Noah McMahon has spent his life preparing for exactly what he is doing now: bringing people together to make the world a better place.

His greatest asset is his global network of friends. He makes few distinctions between friends and business colleagues, since the people worth working with are the ones you ultimately call friends. Building those connections on trust and shared values is his life’s work.

That network was built in person. Based in Nashville with a lifetime of roots in California, Noah is on the road constantly and has traveled to more than 80 countries across all seven continents.

He started out networking White House style. More than 30 years ago, while attending Chapman University, Noah worked on a project with former President Richard Nixon, which led to a job at the Nixon Presidential Library. As a teenager he had dreamed of meeting a President of the United States. He ended up working with six. Playing an integral role in President Nixon’s memorial service in April 1994, Noah personally briefed Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, and their first ladies.

Those experiences sent him out on his own. Noah launched his first company and traveled the world as a secret shopper, learning what turns great organizations into legendary ones. He went on to build businesses in real estate, startups and investing. Those ventures are the source of his financial independence, and what allows him to now advise families and foundations.

He was there at the genesis of the X Prize and launched the Zero Gravity Corporation, giving Stephen Hawking a taste of weightlessness while earning billions of media impressions and a monumental NASA contract. Noah also helped build Athletes First, now the nation’s largest NFL agency, where he was present at the founding and created its philanthropy arm.

At the Walt Disney Company, he managed the company’s celebrity relationships, helped open multiple theme parks and produced record-breaking events, bringing Bob Hope, more than 40 astronauts, sports superstars and the pardoned White House Thanksgiving turkey to Disney’s parks. He has since paired the Dalai Lama, Tony Hawk, Sammy Hagar, Magic Johnson and Lady Gaga with organizations such as Goodwill, Easter Seals and the Starkey Hearing Foundation.

After two decades of helping charities raise hundreds of millions of dollars, build their boards and produce thousands of high-profile events, he changed his business model to serve major donors directly.

Today Noah is the founder and CEO of Anonymous Philanthropy, where a team of nearly 50 experts, advisors and implementers provides strategic advice and introductions to philanthropists, families and foundations representing billions of dollars in philanthropic assets. The firm sits on the same side of the table as the families it serves.

Those families do not simply write checks. Anonymous has built dozens of initiatives alongside them, work that saves children’s lives, moves thousands into skilled careers and protects wildlife and habitat around the world.

He is also giving the company away. Anonymous Philanthropy is converting to a perpetual purpose trust, a structure in which a company is owned by its purpose rather than by people. It can never be sold or acquired. The transition begins in 2027, and once it is complete, 100 percent of the company’s profits will go to charitable causes, in perpetuity. Built to outlive its founder and designed to outgive everyone, Anonymous will have only one shareholder: philanthropy itself.

Outside the firm, Noah is a partner in four restaurants in Los Angeles and Nashville carrying Michelin stars and James Beard recognition, and in The Setting Wines, which has earned multiple 100-point scores and sold a single bottle for $1 million at a charity auction. He has cooked at the Beard House in New York and serves as United States Ambassador to the Club des Chefs des Chefs, the private society of chefs to presidents, kings and heads of state.

His collection of works by Arturo Pacheco Altamirano is the largest in the world, and he is working with Chilean museums to restore the master to his rightful place in that country’s history.

Winspire, another of his ventures, has provided bucket-list experiences to more than 30,000 charities. Closer to home, Noah owns a Tennessee farm that hosts musicians, where a number one record was written, and holds stakes in lodging properties in Napa, Oregon and Fiji and in two Montana institutions: a ranch that hosts disabled veterans and teaches them to fly fish, and the world-famous Wise River Club.

Noah married Debbie, a former pediatric nurse, in 2000. Their daughter Sydney is now a nurse, and their daughter Shawna attends the University of Alabama. He dislikes the spotlight and prefers to remain ...anonymous!