Leila Janah Quotes
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Every woman that dies or loses her baby on a threadbare cot in the heart of Uganda, while her sisters on the other side of the world enjoy first-class care, is a threat to our collective humanity.
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Much like the opportunities that factory work provided for working-class Americans in the last century, microwork will provide opportunities for marginalized people in this one. All they really need is basic literacy, a cheap computer, and an internet hookup.
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So often, we leave the selfless side of ourselves for nights and weekends, for our charity work. It is our duty to inject that into our day-to-day business, into the work that we do, to improve corporations, to improve civil society, and to improve government.
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I think part of the problem with charity is that it tends to make us view people as helpless victims. I think in the future, we'll look back on charity in the same way that we look back on colonialism today: as a very paternalistic system that doesn't fully recognise the full spectrum of humanity.
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We know what happens when a woman earns money. She is far more likely than a man to spend her earnings on the health and education of her children and to invest in improving her family's standard of living.
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Most philanthropists want to be effective altruists. But the problem isn't intention: it's measurement. Unlike financial investing, which has reporting standards, audit processes, and educational requirements, social investing is notoriously tricky to evaluate.
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The amount of work that a for-profit has to do to get real money is minimal compared to the amount of work it takes a non-profit to get even a very small grant.
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I love dancing and practiced ballet for ten years until I realized I wouldn't make it professionally - then I started taking salsa classes. I learned to dance samba in Rio and Salvador when I lived in Brazil.
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FlipBoard is the 'W Magazine' of the iPad-app world. The sleek interface makes content from your friends' Facebook and Twitter feeds much easier on the eyes by displaying them in a magazine format.
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The thing that the Internet does is it allows labor to move freely across borders in the way that capital does but, traditionally, labor cannot. So the Internet frees workers to be based anywhere and work for employers anywhere.
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Social business lies in the spectrum of possibility between the traditional, profit-maximizing business, which directs little to no profit to doing good, and the traditional charity, which relies mostly on donations to sustain itself.
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I'd worked at the World Bank briefly as an undergrad and studied poverty levels around the world - particularly those earning less than $1.25 a day.
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I grew up believing in meritocracy and the American dream. My parents came here from India. They had no connections. My brother and I went to public schools, and both of us succeeded.
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A lot of people are happy to give money to charities but are wary of giving through taxes because they feel it doesn't produce any value.
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Sama means 'equal' in Sanskrit; I chose 'Samasource' because I thought it really reflected a value that I had and that I wanted the company to have, which is that everyone has equal capabilities and deserves an equal chance.
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In terms of environmental impact, Samasource jobs are very green. Our product is human intelligence, and it's transported through the Internet rather than via carbon-intensive trucking, shipping, and warehousing.
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I used to think my job as a CEO meant managing metrics and meeting goals, but I've realised now that's it's about managing my board and employees.
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I founded Samasource because I was frustrated by traditional approaches to poverty alleviation. Even those approaches focused on jobs often equip poor people with skills for which there is little market demand.
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We think the way out of poverty is to view the poor as producers, and the Internet is probably the most efficient tool we have for tapping this capacity. Because you don't need roads. You don't need customs officials who are friendly. You don't need to manage shipping and delivery schedules. You don't have to worry about tariffs.
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I own a shameless number of ethnic necklaces acquired at local markets in developing countries or inherited from my grandmother. These have seen me through meetings in Davos and visits to refugee camps.
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In order to thrive in the 21st century, you have to be a savvy citizen of the digital economy or risk being left behind.
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Most of us working on poverty alleviation simply want to know, 'How much poverty can I reduce for every dollar I donate?'
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Many people don't think that the poor in the developing world can do work on a computer. They won't say it explicitly. But they think it's too sophisticated.
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I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth.