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Chief Change Officer
#369 Chris Schrader: From Rainy-Day Idea to Global Movement—The 24 Hour Race Story–Part Two
00:34:33
Chris Schrader has crossed deserts, built movements, and dropped out of Harvard—but his boldest ideas come from the mountains. In Part Two, he unpacks why real leadership means serving others, making tough calls, and trusting your inner compass—even when you’re not sure where it leads.
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- [00:13]
Vince Chen
Hi everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer, I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change. Progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Chris Schrader, founder and executive chairman of 24 Hour Race, which is a global movement against human trafficking that has raised over US$20 million in the last decade. I've known Chris for almost 10 years. Our first encounter was back in 2016 when I invited him to be a panelist at an event I hosted on education technology. Chris is sharp, well read and definitely unconventional. He took a leave of absence from Harvard, spent an extended period of time away and eventually finished his studies in neuroscience while also building and growing tech businesses around the world. Along the way he founded a charity based on his love for expeditions. And it's safe to say he sees life and business leadership as a journey too. We have talked for about an hour split into two parts. In the last episode, part one, we touched upon the genesis and evolution of 24 Hour Race. What started as a casual suggestion on a rainy day turned into a life changing journey for teenager. The walk across England raised five figure in US dollars and sparked an eight figure US dollar global movement. At the end. Today's episode, Part two will focus on Chris approach to leadership and team building. Drawing parallels between leading an expedition and managing a business team. Here we'll highlight how lessons learned from life or death situations in the wilderness translate into effective leadership strategies in the corporate world. Chris also offers his genuine advice for young ambitious talents on balancing life goals, family expectations and career direction. Let's get started as you walk us through this journey from the humble beginnings all the way to raising US$20 million over the years. It almost sounds like magic, but I know it's not magic. There must have been plenty of challenges along the way. Not just in the beginning when teachers were dismissive of your idea, but throughout the whole process. Could you tell us more about some of the difficulties or obstacles that you and your team faced and how did you eventually figure things out? Maybe you can share some specific examples.
- [04:51]
Chris Schrader
Yeah, that's a great question. Look, we've honestly had hundreds of thousands of challenges and they can really span from existential through to incidental. So existential, for example, was just identifying our purpose. What are we? We're not quite a grassroots organization. We put these races together, we raised quite a bit of money. Do are we in a grassroots ngo? Are we an events provider? Are we an anti slavery charity? And just figuring that out in the early days was really tough. We've had other stuff since. For example, we had one event that was literally received a threat from ISIS at the peak of the ISIS terror wave in the 2000 teens. And we had to make a spot decision whether to cancel our event or to continue it. So you have these sort of momentary hurdles and you have the existential ones. The way I always think about it is like climbing a mountain. When you climb a mountain, and let's say it's a totally novel new mountain that hasn't really been climbed before, you identify an approach from where the perspective that you have, you'll of course miss things. And then you attempt to summit or wherever you attempt an approach. And often there are obstacles and maybe you get about halfway and then there's an ice field and it's insurpassable. And so you turn around and you reevaluate your approach. But fundamentally the goal is the same, which is to summit that mountain. And sometimes you get really close and you're so close that it's very chanting to carry on. But again, there's some kind of threat, a big crevasse or whatever, that just isn't worth the risk. And of course, if you're very lucky and if you're very good at what you do, summit the mountain. But as any mountaineer will tell you, when you get to the top of a peak, what's the first thing you see? Another peak that you want to climb? There's this sort of aspect to a charity where I would describe, for example, an ISIS threat to a group of students in a particular city trying to fight slavery as a similar situation to a crevasse on that mountain. Analogy versus what is the actual mountain we're climbing is more existential and more akin to what is a 24 hour race. What's its role in the world, if that makes sense.
- [07:14]
Vince Chen
I really like the analogy used, is actually quite philosophical. It reminds me of a Chinese saying which is, however high the mountain is, there's always another one higher. That idea of always seeing a higher peak resonates with what you are saying. This philosophy seems not apply only to how you build this charity, but also to your approach in many of the business ventures you've been involved in.
- [07:59]
Chris Schrader
Yeah, let me expand a little bit on that analogy by going into the realm of the absurd. So in 2011, I took a gap year after graduating high school, and while all my friends were heading on trips to Phuket and various destinations in Asia, I got on a train and then a plane and arrived in the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaata, where I met a team of 14 in total, seasoned explorers. And then we went all the way out to the west of Mongolia and we began to attempt to walk across the Gobi Desert. And I was young, I think I just hadn't turned 18 yet. I was 17. And as we began this journey, the Gobi Desert itself, sometimes for whatever reason back then, the GPS signal wouldn't work. Now, navigation was a little bit more simple in the early days because you basically had a series of mountains to your north and you had a series of mountains to your south. The sun rose and you just followed the sun and you kept the mountains between. You'd more or less be on track. But as that mountain range, the Altai Mountains, subsided into the flatness of the Gobi, you know, we struggle with navigation to the point where we'd have to double check where we thought we were with stars. And what I think is interesting about stellar navigation, this millennia long way of getting around the world is you follow stars, but you never really expect to set foot on them. So you can follow the North Staris, which is the one everyone talks about, or you can navigate by it and they can guide you to incredible destinations. It can get you to exactly where you want to be at various points of your journey. But by following this thing, you're not going to ever reach it. And I think in some way good goals are like that. Good goals guide your day to day decision making, whether they're immediate, random threats to whatever it is you're building or doing in your personal life or in your business life, or totally big decisions to make. You can always refer to your so called North Star or whatever star it is that you navigate by. I think about that analogy a lot. What's a goal worth pursuing? Were you to spend your whole life pursuing it and you were to never reach it, and you're in your old frail years, you could still say to yourself, that was a hell of a shot and it was totally worth it. You know, what are goals that are so important that failure is expected and not a disappointment because. Because the goal itself is just too important for that. And that was a thought process I had back on the Gobi expedition some time ago.
- [10:51]
Vince Chen
So far our discussion has been focused a lot on your charity work, but I also know you've been involved in a wide range of businesses over the years. Rather than focusing on one industry or one firm, let's talk more broadly about your business endeavors you've had your hands in. So Many different ventures across different cultures. Tell us a bit about your overall approach. You've shared your philosophy earlier, but how have you integrated that into the for profit business world? How do you use it to drive business growth, build strong teams and achieve financial goals for the businesses you've been part of?
- [11:52]
Chris Schrader
Okay, so in short, I worked, I studied at, at Harvard from having graduated in Hong Kong, took a gap year in that gap year, applied to uni, ended up going to Harvard, and a year and a half into that degree, I dropped out. I did what's called an indefinite leave of absence. So you don't lose your seat at the university, but you're basically allowed to take as much time as you want at the university. And in that time I transitioned from being a charity founder to a software founder. And I have a lot of thoughts about the evolution of software since I started working in the industry in 2014 till today, as a matter of fact. My background, I started at Harvard studying a very generically named field, East Asian Studies, mainly focused on China and in particular Ming Dynasty Chinese history onwards. And I transitioned to the field of computational neuroscience, which is eventually where I got my degree. So I was always attracted to the field of technology and anyone who was alive in 2013 or 2014 could see it was really early days for adopting and deploying technology into various industries. So I made that transition. That being said, everything, every success I've had, and for that matter, every failure I've had while working in the for profit technology and software sector, I can basically trace to an analogy from an expedition that I've partaken on. So talking about, for example, team building, there's an expression that I first heard when I was rowing in high school, at boarding school, which was the. The first boat is only as fast as the second boat. And I think what was meant, I was on the second boat, by the way. I wasn't, I wasn't on the 1st. I think what was meant by this is that you're defined, your performance is not defined by your best players, it's defined by your weakest players. And in business this can be a little bit of a trope because our attitude often in the business world is to give people chance, chances and to make sure they perform. But the expedition world, there are no such, there's no such forgiveness. So I can think of one expedition that I was on, for example, where the expedition leader who wasn't me, was himself an accomplished explorer, but was not very good at understanding that distinction between your top players and your. I wouldn't say bottom players, but your weaker links. As an expedition leader, you need to make sure that your top players are humbled and understand that they're only as strongest as their weakest player. And so as an expedition leader, you have really two choices. You can either get rid of your weakest link or you can reign in your top performers. That's really what happens. And by the way, to be quite honest, by the time that an expedition actually takes place, it's really too late to be making these decisions. They should be made well before you do. The expedition itself and this particular person didn't really understand this concept very well. And the result was that small discrepancies in the abilities between team members when not managed properly led to huge discrepancies in morale and expedition success. And on this particular expedition, I think over 70% of the participants ended dropping up and they dropped out for health reasons. There were some very close calls. And when I say close call, I mean near death. Okay, this doesn't happen in the business world, but in the expedition world it definitely does. And just due to low morale, we lost some really great team players. So there's a sort of like motto in the startup world. Fire fast, higher slow kind of thing. With expeditions, it's very much like this. If there's an issue, you almost immediately have to try and address it, but you have to address it in a way where you're not just benchmarking everyone against your most capable person. And moreover, what I'll add is I've been on plenty of expeditions where you have to be extremely wary of the type of person who is extremely physically confident, mentally confident. Often these people end up being quite weak on in the expedition environments where you operate absolutely. As a team. So I guess what I'm saying is that a business is a watered down, in my opinion, a watered down version of an expedition. An expedition is a hyperbolic version of a business. And you, especially when it comes to thinking about team dynamics, who's your weakest, who's your strongest, how do you get those two? How do you bridge that gap between the two? And because I experienced a few failures in expeditions very early in my life, I think I was able to see the crisis of building a team and how that can win or lose a goal in a sort of high stakes boiler environment and translate that to work, I think more recently. Yeah. So in summary, when I think about the successes I've had or failures in the world of software, it basically comes down to the team and the realization that yes, I'm supposed to be really good at what I do, whatever it is that I do in that particular company. But I'm never supposed to be better than any individual who works with me. And as an expedition leader or as a business leader, I'm effectively the secretary for the team. My job is to check in on everyone, make sure that they're aligned and get rid of any obstacles in their way so that they can do the best jobs possible. Which I think is a very different attitude to a sort of gung ho lead from the front attitude. Don't get me wrong, I think that's important. I think leaders demonstrating their commitment to a particular cause, to a business venture, to an expedition, whatever it is, through self sacrifice, that's key there. It's not necessarily competitive though. I think competition has a lot of good, a lot of benefits for both business expeditions, at least in the lead up to them. It's about being a servant for a team that where each team member in their respective domains is a much better performer than you are and enabling them by guiding the direction of the whole.
- [18:40]
Liz Chen
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- [19:06]
Chris Schrader
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- [19:08]
Liz Chen
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- [19:10]
Vince Chen
You are a servant leader. You are the type who wants to make others shine. If you can help your team members grow to become better people, better leaders, better managers, then you are the silent force behind the success.
- [19:35]
Chris Schrader
Look, I have ego and I failed more than I've succeeded. So I think it's a goal. I don't know if I'm a good leader, but I'm trying to be and introspective about it. I don't think the factor of being a leader is being a servant. There are many cases where you as a leader have to build a kind of myth around yourself. You have to be something that people aspire to be toward or to be like. You have to demonstrate qualities, the best qualities that maybe they see in themselves. You have to exemplify that. But those qualities don't necessarily mean obviously beating everyone else at their own gain. Those qualities could be patience, wisdom, experience, humility, strength, ruthlessness. This is an underrated one. I think every one of your team members trusts you not to make the best decisions for each of them individually, but to make the best decision for the expedition as a whole. Right? This is a typical lesson you learn as an expedition leader. You're not there to make everybody individually happy. You're not an adventure tour guide, let alone just a regular tour guide. You're there to achieve a particular goal. That's what expeditions. That's what sets expeditions apart from tourist holidays, right? They have specific goals, typically scientific goals or attainment goals. You try to do something for the first time, and everybody should walk into this experience understanding that they're walking into the unknown and that ultimately they're going to have to trust one person who will make decisions, perhaps against your own interests, maybe with you, but incidentally, but overall contributing to the final goal. And I think this analogy is particularly important when it comes to low performers. And in the business world, by the way, which is that too often I've seen great leaders in every other sense who go, this particular person's maybe dragging their feet a bit or is lagging a bit. But you know what? The team performance overall is so strong that we can just basically mask that. And I can avoid an awkward conversation. The expedition world has taught me that you nip that in the bud as soon as you sense that. Right. Whether it's with a particular plan or just understanding what's going on, you need to address that almost immediately. Too many times in life I've made so many mistakes, but too many times in life I have a gut sense, like a gut inclination towards a particular direction, and it becomes vindicated months or even years later, even though I knew what I needed to do a year ago or months ago. Now, in an expedition scenario, that's life or death, right? So you don't. The pressure to make that type of decision is much more to a business decision where someone loses their livelihood or their income, which is still a big deal, but obviously not as big a deal as on expedition. And I've seen a lot of leaders who just fail to understand that. And so they let low performers continue working in their organizations. But guess what? The people you work with, if you've done a semi decent job, are not stupid. They can see that this person has slack and is being let off. And it really affects the morale in particular of your top performers. Say, what's the point? What's the point of me pushing towards this big vision that I've been sold on that I want to work towards? If I don't have to put in the same effort and still be around. And it's the same thing on an expedition. The last thing you really want on an expedition is someone who requires a lot of energy and a lot of support, but contributes very little. You have to be agnostic to the reasons for this. Right? You can be very sympathetic with someone on an expedition who's having a really difficult time. And at least on the expeditions I've organized with people that I haven't done expeditions with, they're always in generally well supported areas. So if I need to evacuate someone, get them out, I don't need to be an ass about it. And if I'm allowed to say that, yeah, I can basically be sympathetic to them and help them get out the expedition without it affecting them or the team. It's the same for a business. In fact, in many ways, a business is an expedition on easy mode. If you need to let someone go tomorrow and you need to do and you do it in a responsible way that gives them the support they deserve and need, you can make that decision without worrying about whether they'll find work again or whatever. You cannot do that in an expedition environment.
- [24:09]
Vince Chen
This is the last question of the day. It has two parts. I see you as a purposeful leader, a world explorer, skilled in technology, but always human centered. Yet in a place like Hong Kong, where both of us are from, there's often a set path. Study finance, engineering, medicine, become a doctor, lawyer or banker, for example. You chose a different path. You didn't follow the typical expectations. Yet you grew up in an environment where those expectations are strong. So the first part of my question is about the people around you, such as your parents, family members and friends. How did they influence and support you in becoming who you are today? The second part is about leading a purposeful life. In career, we are all in some kind of pursuit of success and fulfillment. But there's always a lot of noise, external pressures, expectations, people telling you what, what you should and shouldn't do. How do you balance all of that while staying true to your own purpose and building a life that feels fulfilling to you? Is a big question, but I love to hear your thoughts on it.
- [26:06]
Chris Schrader
Yeah, okay. With regards to the first part of the question, I think I got very lucky. Anyone who's had any reasonable success in their life and relies on their own sheer will to explain that success, I think there's something they're not telling you. Although I greatly and deeply admire those types of people, that type of confusion per se. I think it's actually quite cool. That being said, for me, it first started at home, in particular with my parents. My mother and father, they had, going back to my analogy of mountains, they had particular goals and peaks that they wished I would summit. But those peaks were actually, they weren't even peak, they were more like those north stars. They were values. So my parents didn't tell me that they wanted me to have a particular career, were to earn a certain amount of money or to go to a particular university. In fact, I can even remember that when I did very well in my application, I got into almost every university that I applied to. And I remember telling my mom and dad about this. I remember calling them and I remember that my father, when he heard about for example Harvard, which for your average Hong Kong is like a big deal, right? You ain't going to Harvard. He was, he thought I was going to be studying in New York. They just had no idea about where these universities were and in fact had very little input in me applying to the US at all. I had a university spot before I applied to the U.S. in the Netherlands, which I was happy with and they were happy with too. But more, more importantly for my parents were values in particular. Start something, finish something that you start was a big one, do the right thing. Ethically, that was a big one for my father who was my first board member at the 24 hour race and was always, always the guiding pillar in terms of its moral and ethical framework, which as a young man in my late teens and early twenties I could often forget about. What, what are we doing here and are we doing it for the right reasons? So I had a really good network even I, I remember one of my first non familial mentors was a man called Paul Salnico who started a very successful business here in Asia called the Executive Center. It's very high end service to office arrangement. And I remember talking to him about our goal, our mission, our vision of the 24 hour race, which he was an early board member of, was to be the end of slavery. And he said, Chris, if you think that you can set this kind of mission, you don't understand human nature. Humans are always going to be exploiting each other to some degree and you need to be thoughtful and mindful of this as you pursue your journey. I remember that hit me like a ton of bricks right at the age of 18 or 19. But he was absolutely right. I can't change human nature and there's always going to be people willing to exploit other people. For a dollar. So at best I can mitigate it. And I think that's a nice segue into meaning and purpose in life. I go back to that analogy I said earlier. Could you spend your whole life fighting for something that you will dedicate every minute you have to and still fail? And can you still have a smile on your face at that passing moment? I don't think that's a really easy question to answer. It really isn't. But judging your own life success based on comparisons, which are really easy to make in the digital age because 100 years ago you compared yourself to 50 neighbors. Today you compare yourself to anyone who's online. And I think that creates a lot of anxiety, by the way, for young people. Look, you as an individual will always have to tread a balance between what you want to be and what you need to be. Yeah, I want to be an astronaut. No, no joke. For a long time, my life goal, my ultimate expedition, was to become the first man to circumnavigate the moon. It still is, by the way. I don't know how likely it is, but it still is. It's still a big goal in life. But what I need to be is a really good son to my parents. And what I need to be is a really good partner to girlfriend. And what I need to be is an excellent chairman for the 24 hours. What I need to do is pay my electricity and gas bill, which will be really high because I've got into the sous vide cuisine recently. So I need to find constantly a balance between these two things. And I explored, as any person does, regardless of their age, I explored lots of different philosophies that I thought may provide the answers with this tension. What I want to be, what I need to be, and ultimately what's given me the most fulfillment has been a sort of vitalist, Nietzschean sort of approach. Nietzsche, in my opinion, is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. And I wouldn't be surprised if he accrues almost religious like deference in the next century or two. And one of Nietzsche's most important tenets is to live life with vitality, which means, contrary to a lot of different religions, to live it with energy in the moment, to think about what gives you pleasure and what gives you joy in the present right now, and to use the past and the future only as guiding posts, but mainly to think of what maximizes your human experience today. And this is a philosophy, I think, in today's world, which is so full of challenges, I can't Even begin to talk about them. A very helpful philosophy. So I think aspire toward values that are important, but accept that you're not perfect and you'll never be able to embody those values. Just aspire towards them and try and do things that will make you happy even if you fail at them. And I want to end with one analogy which I think summarizes this philosophy in some way. You know, when I was really young, at the start of the 24 hour race, the types of people I looked up to were like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, people who had transcended the value, the hierarchy of impact to the point where everybody knew who they were and everybody had experienced some benefit from these people. And I thought, okay, if there's a hierarchy of giving back, it starts with family and friends, it elevates to a community, and then finally it's maybe something global. I think today I realize I had it the wrong way around. You know, the easiest thing, even though it's not easy at all and people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have. My utmost respect is to create this kind of incredible but kind of minute change to people's lives versus the hardest thing is to look at the people around you today, your family, your friends, and to help those in meaningful ways, like beyond just a phone call, which I think is important, don't get me wrong, it's actually invest in them and invest in their future. And I can think of people who said small things or did small or big things for me that will be forever more important in my life than any Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These are just people I met and encountered briefly or have known for a long time who made huge and lasting impacts. And all of us have that opportunity today. All of us have that opportunity today to look at the people that we know and make a difference in their lives in a positive way. And I think that's the paragon of the human experience. The paragon is being someone who's not always a nice guy. Right. Sometimes it involves giving tough love, but who can provide that value, provide that feedback to the people closest to you. And I think you can live a very satisfied life just by doing that.
- [34:33]
Vince Chen
Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show. Leave us Top rated reviews. Check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm Liz Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.
- [35:03]
Liz Chen
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