Her idea was simple: suit up low-income women for job interviews.

Today, the org operates in nearly 150 cities across 20+ countries and has helped millions of women enter the workforce.

Then, in 2003, Lublin took over DoSomething, an imploding nonprofit with $250K in debt, no office, and one employee.

She turned it around, moved it online, and turned it into one of the world’s largest platforms for youth-led social change, with over 6 million members.

Under her leadership, it launched SMS campaigns, celebrity-backed award shows, and viral actions that reached tens of millions.

In 2013, after a disturbing text from a se*ual abuse survivor hit DoSomething’s SMS system, Lublin spun out her third venture: Crisis Text Line.

Free, anonymous, 24/7 mental health support via text.

No talking. No judgment. Just help.

She announced it at TED.

Raised $140M.

Trained over 30,000 volunteer crisis counselors.

Processed 150M+ messages.

And used AI to triage cases by urgency, so texters in acute crisis got help first.

No call centers. No therapists on staff.

Just a gig-style volunteer model with trained civilians operating remotely and anonymized data made public for policymakers and researchers to learn from.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

In 2020, Lublin was ousted after a virtual walkout by Crisis Text Line staffers citing allegations of racism, abuse, and toxic leadership.

Internal emails, tweets, and testimonies painted a picture of founder syndrome run unchecked.

The same boldness that made her a trailblazer had, to many, become the problem.

So she left the org.

But in 2022, she launched Primiga, a seed-stage investment firm funding hope-forward startups.

That same year, her for-profit AI spinout Loris AI (originally launched as a tool to teach empathy to customer service reps) was acquired by ContentSquare.

One of the rare examples of a nonprofit tech spinout to raise venture capital and exit.

Say what you want about Nancy Lublin.

She’s controversial. She’s complicated.

But she’s also one of the most prolific nonprofit builders of the 21st century.