Silicon Insider: Social Entrepreneurs
June 23, 2005 -- -- I spent Monday night on stage in Silicon Valley with a Hollywood superstar, an Internet billionaire and quiet guy from India named Kailash Satyarthi.
Guess which one of three got a standing ovation from the audience?
Nope, it was Kailash -- and the two others, Robert Redford and Jeff Skoll, were among the loudest applauders.
How we got there is a complicated story, but one that bodes well for the future. If a person like Kailash can become a celebrated hero, then there is hope for this complicated, tragic and scary world.
Let me start at the beginning.
As you may know if you've read this column over the years, I was involved in the early days of eBay, back when the company was little more than Jeff, Pierre Omidyar and a jar of Red Vines. I became friends with both men, especially Jeff, and we've stayed in regular touch ever since.
Even in those early days, I knew that both men were looking beyond online auctions -- and that if they succeeded with their young company they would dedicate their lives to doing good works … which is just what they have done in the years since.
But even before eBay was a success, Jeff took the extraordinary (and probably unprecedented) step of creating the eBay Foundation with funds from pre-IPO stock. Needless to say, when eBay enjoyed its historic IPO, the eBay Foundation became one of the richest in the country.
But Jeff wasn't done. A few years later, after Jeff retired (in his mid-30s) from eBay, we sat down on a number of occasions to talk about what he wanted to do next. It was then that I first heard him use the term "social entrepreneur." It was an intriguing notion: that one could take the tools and techniques of commercial entrepreneurship, like that found here in Silicon Valley, and apply them to the world of non-profit organizations, especially those in the developing world. And when Jeff and Sally Osberg, another old friend whom he had asked to direct the new Skoll Foundation, asked me to join the board of directors, I readily agreed.
What I found as I investigated the field further and studied the work of the world's leading social entrepreneurs was that here was a vast new global movement that few people in the developing world had ever heard of. Even more intriguing was that these social entrepreneurs and the enterprises they were creating were actually succeeding -- putting dents into the world's seemingly intractable problems -- hunger, exploitation, disease, illiteracy -- where the bigger aid movements of the last half-century had scarcely made a mark.
