← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
You're listening to the Impact Theory podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers. Join host Tom Bilyeu, serial entrepreneur and co founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success. Welcome to Impact Theory.
- [01:24]
Leila Janah
Hey everybody.
- [01:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome to Impact Theory. You are here my friends, because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless. But you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it. So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a Harvard educated social entrepreneur who is up ending the traditional economic aid model by creating best in class companies that help people pull themselves out of poverty. She's been so successful at that she was named one of Conde Nast's daring 25 and Elle's 2016 Top Women in Tech. Since founding her first company, Samasource in 2008, she has employed nearly 10,000 people and helped nearly 35,000 people permanently move above the poverty line. The raw effectiveness of her business model is proving that creating opportunities is far more sustainable and empowering than offering people handouts. She can name some of the world's biggest companies as her customers, including Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Ebay and countless others. And her amazing mission and incredible success have seen her profiled everywhere from the New York Times and Wired Magazine to Forbes and Inc. Her company, Somasaurus, was named as one of Fast Company's most innovative companies in 2016. And all of this from a woman who initially lacked the capital to even start a company and had to Pay her way through college by cleaning toilets, serving cocktails, and tutoring wealthy students. But she refused to give in, pitched her dream to anyone who would listen, entered business plan contests, DM'd anyone she thought was like minded, and the world is now literally a better place for it, as she ultimately scraped enough together to make her dream a reality. Now, nearly 10 years in, she has faced and overcome every obstacle imaginable to see her social impact company turn into a profitable company and become truly self sustaining. So please help me in welcoming the founder and CEO of samasource and Luxmi, the Chanel of social impact and the first impact beauty brand to be sold at Sephora, the author of Give Reversing Poverty One Job at a time. Laila. Janna, welcome.
- [03:41]
Leila Janah
Thank you, Ellie.
- [03:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Thank you for being here.
- [03:43]
Leila Janah
It's awesome to be a guest on this show. Thank you so much for having me today.
- [03:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, man, Absolutely. My pleasure, man. Going into your world, you're really a vanguard for something really new that's happening in entrepreneurship, which I've felt like I've been sort of that transitional generation where I wasn't as clicked into things as you were. Right from the jump, I went through the chasing money phase and all of that to find how sort of desperate and horrific that ended up being emotionally before I found something that was more about what's the ultimate impact. But walk us through. So I know that things didn't start out necessarily easy for you. Walk us through the dark times that you had in your 20s and how you ended up creating a social movement that's also financially powerful.
- [04:30]
Leila Janah
Sure. Well, my parents are immigrants. They came here in 1978 with two suitcases. I literally feel like I lived the American dream. My brother and I went to public schools. We had jobs. I started working when I was 12. I started babysitting in the neighborhood and I always had to hustle and I watched my parents do it as soon as they got here. My mom had a job degree in English literature from India. Nobody would recognize it, so her first job here was chopping onions at the local Wendy's and they had to struggle. And so I think grit was part of my upbringing. And I'm actually really grateful for that because I think as an entrepreneur, probably the most important attribute is not quitting and getting through, just rejection after rejection. And most of the really successful entrepreneurs I know will tell me just how many people rejected them along the way. So if you can have a thick skin around that, it's actually a huge asset. For me, it was tough As a child, I was always kind of an outcast. We never had enough money to shop at normal clothing stores. We didn't have TV at home. So I was kind of a weirdo on the playground. I was a big nerd. I read books all the time and did science fair competitions. And I really found my refuge in academics and was really passionate about school and so got lucky enough to get into Harvard, but didn't really have the money to attend. So I would cobble together different jobs. I did in fact clean toilets for our campus. We call it Dorm crew, but it's like a janitorial service run by students. So it's funny to imagine that at one point I was literally like scrubbing the shit off of the rich kids toilets. However, I do think that a lot of that kind of work is truly character building. I remember that summer I would literally calculate the value of everything I purchased according to how many toilets it would take me to clean to purchase that. And I think it gave me this frugality and discipline which I then brought into my entrepreneurial career.
- [06:25]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting because my dad used to make me take like hard labor jobs and either as the family. So before I could work legally, we used to go on these like wood chopping expeditions. We would literally drive up to the mountains. Growing up in Tacoma, like, I don't know if you could do this or you just did it, but we would go and find fallen trees and you cut them up and stack wood and you'd spend all day doing that. And you do that several times through the summer. And then when I was 12, I had to work in a door factory. And so. And you, you can't imagine the rage that filled me with. I was so angry with my parents and I used to have to carry lacquered trim and I was getting arm hair by that point and it would stick in your arm and there's like no way to get it out. See? Oh, I would be so angry, like pulling it out. And my dad kept saying, this is going to build character, this is going to build character. And how do you. And I totally agree with you. And that has served me immeasurably in my entrepreneurial journey. Why is that? Like, what, what is one thing you don't think people understand? Like, if they're about to start their first company, what do they not see coming for them? And how can they. If they didn't have parents that somehow put them through the school of hard knocks, like, how do they toughen up?
- [07:34]
Leila Janah
That's Such a good question. And I know there's, there's a new book out on grit. There's all these new studies on adverse childhood experiences different from, you know, in the case of your parents or mine, you know, adverse childhood experiences are worse. That's if you had trauma or some kind of abuse in your background. What they find is that who have endured hardship in some way can build grit and resilience from it. Sheryl Sandberg talks about this in her book Option B, about this idea of post traumatic growth and using something that's tough as a growth experience. And so I find this fascinating because I think for me, I too hated my parents for forcing me to do some of that. And I also just was frustrated. I mean, I remember feeling surrounded by the rich kids and feeling like I was never going to fit in. I think if you didn't have that kind of a background, one the ways that you can push yourself to get beyond your comfort zone, I think, is to read about failure and try to immerse yourself in more case studies that show you how failure can profoundly shape you. And it's hard. I mean, in the early days of a startup, I think rejection is inevitable. So there's an element of just getting back up again when you've been punched so many times that you feel like you can't. And I don't know what it is in us that creates that sort of tipping point when you decide to get up again. But it's among all the entrepreneurs I know who are successful, that is the single biggest factor. It's not not quitting.
- [08:59]
Tom Bilyeu
You talked about having scar tissue from growing up. And you, you maybe downplayed it a little bit here in your book and in some of your talks, you've talked a lot about like not having the TV parents with accents always being. Because your parents were moving, you moved like an insane number of times.
- [09:17]
Leila Janah
Yeah, 12 times.
- [09:18]
Tom Bilyeu
So moving around so much to stay in essentially wealthy neighborhoods so that you could go to the best public schools and that, you know, kids can be really, really cruel. So going through that and then coming out of it, I think that breaks most people. Why didn't it break you? What were you saying to yourself mentally? Because I'm sure at the time you weren't thinking, oh, this is really going to make me a great entrepreneur. You know, you're just trying to get through it, but what were you telling yourself to get through it?
- [09:42]
Leila Janah
So it's interesting you brought that up. And there was, there was abuse in my family. And I've kind Of come through a lot of that in. In recent years and also understood how it shaped me. And I think for me, my refuge was in helping other people. I started doing community service in high school, and for me, it was this refuge. Maybe seeing people who had it even worse than me put my own suffering in context. Maybe it made me feel like I could somehow transform hurt and pain that I was feeling into something positive in the world. You know, looking back on it, I feel like maybe that was the original impetus for me to do this work. I ended up going to Ghana when I was 17, which was so random. I got a scholarship from a big tobacco company, of all places. So big tobacco did something great for me, which was to fund my travel to West Africa and this volunteer program, which I could have never afforded to do. I didn't have a trust fund. Most people assume, by the way, that folks who work in social impact have millionaire parents who just can write them checks to go to Africa. That is so not my story. I mean, I was hustling for my own checks.
- [10:46]
Tom Bilyeu
I actually, literally had that as a part of your intro at one point. If you think this was a trust fund, maybe you are sadly mistaken.
- [10:54]
Leila Janah
So the opposite of a trust fund used this money to go to Ghana. And a lot of people that my parents knew and even people in my school were like, this is completely insane. Why would you do that? This is, you know, dangerous. You're going to be by yourself as a young American woman in the middle of this, you know, West African country. And I think I never would have done that had I not been propelled out of my comfort zone by what had happened to me as a child. And I think it creates a sense for me at least, of openness and receptivity and maybe vulnerability that I might not have had otherwise.
- [11:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have magic words for somebody who's going through something similar? But their response is to close down. It's not to open up. They're not being propelled forward. They're being held back. Because I've met people that they fall into both camps, like, really similar circumstances, but just diametrically opposed responses. Like, do you have the magic sentence that would help somebody jump from closing down to opening up?
- [11:50]
Leila Janah
The only real power we have in the world is choosing our response. We can't choose what happens to us. We can get stuck into situations where we are abused, where we are not treated fairly, where any number of bad things can happen. And so the only choice we can make is how to respond. And I find that that knowledge gives me so much freedom. Because if something bad is happening to me that I can say is beyond my control, I can say, well, at least, you know, I have the power in my response to show the world what kind of person I am. And I can't tell you the number of really interesting examples of post traumatic growth that we're now cataloging. People who've lost everything, people who've had their kids murdered in front of them, people who've had just every manner of hardship, who are able to choose their response. And rather than shutting down and getting more and more depressed, which is something that you have to get through, but the choice to take that painful experience and mold it into something positive for the world is, I think, the deepest kind of healing we can have as humans. And for me, I think part of what got me through those tough times eventually, as I matured, was the knowledge that I had transformed that into something good for the world.
- [13:03]
Tom Bilyeu
When you say that we're cataloging, do you mean humanity or are you talking about Samasaurus Humanity? Okay. I was like, wow. Because the stories in the book are unbelievable stories of transformation. Like reading them is. Is cathartic in and of itself. Like, you get so excited, or at least I do. I got so excited about, like, the possibility and what you're doing with Sama Hope and like the ability to fund a surgery and see how directly you're impacting somebody. I mean, it's pretty incredible and so really fast connect two things for me. So you said in your 20s that you went through some pretty horrific depression. And you said it got so bad at one point, I wasn't sure I was going to make it out, which obviously is pretty scary given especially what you've gone on to do with your life and then how much of the catharsis from that comes from the, like, individual stories of the people that you've touched.
- [14:00]
Leila Janah
I did struggle with. With pretty severe depression in my 20s. I had a year in college when both my aunt and one of my best friends committed suicide. And that came at the same time? Yeah, it was my roommate. She was my blockmate. We were in the same rooming group and we had very similar backgrounds and very similar relationships with our parents. And both my aunt and this young woman were incredibly beautiful, incredibly bright, like the least you would imagine, the least likely to take their own lives. And so it was such a huge burden to carry that. And at the time, therapy and counseling wasn't as known maybe as it is now. And there weren't very many resources. So I didn't seek that out. And at the same time that that was going on, I was undergoing tremendous financial pressure. My parents had gotten a divorce and couldn't pay for school at all. So I was working three jobs and always trying to hustle to make ends meet with a full course load. And then maybe to add to that, I would go and spend time in Africa. So I did research in Rwanda, literally working on this project with victims of the genocide who'd had, you know, I'd go there and interview people with like, machete wounds on their head from this horrific genocide, talking about having seen their children murdered in front of them. And so I didn't even understand the concept of ptsd. And, you know, how if you're exposed to people who've undergone serious trauma, you yourself can take that on. So it was just a hot mess after. After these few years. And then. And then I graduated and I moved to New York City. I took a management consulting job just to be able to pay the bills and hopefully learn about business. I knew I wanted to create a business that would people, and ideally a business that would hire poor people and move them out of poverty. But it was tough times. I was alone, often as a consultant, getting up at four in the morning on a Monday to fly to some random city, and spent most of my time alone in hotel rooms. So it kind of all added up and at one point just exploded. And I went through some very dark times. Anyone who's been through depression knows what I mean. And I guess what got me out of it was I feel very blessed to have found a career that nourishes me spiritually. I feel like when your core spiritual values or your morality are aligned with what you spend the majority of your time doing, it creates this, I don't know, this unity in your soul. And I feel like having that has been such a cornerstone of my life. It's what I often go back to. When I'm really struggling or when I'm feeling depressed, I will literally go back and read. I have a file in my Gmail of inspirational stories from our workers. Stories that people will send me about their own transformation, or stories that managers of our centers will send me. And whenever I'm feeling depressed, I'll go back and read those just to ground me. I also think that connecting with other people who are suffering, there's all this research that empathizing with someone else who maybe has it even worse than you can relieve your own burden. And so, as much as possible, when I was in those states, I Would try to immerse myself in issues around global poverty or understand what life was like for someone who had it even worse. Who might be struggling with depression. Depression. But living on $2 a day and also struggling with HIV or some other problem. And that would help bring me out of it.
- [17:16]
Tom Bilyeu
You said that you have a four tiered process to dealing with things. I'm putting those words. But it was a four step process. One of them was meditation. Walk us through the four. That'd be really fascinating. But the one that I found super interesting was your brother's an astrophysicist. Which is crazy. Totally crazy. And you said thinking about nature, thinking about space, like thinking about something bigger. The human problems that I'm struggling with alleviates that. It's really interesting to see that sort of reflected both at the human level. Even just finding somebody that's struggling bigger than you and then even stepping outside of that and seeing how small we are. And you said you used to look through the telescope at Saturn and it gave you the sense of. It would lower your stress and pressure. So what is that four step process?
- [18:04]
Leila Janah
Sure. And I think I might have forgotten I wrote this up. I know there was meditation and mindfulness. The zooming out and contemplating nature is so helpful. And there's now all this new evidence that shows that when we spend time in the wilderness. The Japanese call it forest bathing. There's a term for it. There are actually documentable neuroscience benefits to that. Your brain chemistry changes when you're exposed to wilderness. My own view is that we become conscious of our smallness and how irrelevant these petty concerns are day to day. You'll be annoyed about. I often get annoyed about something somebody said to me at the office or some political thing that's going on in my friend group or some other issue. I'm stuck in traffic and I will forget. Wait a minute. Okay. At the end of the day, I come from stardust. I will return to being stardust. None of this matters at all. The only real thing that matters is love. Loving people and being loved yourself. And I think everything else is kind of gravy. So it's helpful to remind ourselves of that. And contemplating vast expanses in space. Or for me it's really the ocean. I spend a lot of time in the ocean as much as possible. I'm such a California person at heart. That really helps center me and remind me how petty my concerns are. Actually, I also talk about exercise. For me, various forms of exercise are totally cathartic. I'm really tightly wired and a little bit manic and so I'm like a little hamster. If I don't get out my hamster wheel energy, it's probably going to get scattered all over the place. So I kite surf, I do yoga. I'm really into dance. I find rhythmic activity really helps and can be really soothing and therapeutic. And then I don't know if I talk about this in that piece but, but for me, therapy and coaching have been hugely helpful. I don't think we talk enough about therapy. I think that if we're willing to hire a coach for better sports performance, why wouldn't we hire a coach to have better emotional performance and deepen and improve our relationships?
- [20:05]
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- [20:35]
Tom Bilyeu
What are some key things that you've gotten out of coaching? Like if somebody watching right now was going to take away a few key things, what would they be?
- [20:44]
Leila Janah
The biggest one for me being like a hot blooded, passionate entrepreneur is the concept of the pause. So inserting a pause before you respond is probably the most helpful thing for at least for my relationships with my colleagues, with my partner, with my friends. I'm tempted always to run a mile a minute and to respond immediately when I hear something. I'm pretty quick witted. I like thinking on my feet. I have that entrepreneurial hustle and so I'm very tempted to just respond immediately. The worst decisions I've made, the worst comments I've made, the most damage I've done to relationships or in my companies has been when I've responded that way and not taken a pause.
- [21:25]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting. You actually have a great story about this with a guy that wrote in and said, you're destroying America, you're outsourcing all of our jobs to India, essentially. Shame on you. And you wrote him the vicious email, but you didn't send it. And then what happens from there?
- [21:40]
Leila Janah
I'm so happy that you brought that up. I will never forget Joe from Ohio and he wrote this email because he said saw a PSA that we'd done on Hulu. So I'd literally taken this footage on my Phone of these refugees who we'd trained in this horrific refugee camp called Dadaab in Kenya where people are literally living in the most avoidable suffering. I mean it's just tragic to see it. And we'd shown these refugees how to do digital work and they were doing a pilot program with Microsoft, which I thought was the most inspiring thing. Here are these people who are helping themselves not rely on aid or charity. And so we run this ad and I get this email as soon as the ad started running. And I got it in the middle of a really tough day. Like we had been rejected from another funder. I at the time was sleeping on my ex boyfriend's futon because I had no money. Bless his heart, remains a good friend. And so I get this email and the email subject line was, you are ruining America. And I felt so slammed by that because here I am trying to help people. It's a non profit. I'm never going to be like a millionaire billionaire out of this business. And so my immediate response was to dash off like a nasty like how dare you kind of accuse me email. And then I slept on it and I didn't send it. Best advice. Pause. The next morning I woke up feeling really different. And I did a quick Google search of Ohio unemployment statistics and found that Ohio had been very hard hit by the recession. This was back in 2009. And I thought, let me respond with compassion. So I wrote to Joe and I was like, dear Joe, you know, I'm sorry you feel this way. Maybe you have a point. Do you have any ideas on how we might adapt our digital work model for here in the us I would love to help communities like yours. And his response to my email was night and day. He wrote back and he said, thank you so much for your kind response. I'm really sorry that I said what I said. I'm just really frustrated. I lost my job recently. I live in a community where a lot of the factory work has, has gone overseas and we're struggling. And eventually he kind of dropped off the map. But it did inspire me to go to my board at Samasource and say, what could we do to fight domestic poverty? How can we be an organization that's not just siloed into attacking this issue at the international level, but maybe is more thoughtful and creative about applying it here?
- [23:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I was really surprised by that. So I knew that you were doing things internationally, but I had no idea that you had started. And it's in rural Arkansas right now, right along the Mississippi Delta, we started
- [24:06]
Leila Janah
there and we eventually shut down that branch of the program because it wasn't working. And I can tell you all about that. But it operates now in San Francisco and New York. It's called Sama School.
- [24:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, so what is Sama School now then?
- [24:18]
Leila Janah
So the idea behind Sama School is if you look at the American economy, it's very different from the economy of say, Kenya or Uganda. So the model that we have working overseas doesn't exactly work here. It's a different flavor here. Here. All net employment growth in the last decade has happened in the independent work economy. So this is contracting basically everything from gig economy jobs like Lyft and Uber and TaskRabbit and Field Nation to contract work for. And that has just exploded partially because younger workers want more flexibility in the jobs they have. They don't necessarily want to work a 9 to 5 for 40 years and then get a pension at the end of it. Those jobs have gone away. So we developed the first gig economy training for low income Americans. And what we're trying to do is help modernize our workforce training in this country, which is so out of date. We're training people to do jobs that went away a decade ago and are not coming back. So our philosophy is, why try to oppose the trend? Let's understand, this is what's happening. And so how can we make the most vulnerable people in our society successful on these platforms?
- [25:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow, that's incredible. What do you say to people that say you're a saint?
- [25:29]
Leila Janah
They don't know me well enough. Definitely not a saint. I just tell them, also talk to my colleagues and they'll be schooled. You know, I have a passion for doing this kind of work. It's almost a selfish passion because it makes me feel really good. Maybe it's the feeling that other people get when they go to church or they do volunteer work. For me, this is like my soul food.
- [25:52]
Tom Bilyeu
How did people respond? You gave an amazing speech, which I'd love you to recapture the, the core thesis, but you gave a speech about how MLK Gandhi, they're not saints, they're real people. And as you walk through that, you led the speech off by saying, I'm about to get a lot of haters for what I'm about to say. And then you said some. I thought it was, it made them more interesting. What was your thesis in that?
- [26:19]
Leila Janah
Just that when we put people on pedestals as saints, we sort of, we turn them into an other. We turn them into, you know, we, we think of ourselves as us and. And lowly. And we think of them as these saintly people who are just somehow different from us. And therefore, we don't have a moral obligation to do the things they're doing because they're uniquely equipped. Let's remind ourselves some of the most famous and prominent social leaders were not flawless. MLK was a known, you know, cheater. He cheated on his wife regularly. Unfortunately, Gandhi, it's well known in India, was really, really cruel to his wife. There's even a play that I watched about it which was kind of shocking. And I guess the. The moral of the story is that no one is a saint, you know, even when they're canonized. There's a whole book that criticizes Mother Teresa's work. And I'm not saying this to take down our heroes. I think that what all three of those folks have truly heroic and great and should be celebrated. I say this because it's important that we don't absolve ourselves of a moral duty to act. We all have that duty to act. You don't have to be flawless. These people are not, you know, genetically different. And I think that's another problem with this pedestal issue, is that when we put people on pedestals, we then start nitpicking and saying, oh, well, if he or she wears a nice dress, then she can't possibly care about poverty because she's too consumed with her own appearance. Or in MLK's case, you know, he was. Many people tried to take him down because he had such great, I think, a great sense of style. Those two things are not incompatible. You can have an interest in fashion and a desire to make aesthetic choices that fit your taste and at the same time find poverty to be morally objectionable and want to do something about it. People who do work in service of humanity do not need to be saints. We do not need to put them on pedestals. They don't have to, you know, take vows of poverty. I think when we say that and do that, it makes ordinary people feel like they could never enter this field. And that's part of the problem.
- [28:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I love that. Like, and that's one consistent theme that I've seen through everything that you've written, that you've talked about, interviews that you've done, is like, look, I want to do good in the world, and I also want to be a badass chick. So, Right. Like, I want to roll up and do something amazing. And you said, oh, God, you were talking about humility. And you said, look, is Elon Musk overly humble? No. And do we want him to be like, what? Judge me by my results, not by my attitude. That's not the word you use. But it was like that was where you were going with that. What are your thoughts around humility? How we can leverage a little bit of bravado to draw attention to important causes?
- [29:00]
Leila Janah
I think it's so important and I think again it's that pedestal problem because when we put someone on a pedestal we expect them to behave, you know, like not human. Right. We expect them to behave like characters in the Bible or something. And as a result we get extremely demoralized or our whole image of them is taken down when we hear that they spent some amount of money on an outfit or that there have been so many takedowns of social entrepreneurs in the media or nonprofit do gooders for some reason. Maybe it's because people assume that if you're doing good in the world that you are a little bit self righteous and you're putting down others. There's sort of a takedown down desire people have. And I just feel like that's unfortunate. I think like there are so many examples of truly corrupt solely profit seeking entrepreneurs who've done far worse, I think who are under far less scrutiny than relatively good social entrepreneurs who you know, are, are flawed humans like we all are. And, and I guess my takeaway from that is to, is to try to be a little bit more balanced in our assessments and look at the bigger picture.
- [30:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting. I like that notion of looking at the bigger picture, of really starting to assess. And in fact this is at the core of how you want your non profit to be judged is what's the impact for the dollar spent. So you've, you've said like people will see a nonprofit throw a lavish party and they're like, oh my God, that's so scummy. Like how can you be doing that? But what if in doing that they draw like people that just pour millions of dollars into something and it has a massively disproportionate effect? I think that's a really powerful way to look at that. And I see, I'm actually interested to hear your details. But you have moved at least with luxury me into a for profit. I've worked on the board of the X Prize, talked to Peter Diamandis who I know, you know, and about the frustrations of the nonprofit world and, and I have chosen. So I like to think that what we're doing at impact theory will ultimately have a Lot of social good. But for me it is absolutely like I wouldn't even do it if I couldn't turn a profit. And I'm just being honest, right? Like you say whatever you want about me, I don't give a shit. Like, I want to have lasting impact. I want it to be interesting for me and I want it to be. I want to touch the lives of hundreds of millions, if not north of a billion people and be absolute incredible. But I'm driven by both, right? And so to pretend that I'm not driven by one seems crazy. Also, there's so much power in being able to be self sustaining to not have to ask anybody for anything, quite frankly, let alone money. What made you transition into the for profit world with Luxme since it's still so socially driven? Like, what does that look like?
- [31:33]
Leila Janah
It's so interesting. I think part of the problem is that especially here in the United States, we have a very bifurcated view of nonprofit versus for profit, right? We think, okay, for profit means you're profit maximizing at the expense of everything else. Which means that if it's going to make you more money, you will pollute the stream, you will use slaves in the supply chain, you will do any number of things that are bad for the world. And so we think, okay, the job of a business is to make as much money as possible. And then maybe there's going to be excesses that can get donated at the end of the day. And then they get donated over here to these nonprofits which are generally cash starved, reliant only on grants and donations and the whims of very wealthy people to solve all the problems that are being created by these, you know, profit maximizing companies here. That is such a flawed system, right? The real answers lie in the middle. The real answers lie in businesses that actively try to solve a social or environmental problem and do so sustainably. And there is a whole range of these businesses and we're starting to see them crop up both on the nonprofit side and on the for profit side. If you think about it like the Girl Scouts sells hundreds of millions of dollars of cookies each year. That's a very viable business, right? Organizations like Goodwill and the Salvation army support a huge part of their OPER operations by giving work to low income people in their stores, which amount to hundreds of millions. I think Goodwill's actually multi billion dollars in terms of sales in their stores. And we don't think about that as social enterprise, but that is where all the most exciting things in social impact will happen. Then I think about for profit companies like Patagonia or Method. Patagonia is one of my favorite examples. For profit company that has taken a huge environmental stand, protected tons of acres of wild lands, donated, you know, more than probably most companies have to environmental groups. And that's a for profit company. So I think that this. This bifurcated view we have of nonprofit versus for profit is a little bit old school. And again, it's the conversions that's most exciting.
- [33:32]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so abstracting it for a second from the social angle, just in general about entrepreneurship, what have you learned over the last 10 years, which I imagine is pretty legion.
- [33:43]
Leila Janah
So best piece of advice I ever heard is from Ben Horowitz, don't punk out and quit. I have the tattoo. I have the Sama tattoo on my right hand, but I almost feel like that should be the other tattoo because I think the most worthwhile, worthy things in life are just the result of a lot of painful, enduring failure. So that's the first. The second, I think, is I found that, that the pause, the not making rash decisions. And I'm always very tempted to make rash decisions. I have a million business ideas a minute. I have like a hundred domain names I own. Like many entrepreneurial people, I constantly get inspired by things I see. And being able to pause and breathe before I make decisions has probably saved me a lot of heartache. And then the third is I get a lot of PR and a lot of the fame and glory for building Sama. But really, really everything that we've achieved has been because of the people that took the leap to join me. I mean, I can't tell you how risky it was for our first employees to quit their normal paying jobs and come work for me. I just saw one of them today at a book reading. She was the person who opened up our East Africa office. And Jen would call me in the middle of the night to tell me things like, oh, by the way, a ship dropped its anchor on the Internet cable heading into East Africa. So the Internet is down for the foreseeable future. We're an Internet based company. I mean, crazy things like that would happen. And if I hadn't had Jen on the ground in East Africa. Africa, we wouldn't have succeeded as a business. So the team is everything. I mean, the idea is great. Having a founder who can go out and raise money and can be charismatic is wonderful. But you need to have the team that can operate the business day to day and sort of keep you in check. And so I've been very fortunate to have the most amazing people who are willing to quit much better paying jobs and opportunities and come work for us.
- [35:34]
Tom Bilyeu
And what do you look for specifically when you're hiring? Are there certain traits, characteristics? Characteristics?
- [35:39]
Leila Janah
I'd say so. The first is competence. So I think that can be demonstrated in a number of ways. But usually it's pretty easy for me to tell whether someone knows what they're talking about. They don't need to have slides, they don't need to have a fancy resume. But I kind of get into the nitty gritty very quickly often. What kind of metrics do you look for to know if you're succeeding in whatever you're doing? What did you do at your prior company that you're most proud of? What was the biggest struggle you had? So I ask questions that try to quickly get to whether someone's competent to do that job. Number one attribute. The second I find for social mission companies is to understand someone's core motivation.
- [36:17]
Tom Bilyeu
How do you find that?
- [36:19]
Leila Janah
I find that, like most people who come to work in social enterprise, had a transformational life experience. I can't tell you how many people will say I had a parent who died, or somebody close to me became really ill, or I struggled with an illness, or I battled depression. I had some kind of traumatic or serious life event that called into question how I was spending my time. And that basically made plain that I wasn't able to implement my value system in my job. And that created this disharmony. And so many of our best people who've been with us the longest are the people who had those kinds of transformational life events and decided to quit the job and do something meaningful and invest themselves fully. And it can be so hard, I think, often with social, environmental impact, companies running the same race as everybody else. But you're like deliberately handicapping yourself by putting these additional constraints on your business. So to get through that can just be so hard. It means you're often not getting enough sleep because you're dealing with some worker issue in Nairobi that a normal company wouldn't have, because a normal company wouldn't hire people who come from slums and who deal with all these other issues. And so you really do need to find people who are exceptionally committed, above and beyond just the excitement of doing their job, exceptionally committed to the mission. And when you find those people who are basically like missionaries for what you do. I think the most satisfying thing for me has been seeing people invest as much or even more than I have in the company. And that was a real turning point, is seeing people who were willing to care more about Sama than I was at a certain time. And as an entrepreneur, that's maybe the most satisfying feeling.
- [38:02]
Tom Bilyeu
What did that first? I'll call it the first year, but it's really before the company existed, when you were trying to get people on board. Board. Because one of the number one things I get asked is, like, what's that first step? How do I get started? I don't know anybody. I don't have money. Like, what do I do? How did you overcome that? Like, tactically?
- [38:21]
Leila Janah
Yeah, I mean, I think another good piece of advice is, is the side hustle. So I started the business plan for samasource when I was working as a management consultant. And I started working on it at nights and weekends. And just really because I was bored with my consulting job and I wanted to do something more meaningful. I knew I wanted to build a enterprise of some kind. And so I read every book I could. I read every case study I could get my hands on. I learned about Muhammad Yunus and the microfinance movement. He remains an inspiration to so many of us in the field. I went out and I watched speeches done by other social entrepreneurs and in this learning, put together this business plan and applied for competitions online. I just sent out the business plan to. There was a social business challenge in Amsterdam that I found on the Internet. And I, like, submitted the application and lo and behold, they called, called me. I went to the semifinals and I got one of those big checks. I got €22,000 from that competition. And around that time, I thought, okay, I should quit my job and do this full time. The next funding we got was from another business plan competition. I didn't place first in either of them. And that was another, like, $14,000. And I cobbled that together and made that stretch for over a year. In building Zomasaurus at the very beginning,
- [39:38]
Tom Bilyeu
how did you, like. How do you decide what books to read? What Internet searches are you doing? I literally think people, like, they. They go, okay, I've heard Lila said I need to, like, go see. I need to speeches. I need to read books. But what books? What speeches? Like, where do they start?
- [39:55]
Leila Janah
Yeah, well, Amazon recommendations are actually pretty good, so.
- [39:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Really?
- [40:00]
Leila Janah
Yeah.
- [40:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Just say some things you'd already read based on things.
- [40:02]
Leila Janah
Yeah. So, like, if you. If you, like, look at what Muhammad Yudes has written, they'll suggest other books in similar categories. I personally. Inspiration from entrepreneurs. I read a lot of books about entrepreneurship and the journey that people have taken. I actually published a book list on my Medium account, if anyone's curious, with my 108 life changing books, pieces of art, and I think I even have some podcasts and music on there.
- [40:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Nice. All right, we'll have to check that out. In fact, weird. Just drop your name into Medium and it'll pop up.
- [40:31]
Leila Janah
And it'll pop up.
- [40:32]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, perfect. So you're reading, reading, reading, taking in information. But you don't stop there. You actually put it into action. Do you remember, like, what that first, like real tangible thing was that you did?
- [40:42]
Leila Janah
Yeah, I mean, I. I was no stranger to the hustle. Right. So I think one benefit of having immigrant parents is you're just kind of used to taking action all the time. And I think almost to a fault, I have this paranoia about one day being like out on the street and not having enough money and not being able to survive. And so like I'm always, I've just always been doing things and hustling. So. So when I had this consulting job, I knew I wanted to start a social enterprise. I had no idea how I was going to afford it. And then I figured, well, if I get the money from these business plan competitions and I start winning some contracts and I really economize and cut down on my expenses and maybe I take a side tutoring job. That's what I did in the first year of SAMA to keep things going, then I can at least have some semblance of a business. So I put this plan in place. I remember asking a professor friend I'd worked with if I could get some sort of access to the university that he was teaching in. He was teaching at Stanford. And I was like, look, I'm not going to go to grad school, but could I get, like, could you make me a visiting scholar or something? So I have some semblance of an official title so I don't seem to everyone like I'm just looney Tunes and I've left my job and I'm starting this crazy nonprofit. So he gave me a library card. I became a visiting scholar at the Stanford Program on Global justice, basically because I asked and because he's a very generous person. Didn't come with any money, but I think it did help to be part of that Stanford community, even from an emotional perspective. This was before the days of co working, so it was quite lonely to start something on your own. And at the time, all my friends were joining Facebook as early employees, and it was hard. It was like, being homeschooled when all your friends are part of the cool high school put me through that.
- [42:19]
Tom Bilyeu
That had to be tough. As your friends are early employees of Facebook. They're making dosh. Like, how did you deal with that comparison? So there was no. Like, that wasn't. Part of the emotionally hard part of starting is seeing people start to make money, even though it hadn't cracked and become what we think of today. But I imagine that wouldn't be too easy as you're struggling to get this thing off the ground, you're struggling to make ends meet, people writing to you, telling you you're destroying America when none of this is for money to. Like, what advice do you have for somebody that. That's in the middle of that path and they're looking at somebody that took the more traditional path? It's easier. Maybe they've had kids and they can support the family. Like, what would you tell them to hold on to?
- [43:00]
Leila Janah
It was so hard. At one point, my best friend who works in finance, took a month off between jobs and moved out to San Francisco just to be near me, because I think he was so worried. This was, like, in my local point, in my 20s, that depression I referred to. For me, what really helped was, again, going back to the stories of the people we were helping because it just provided this sustenance. I got one email one year around Christmas time from one of the people who managed our work center that was working with mostly women who came from slums. And she said, lila, I just want to tell you the story of this woman who is a single mom and what she's been able to do for her kids. And you may not see it, but I'm here in Nairobi. I see this every day. I cannot tell you what a difference that you personally have made in the lives of all. All these people. And I'm so grateful. It was just a simple Christmas card. And I wept when I read that. I so needed to hear that. At that moment, I pinned it to my wall. I still refer to those kinds of letters all the time. And to me, that's like, that's worth so much more than money, you know, I think some people live their whole lives and don't get that sort of satisfaction from their jobs. So I feel tremendously lucky and grateful that I've been able to build a career in this. And I think it's worth a lot of, you know, compensation.
- [44:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So one of the most interesting things to me in your story is actually back when you were 17, when you go To Ghana, I believe. Walk us through that. So one time I was doing a live broadcast, and people ask questions, and I answer them in real time. And somebody said, you know, oh, I'd like. I want to do something with my life. What do I do? I've been reading. I've been all this, and I just lost my shit. And I was like, just fucking out act. Would you, like, for the love of God, just go do something? And I said, if you've always been thinking about going to Africa and, like, doing some good, book a ticket right now, today and go tonight. Like, stop thinking about it. Just go. And of course, the criticism was, are you out of your mind? You can't tell people to just book a flight to Africa. Like, you need immunizations, if nothing else. Like, this is crazy town. And. And I thought, okay, for sure. But at the same time, I would actually rather that person roll the dice and take a risk and go than spend the rest of their life stuck in paralysis. You're 17. You roll up not having any connections, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing. How did you make that work? How did you find the courage? What was that all about?
- [45:24]
Leila Janah
Well, first of all, it's funny because everybody was telling my parents, oh, my God, you're negligent. Your daughter's gonna get hurt. Like, rural Ghana is probably the safest place on earth. Like, far safer than urban Los Angeles. My neighbors, as soon as I moved in, were just always taking care of me. Their first objective was to fatten me up because they said I was way too skinny. I would never find a husband if I continued that way. And so they would bring me excess cassava and stuff from the farms. I remember the first day I got there, this little girl came running over with this plastic cup. And I looked at my host mom. I was staying with these grandparents, actually, who did this work for fun. Basically, they hosted these foreign volunteers. And so this girl comes with this cup, and she's got eggs in the cup. And she says something I don't understand and looks at me expectantly with this cup, and I'm like, why is she giving me eggs? And my host mother explained. She's like, well, eggs are a very precious commodity here. These chickens often don't lay many eggs because they don't have enough nutrition. And so she's giving you the most valuable thing that her family has to welcome you.
- [46:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
- [46:26]
Leila Janah
So there was just this incredible welcoming and generosity, and it made it so easy. In fact, my hardest thing was coming back Back home, I had culture shock, reverse culture shock. Going to Harvard from Ghana where everyone was super friendly and smiling all the time, and then get to Harvard where it was much colder and harder to survive and a much more like, dog eat dog atmosphere.
- [46:47]
Tom Bilyeu
That is really interesting. In fact, you have an awesome quote, and I'm almost certain that I have the exact quote here. I have molded my life around the fact that work is the best way to move people out of poverty, and that work is at the core of human dignity, but it's not all that there is. So in the context of what you just said, like, that's. That was jarring for me, just to hear you describe it about the human warmth, the human connection, and then to go to a place like Harvard in, you know, Western civilization and to feel more distant, more disconnected, and ultimately then sort of that becomes the beginning of the. The emotional distress that you go through. Like, how do we reconcile that? Like, what are your thoughts? Or around the disconnect of the traditional Western lifestyle and the beauties that are in these rural villages that you're trying to really help, but you're trying to help them with, like, these Western ideals. It's pretty fascinating.
- [47:46]
Leila Janah
I know, and it's such an odd juxtaposition because, you know, I find that some of my happiest moments are when I have very little and I'm in a place like rural Ghana or one of the places I love most in the world is rural northern Uganda, which is just stunning. It's pristine. I, you know, I've had so many amazing experiences of just connection with the land, but also with people. And I think there's a certain vulnerability that comes from not having a lot of stuff. When you're poor, you depend on each other. You depend on your relationship with your neighbor and your family, because if you don't have that, you have nothing. And when an accident happens, there's this social capital that helps people get through that. And so it's tough because on the one hand, I think a lot of the traditional values or a lot of the values that I see in poor communities are values that we want to perpetuate and that are important. And on the flip side, there are things like really avoidable suffering in healthcare, for example. And I remember talking to a doctor in Kampala who would tell me that he would watch people routinely die in his hospital because the hospital didn't have enough sutures. So people would come in from an accident on the street and they would literally die from hemorrhage because the Hospital did not have stitches. So that's the kind of thing that just should never happen in 2017. Not on our watch. Right. I also think that we're learning more and more that more money after a certain level does not equate to more happiness or a more fulfilled life.
- [49:16]
Tom Bilyeu
So there's one thing that I want to talk about before we get to my final question, and that is your notion of untapped potential. So I've literally, accidentally, I can take exactly zero credit for this. In fact, going back to your notion of sometimes being selfish ends up with really great, great results. To get extra credit, I started working in the inner cities around usc. So they say, hey, who wants extra credit? I was like a total freak for getting good grades. And so I raised my hand. They send me into a school in South Central to first teach. I was teaching oceanography. And then I got asked again, who wanted to do extra credit. Me. And they did one on ones. And that one on one relationship that I entered into with this little kid named Rashaun turned into an eight and a half year relationship relationship just because I made him a promise that I'd help him with his homework. And so like it turns into this whole thing. And like, I don't at the time. I have no concept of this kid is changing me as a human being, like just at a deep and fundamental level. Right. But I don't understand that. I'm 19, whatever.
- [50:16]
Grainger Representative
So.
- [50:17]
Tom Bilyeu
But it leaves this indelible mark on my life. And then I go on my crazy entrepreneurial journey going through the periods of me realizing, okay, I've been chasing money and for me, maybe not for everybody, but for me, like, it just was soul crushing. And so I needed to connect to something again. Humanity, people, something. Like when you were talking about that juxtaposition of, you know, being in rural Ghana and then coming to Harvard, like that's how I felt in the business world. Chasing money versus like actually connecting with people. And I wanted to connect. And so that ends up we create Quest Nutrition out of that desire to connect and bring value and all of that. But then again, unintentionally, I find myself in the inner cities because that's where you can afford the real estate, that's where manufacturing happens because it's zoned for that. And then B, you can get hundreds of thousands of square feet. So of course you're drawing from a local population. And here I am again with like these, these just incredible people. And I used to say I'm mining for astronauts and I don't know why. That was just like the, to me as a kid, like an astronaut, like you could never be an astronaut. Right? That was like the unattainable dream. And I just thought these guys, they could be like, they're, they're just as smart as me. And I'll define smart as the ability to process raw data at a given speed. Right. They could do it just as fast as I could. So I was like, it's purely my opportunities, my mindset that differentiates me. And you've talked about that. You said the problem isn't potential, the problem is opportunity. Walk us through that and then what awaits us on the other side when these people get to express their potential?
- [51:55]
Leila Janah
Sure. It's just as you said. Talent is equally distributed and opportunity is not. And we live in a world where more than 2 billion people live on less than $3 a day. And that number is adjusted for purchasing power. So that's what $3 would buy you in a US city in modern times. So just imagine what that means. I mean, it means that you are living in a constant state of scarcity. We now know there's a very interesting book out called Scarcity, which talks about how scar. Scarcity reshapes your brain. They took Fortune, like I think Fortune 500 CEOs and had a few of them volunteer for a study where they were basically voluntarily starved for a week. And these guys stopped being able to make good long term decisions universally because your brain chemistry is focused on finding food, it's focused on whatever is scarce. And so when people are living in a constant state of scarcity, they cannot possibly make, you know, what we would think of as good decisions. They are locked into a state of suffering and not achieving their full human potential. That, that is just tragic. And it's tragic not just at the individual level. It's tragic in the sense of this is the greatest natural resource we have in the world. More important than going to Mars, more important than finding the next oil reserve or the next diamond mine, is figuring out how we can mine the talent of the bottom billions of people who've been left to fester. And I think it's a tremendous loss to the world. And so for me, I think it's so exciting to be able to go to places like Nairobi or Uganda and see people, sh. People who could easily be astrophysicists if they had only had the opportunity and hopefully get them on the path where they can achieve more of their human potential. And it is the most personally satisfying job I could ever Imagine having. And I think as a society, when we do this, we, you know, we feel more satisfied collectively as well.
- [53:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting. I used to tell people I'm looking for the next 101,000. Elon Musk's right. And what does the world look like when you have that many people that can play at that level? So I totally, totally get that. All right, before I ask the last question, where can these guys find you online?
- [54:01]
Leila Janah
Lilajana.com I'm on Facebook at Lilajana and then givework.org where I talk about Samasource and LXMI.
- [54:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Perfect. And we'll drop that all in the show notes. All right, final question. This is a big one for you and it's come out clearly in the interview, but what is the impact that you want to have on the world?
- [54:18]
Leila Janah
The world's largest 2000 companies spend $12 trillion annually on good goods and services. That's dwarfing the budgets of international aid and charity. If we could direct even a little bit of that money to sourcing from social enterprises that give work, we could move millions of people out of poverty very quickly without even changing corporate business models. I think there's so much potential in giving work, not just at the individual level, not just us choosing brands that do good in the world, but in companies choosing to source for good demand and services from these types of vendors. And that is, I think, the next evolution of our mission.
- [54:55]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. Thank you so much, Lila, for being on the show. Guys, you're going to want to check out this book. It is absolutely incredible. The whole concept of being able to end poverty one job at a time and giving work instead of giving handouts is absolutely incredible. But what you're really going to love about diving into her world is that she talks about that fascinating balance that she mentioned earlier between really wanting to do good, being who you are, bringing the full weight of your personality, understanding what's working in for profit businesses and bringing it and making the demand that we can do it in service of a greater good and that there is no compromise. You're not giving something up by doing that. And that was the thing that drew me into her world. If you know me, you know my whole thing is results, baby. And that is it. That is the only thing you should be focused on. And from the jump, that's what she talks about. You need to be looking at the result that people are getting out of these. It doesn't matter if they're an ngo. It doesn't matter if they're a nonprofit or a profit, you need to be looking at the results that they deliver. How many people are they helping? What are they able to do with a dollar? And that's what's amazing to me. So you're. She's lighting the world on fire in two ways. One, she's creating best in class companies, and that is something that I did not ask her nearly enough about. When you dive in, you're going to see she creates products and people actually, actually want products that people actually want. She solves problems and she does it in a way that is humanity plus. And that's it, man. It is a new way of doing business. And I think she's a vanguard. Jump into it and see what it's all about, because it's really good. All right, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you. Awesome. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.