From Cleaning Toilets to CEO, Leila Janah on How Rejection Is Inevitable & the Key to Success & Grit

So I think determination was part of my upbringing and I'm actually very grateful for that because I think as an entrepreneur, probably the most important attribute is not quitting and overcoming

rejection

after

rejection

. Hello, everyone is welcome to Impact Theory. Today's episode is a relaunch of one of our first guests we were lucky enough to cross paths with

leila

janna layla lost her battle with a rare form of cancer earlier this year leaving behind a legacy of lasting impact layla dedicated the work of his life not only advancing his own unlimited potential but inciting others to do the same during nearly a year of commemoration of his untimely passing.

We want to take this moment to honor Leila Janna. Thanks for being here. It's amazing to be invited to this program. Thank you so much. for inviting me, oh man, it's absolutely my pleasure, man, to come into your world, you're really a vanguard of something really new that's happening in the business space, which I've felt like has been kind of a transitional generation. in which it was not. like things clicked, since you were right from the jump, I went through the money-seeking phase and all that to find out how desperate and horrible it ended up being emotionally before I found something that was more about what's the final impact, but Guide us so that you know that things didn't necessarily start out easy for you.

Walk us through the dark times you had in your 20s and how you ended up creating a social movement that is also financially powerful. 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 years old. I started babysitting in the neighborhood and always had to work hard. I saw my parents do it as soon as they got here. My mom had a degree in Indian English Literature. No one would recognize him, so her first job here was chopping onions at the local Wendy's and they had to fight, so I think determination was part of it. from my education and I'm really very grateful for that because I think as an entrepreneur, probably the most important attribute is not quitting and overcoming rejection after rejection, and most of the really

success

ful entrepreneurs that I know will tell me how many people they rejected. them along the way, so if you can have a thick skin, it's actually a big plus for me, it was tough when I was a kid, I was always a bit of an outcast, we never had enough money to buy normal clothes you know.

In the stores we didn't have a TV at home, so it was a little weird on the playground. He was a big nerd. I read books all the time and participated in science fair competitions. I really found my refuge in academics and I was very passionate about school. so I was lucky enough to get into Harvard but I didn't really have the money to go, so I improvised different jobs. In fact, I did bathroom

cleaning

for our campus. We call it the dorm team, but it's like a student-run

cleaning

service. so it's funny to imagine that at one point I was literally like scrubbing rich kids'

toilets

, however, I think a lot of that kind of work is really character building.

I remember that summer, I would literally calculate the value. of everything I bought based on how many

toilets

it would take me to clean to buy it and I think it gave me this frugality and discipline that I later incorporated into my business career. It's really interesting because my dad used to make me take them as hard jobs and as a family, so before I could legally work, we used to go on these expeditions like to buy lumber, we literally drove up to the mountains growing up in Tacoma, like I don't know if you could do it. this or you just did it, but we would go look for fallen trees and you would cut them and stack wood and you would spend all day doing that and you would do it several times in 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.

I was so angry with my parents that I used to have to wear lacquer decorations and by that time I was already growing hair on my arms and it would stick to you. arm and there's no way to get it out, so oh, I'd get so mad to get it out and my dad kept saying this is going to build character, this is going to build character and how do you do it. I totally agree with you and that has been very helpful to me in my entrepreneurial journey, why is that? what's something you don't think people understand if they're about to start their first company what they don't see coming for them and how can they do it if I didn't have parents that somehow put them through these hard knocks like, for example, what? how do they harden?

That's a really good question and I know there's a new book on

grit

, there's all these new studies on adverse childhood experiences different from what you know about in the case. From your parents or mine you know that adverse childhood experiences are worse, if you had trauma or some type of abuse in your environment, what they discover is that people who have endured difficulties in some way can develop courage and resilience from Of them cheryl sandberg talks about this in her book, option b, about this idea of ​​post-traumatic growth and using something that is difficult as a growth experience, so I find it fascinating because I think, for me, you know, I hated my parents too for making me do some of that and I was also frustrated, I mean I remember feeling surrounded by rich kids and feeling like I was never going to fit in, I think if you didn't have that kind of experience, one of the ways that you can push yourself to go beyond your comfort zone, I think it's reading about failure and trying to immerse yourself in more case studies that show you how failure can shape you deeply and it's difficult, I mean, in the early days of a startup, I think rejection is

inevitable

, so there's an element of just getting back up when you've been hit so many times that you feel like you can't and I don't know what it is about us that creates that kind of tipping point. when you decide to do it.

Get up again, but among all the entrepreneurs I know who are

success

ful, that's the most important factor: not quitting, you talked about having scar tissue from growing up and maybe you downplayed it a little bit here in your book and in some from Your talks that you've talked about a lot, like not having TV parents with an accent, it was always because your parents were moving, you moved like crazy, yeah, 12 times, so you moved so much to stay in neighborhoods essentially rich to be able to go to the best public schools and know that children can be very, very cruel, so to go through that and then come out of it I think that destroys most people, why didn't it destroy you ?

What were you telling yourself mentally? I'm sure at that moment you weren't thinking, "Oh, this is really going to make me a great entrepreneur." You're just trying to get over it, but what were you telling yourself to get over it? So it's interesting that you mentioned that and there was um. There was abuse in my family and I've been through a lot of that over the last few years and I also understood how it shaped me and I think for me my refuge was helping other people. I started doing community service in high school. For me it was this refuge, maybe seeing people who had it even worse than me, putting my own suffering in context, maybe it made me feel like I could somehow transform the pain I was feeling into something positive in the world, since You know, looking back.

I feel like maybe that was the original impetus for doing 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, you know? Great for me, which was funding my trip to West Africa and this volunteer program that I could never have afforded to do. I didn't have a trust fund. Most people assume from the way people who work in social impact are millionaires. parents who can just write them checks to go to Africa, that's not my story, I mean, I was like struggling for my own checks, in fact, I literally had that as part of your introduction at one point, like you think this was something trustworthy.

You're the opposite of a trust fund so I use this money to go to Ghana and a lot of people my parents knew and even people at my school were like this is completely crazy, why would you do that? You know, it's dangerous. You're going to be alone as a young American girl in the middle of this well-known West African country and I don't think I would have ever done it if I hadn't been taken out of my comfort zone because of what had happened to me as a child and I think it creates a sensation for me. at least of openness and receptivity and perhaps of vulnerability that I would not have otherwise had.

Do you have magic words for someone who is going through something similar but their response is to shut down, not to shut down? Open up, they're not being pushed forward, they're being held back because I've met people who fall into both camps in really similar circumstances, but just diametrically opposite answers like, do you have the magic phrase that you know would help someone? jump from closure to openness the only real power we have in the world is to choose our response we cannot choose what happens to us we can get trapped in situations where we are abused where we are not treated fairly where any number of bad things can happen and therefore the only choice we can make is how to respond and I find that that knowledge gives me a lot of freedom because if something bad happens to me that I can say is out of 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 are now cataloging: people who have lost everything, people who've murdered their children in front of They, people who have been through all kinds of difficulties and who are able to choose their response and, instead of closing down and becoming more and more depressed, which is something that has to be overcome, but the choice to take that painful experience and shape it into something positive for the world is, I think, the deepest kind of healing that we can have as human beings, and for me, I think part of what got me through those difficult times as I matured was knowledge. that had transformed that into something good for the world when you say we are cataloging, do you mean humanity?

Are you talking about Samosaurus humanity? Okay, I thought wow, because the stories in the book are incredible stories of transformation like, uh, reading. They're cathartic in themselves, like you get so excited or at least I got so excited about the possibility and what you're doing with sama Hope and like the ability to fund the surgery and see how directly you do it. you're impacting someone, I mean it's pretty incredible and very quick, it connects two things for me, so you said when you were 20 that you went through some pretty horrible depression and you said it got so bad at one point that I wasn't sure if I was going to do it. figure it out, which is obviously pretty scary given especially what you've done with your life and then how much of the catharsis of that comes from similar individual stories of people that you've touched that I struggled with with nice things. severe depression when I was 20 I had a year in college when my aunt and one of my best friends committed suicide and that happened at the same time, yes she was my roommate, she was my blockmate, we were in the same group accommodation and we had very similar backgrounds and very similar relationships with her parents, so um, and both my aunt and this young woman were incredibly beautiful, incredibly bright, like the ones you least know, you would imagine the least likely to take their own lives, so that was such. it was a huge burden to bear that and at that time you know therapy and counseling wasn't as well known maybe as it is now and there weren't a lot of resources so I didn't seek that out and at the same time that was happening.

I was under tremendous financial pressure, my parents had divorced 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 study load and then maybe add more. 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 knew that I would go there and interview people with machete wounds to the head from this horrible genocide. talking about having seen their children murdered in front of them, so I didn't even understand the concept of PTSD and you know that if you are exposed to people who have suffered serious trauma, you yourself can take that on, so it was just really , it was a disaster after these few years and then I graduated and moved to New York City.

I took a management consulting job just so I could pay the bills and hopefully learn about business. I knew I wanted to create a business that would helpto the people and ideally a company that would hire poor people and lift them out of poverty, but these were difficult times. I was often alone as a consultant, getting up at four in the morning on a Monday to fly to some random city and spending most of my time there. time alone in hotel rooms, so it all added up and at one point it just exploded and I went through some very dark times.

Anyone who has been through depression knows what I mean and I guess what got me out of it was that I feel very blessed to be able to find a career that nourishes me spiritually. I feel like when your core spiritual values ​​or your morality are aligned with what you spend most of your time on, it creates this. I don't know this oneness in your soul and I feel like having that has been a cornerstone of my life. It's what I often go back to when I'm really struggling or when I'm feeling down. I would literally like to go back and read I have an archive in my gmail of inspiring stories from our workers, stories that people will send me about their own transformation or stories that our center managers will send me and when I'm feeling down I'll go back and read them.

Just to connect, I also think that connecting with other people who are suffering, there's all this research, that empathizing with someone who maybe has it even worse than you can ease your own burden, and as much as possible when you were in those states. I would try to immerse myself in topics related to global poverty or understand what life was like for someone who had it even worse, you know, who might be fighting depression but living on two dollars a day and also fighting HIV or some other problem. and so. It would help me get out of this.

You said you have a four-level process for dealing with things. I'm putting those words out there, but it was a four-step process. One of them was meditation, walking through all four, which would be really fascinating. but what I found super interesting was that your brother is a just crazy, totally crazy astrophysicist and you said that thinking about nature, thinking about space, is like thinking about something bigger than the human problems that I'm struggling with, it relieves, It's really interesting to see that. in a way it reflects so much on a human level, even just finding someone you know fighting bigger than you and then even coming out of that and seeing how small we are and yes, you said that less you looked at the telescope on Saturn and it gave you the feeling It sounds like it would reduce stress and pressure, so what's that four-step process?

Sure, and I think I might have forgotten I wrote this. I know there was meditation and mindfulness. Stepping back and contemplating nature is very useful. and now there's all this new evidence showing that when we spend time in nature the Japanese call it forest bathing there's a term for it there's actually documented benefits from neuroscience that your brain chemistry changes when you're exposed to desert Mi Our own point of view is that we become aware of our smallness and how irrelevant these small worries are from day to day. You know, you will be angry. You know, I often get angry because of something someone said to me at the office or because of some political issue. that's happening, you know, in my group of friends or some other problem, I'm stuck in traffic and I'll forget it, wait a minute, okay, at the end of the day I come from Stardust, I'll be Stardust again, none of this matters at all .

The only thing that really matters is love, you know, loving people and being loved yourself and I think everything else is kind of gravy, so it's helpful to remember that and contemplate vast expanses in space or, for me , it's really the ocean that I spend a lot of time in the ocean as much as possible. I'm a California person at heart which really helps me center myself and remind me how insignificant my worries really are. I also talk about exercise for myself. Various forms of exercise are totally cathartic. very wired and a bit manic, so I'm like a little hamster, if I don't get the energy out of my hamster wheel, it'll probably spread everywhere, so I kitesurf, I do yoga, I like it a lot. dance, I find that rhythmic activity really helps and can be really relaxing and therapeutic, and then I don't know if I talk about this in that article, but for me therapy and training has been a huge help, I don't think we talk about it enough therapy I believe that if we are willing to hire a coach for better athletic performance, why wouldn't we hire a coach for better emotional performance and to deepen and improve our relationships?

What are some of the key things you've gained from training? Someone who was watching right now was going to pull out some key things, what would be the most important to me? Being like a passionate and hot-blooded entrepreneur is the concept of pause, so inserting a pause before answering is probably the most useful for at least in my relationships with my colleagues with my partner with my friends I am always tempted to run a mile a minute and respond immediately when I hear something I'm quite resourceful I like to think on my feet I have that business hustle and that's why I'm very tempted to respond immediately.

The worst decisions I have ever made. The worst comments. The most damage I have done to relationships or my businesses is when I responded that way. and without pausing, it's really interesting, you actually have a great story about this with the guy who wrote and said you're destroying America, you're outsourcing all of our jobs to India, essentially, it's your fault and you wrote to him the cruel email but you didn't send it and then what happens from there. I'm so happy you brought that up. I'll never forget Joe from Ohio and he wrote this email because he saw a PSA we had done on Hulu.

I literally liked taking these images on my phone of these refugees who we trained in this horrible refugee camp called dadaab in Kenya, where people are literally living in the most avoidable suffering. I mean, it's just tragic to see and we show them this. refugees how to do digital work and they were doing a pilot program with Microsoft, which I thought was the most inspiring. Here are these people who help themselves and don't depend on help or charity, that's why we posted this ad and I get this email so soon. when the ad started going live and I put it in the middle of a really tough day, like we had been turned down by another funder, at the time I was sleeping on my ex-boyfriend's futon because I had no money, bless him, he's still a good friend. and um, I got this email and the subject of the email was "you're ruining America" ​​and I felt really hit by that because here I am trying to help people, it's a non-profit, I'll never be like a billionaire millionaire of this, this business and um and then my immediate response was to run away like a nasty guy like how dare you accuse me? email and then I fell asleep and didn't send it best advice pause the next morning I woke up feeling really different and did a quick Google search on Ohio unemployment statistics and found out that Ohio had been hit hard by the recession, this It was 2009 and I thought let me respond with compassion, so I wrote to Joe and said, "Dear Joe, you know?" I'm sorry you feel that way, maybe you're right.

Do you have any ideas about how we could adapt our digital work model here in the US? I would love to help communities like yours and your response to my email was night and day. He responded to me and said thank you very much for his kind response. I'm very sorry for saying what I said. I'm very frustrated. I lost my job recently. I live in a community where much of the factory work is gone. overseas and we're fighting and eventually it fell off the map, but it inspired me to go to my board of directors at samasource and say what could we do to fight national poverty, how can we be an organization that doesn't just attack this. problem internationally, but maybe be more thoughtful and creative in applying it here, yes, that surprised me a lot, so I knew you were doing things internationally, but I had no idea that you had started and that it is in Arkansas right now rural. in the Mississippi Delta we started there and in fact we eventually closed that branch of the program because it wasn't working and I can tell you all about that, but now it operates in San Francisco and New York.

It's called sama school. Wow, so what is it? Salma School, so the idea behind Zama School is that if you look at the American economy, it is very different from the economy of, say, Kenya or Uganda, so the model that we have working abroad doesn't exactly work here. , it's different, it has a different flavor. here, all of the net job growth in the last decade has been in the gig economy, so this is basically shrinking everything from gig economy jobs like lyft and uber and taskrabbit and field nation to gig work for companies, and that's just partially exploded because younger workers want more flexibility in the jobs they have, they don't necessarily want to work nine to five for 40 years and then get a pension at the end, those jobs have disappeared, so We developed the first gig economy training for low-income people. - income Americans and what we are trying to do is help modernize the training of our workforce in this country that is so outdated that we are training people to do jobs that disappeared a decade ago and are not coming back, so we are our La philosophy is why try to buck the trend, let's understand that this is what is happening and then how can we make the most vulnerable people in our society successful on these platforms?

Wow, that's amazing, what do you say to people who say you're a saint? You don't know me well enough, I'm definitely not a saint. I'm just telling you to also talk to my colleagues and they will be polite. You know, I have a passion for doing this kind of work. It's almost a selfish passion because it makes me really feel. Well, maybe it's the feeling other people get when they go to church or volunteer for me. This is like my soul food. How did people respond? You gave an amazing speech that I would love for you to pick up on the central thesis but you gave a speech about how mlk gandhi are not saints they are real people and as it goes on you started the speech by saying I'm about to get a lot of haters so what I'm going to say and then you said something, I thought it made them more interesting, but what was your thesis that when we put people on pedestals like saints, we turn them into others, we turn them into, you know, we think? of ourselves as ourselves and humble and we think of them as these holy people who are somehow different from us and therefore we have no moral obligation to do the things that they are doing because they are uniquely equipped, let us remember that Some of the most famous and prominent social leaders were not perfect.

Mlk was a known cheater. He cheated on his wife regularly. Unfortunately, Gandhi, um, is well known in India, he was really very cruel to his wife. There's even a play I saw about it. It was a bit of a shock and I guess the moral of the story is that no one is a saint. You know, even when they are canonized, there is an entire book criticizing Mother Teresa's work and I don't say this to tear it down. our heroes, I think what those three people have done is truly heroic and great and should be celebrated.

I see this because it is important that we do not exempt ourselves from the moral duty to act, we all have that duty to act. They don't have to be perfect, these people are not genetically different, um, and I think that's another problem with this pedestal thing, is that when we put people on pedestals, we start to nitpick and say, well, if he either she wears a nice dress and she can't care about poverty because she is too consumed by her own appearance or in the case of Mlk, you know, a lot of people tried to take him down because he had a great sense of style, I think those two things They are not incompatible. you can have, you can have an interest in fashion and the desire to make aesthetic choices that suit your tastes and at the same time consider poverty to be morally objectionable and want to do something about it.

People who work in the service of humanity do not need to do so. to be saints, we do not need to put them on pedestals, it is not necessary for them to take vows of poverty. I think when we say that and do that, everyday people feel like they could never get into this field and that's part of the problem, yeah, I love that style and that's a constant theme that I've seen in everything you've done. written, what you've talked about, in the interviews you've done, it's like, look, I want to do good in the world and I also want to be a badass girl, so I want to roll around and do something amazing and you said oh God, you were talking of humility and you said look, Elon Musk isToo humble, no, and we want it to be like what he judged me to be. my results not because of my attitude that's not the word you used but it was like where you were going with that what do you think about humility?

How can we harness a little courage to draw attention to important causes? I think it's very 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 it's not a human right, we expect them to behave like characters in the Bible or something and, as a result, We get very demoralized. knowing that our entire image of them is removed when we hear that they spent a certain amount of money on an outfit or that there have been so many removals of social entrepreneurs in the media or non-profits doing good for some reason maybe it's because the People assume that if you're doing well in the world you're a bit self-righteous and put down others, there's a kind of desire to tear people down and I think that's unfortunate.

There are so many examples of truly corrupt purely for-profit entrepreneurs who have done much worse, I think they are under much less scrutiny than the relatively good social entrepreneurs who, as you know, are flawed humans as we all are and I guess my conclusion is I mean, try to be a little more balanced in our evaluations and look at the bigger picture, yeah. It's interesting, I like the notion of looking at the bigger picture and really starting to evaluate and actually this is the core of how you want let your nonprofit be judged, what the impact of the dollar spent is, so there you have it.

I've said that people will look at a nonprofit or a fancy party and say, "OMG, that's so gross," "how can you do that?", but what if doing so attracts people who simply invest? millions of dollars in something? and it has a hugely disproportionate effect. I think that's a really powerful way to look at it and I see that I'm actually interested in hearing your details, but your move has moved you at least with lux towards a for-profit company. I have worked. at the x award meeting i spoke with peter diamandis, who i know you know, and about the frustrations of the nonprofit world and i have chosen, so i like to think that what we are doing in impact theory, ultimately Ultimately, it will have a lot of social good, but to me it's absolutely like I wouldn't even do it if I couldn't make a profit and I'm just being honest, like if you say whatever you want about me, I don't give a damn. to have a lasting impact I want it to be interesting to me and I want it to be I want to touch the lives of hundreds of millions, if not north of a billion people, it would be absolutely incredible, but I am driven by both the right and the entitlement to do so. .

Pretending I'm not driven by one seems crazy. Plus, there's so much power in being able to be self-sufficient that you don't have to ask anyone for anything, frankly, let alone money, which made you transition into the for-profit world with lux. To me, since it's still so socially driven, what does it look like? It's so interesting. I think part of the problem is that, especially here in the United States, we have a very bifurcated view between nonprofits and for-profits. -Profit means maximizing your profits at the expense of everything else, which means if you're going to make more money, you're going to pollute the stream, you're going to use slaves in the supply chain, you're going to do any number of things that are bad for everyone. that's right so we think okay a company's job is to make as much money as possible and then maybe there will be excess that can be donated at the end of the day and then it gets donated here to these no. -Profits, which are generally cashless, rely solely on grants and donations and the whims of very rich people to solve all the problems these profit-maximizing companies are creating.

This is such a flawed system, right? The real answers are in the In the middle, the real answers are in the companies that are actively trying to solve a social or environmental problem and do it in a sustainable way, and there is a wide range of these companies and we are starting to see them emerge both in the The nonprofit side as well as the for-profit side, if you think about it like the Girl Scouts sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cookies every year, it's a very viable business. Organizations like Goodwill and the Salvation Army support a large portion of their operations by employing low-income people. people in their stores numbering in the hundreds of millions.

I think goodwill is actually billions of dollars in terms of sales in their stores and we don't think of that as a social enterprise, but that's where all the cool stuff is on social media. If there will be an impact, 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 protected environmental stance. You know, tons of acres of donated wildland. You know more than probably most companies. I have to do it with environmental groups and that's a for-profit company, so I think this bifurcated view that we have of nonprofits versus for-profits is a little bit old school and, again, they're The conversions are the most exciting.

Abstracting for a second from the general social angle on entrepreneurship, what have you learned in the last 10 years? I imagine it's legion, so the best advice I've heard is from Ben Horowitz, don't get carried away 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 believe that the most valuable and valuable things in life are just the result of a lot of you know, a painful failure and durable, um and so on. that's the first one, the second one, I think it's, I found that pausing is like 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 that I own. A lot of entrepreneurial people constantly inspire me with the things that I see and, uh, and being able to pause and breathe before making decisions is probably, you know, saved me a lot of headaches and then, and then the third thing is that I get a lot of PR. and a lot of fame and glory for building sama, but really everything we have achieved is due to the people who took the leap to join me. I mean, I can't express how risky it was for our first employees to like you.

They quit their normal paying jobs and came to work for me. I just saw one of them today reading a book. She was the person who opened her office in East Africa and Jen, you know, she would call me in the middle of the night and say things like Oh, by the way, a ship dropped anchor on the Internet cable heading to East Africa, so so the Internet will not work for the foreseeable future. We are an Internet-based company. I mean crazy things like that would happen and if I didn't have Jen. On the ground in East Africa we would not have been successful 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 who can be charismatic is wonderful, but you need to have the team. who can operate the business day to day and somehow keep it under control, so I've been very fortunate to have the most amazing people who are willing to give up much higher paying jobs and opportunities and come work for us and what Do you look for it specifically when you're hiring? Are there certain traits? Characteristics, I would say, um, so the first thing is that you know competence, um, so I think that can be demonstrated in a number of ways, but it's usually pretty easy for me to know.

If 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 get into the nitty-

grit

ty very quickly. Often, what kind of metrics do you look for to know? If you are succeeding in whatever you are doing, what would you know? What did you do at your previous company? What are you most proud of? What was the biggest struggle you had? So I asked questions that try to quickly determine if someone is competent. To do that job, attribute number one. The second one I find for companies with a social mission is understanding someone's core motivation.

How can you know that, like most people who come to work in social enterprises, they had a transformative life experience? I can not tell you. How many people will say that one of my parents died or that someone close to me became seriously ill or that I battled an illness or struggled with depression? I had some kind of traumatic or serious event in my life that called into question how I spent my time and that basically made it clear that I couldn't implement my value system in my work and that created this disharmony and a lot of our best people who have been with us the longest are the people who had those kinds of transformational events in life and decided to leave work and do something meaningful and invest fully and it can be very difficult.

I think often with social and environmental impact companies you're running the same race as everyone else, but you're kind of deliberately doing yourself a disservice by putting these extra limitations on yourself. in your business, so getting through that can be so difficult that it means you often don't get enough sleep because you're dealing with a work issue in Nairobi that a normal business wouldn't have because they wouldn't. hire people who come from the slums and deal with all these other issues, so you really need to find people who are exceptionally committed, beyond the thrill of doing their job, exceptionally committed to the mission, and when you find those people who are basically like missionaries because of what they do.

I think the most satisfying thing for me has been seeing people invest as much or even more than me in the company and that was a real turning point in seeing people who were willing to care more about sama. of what you know, of what it was at a certain time and, as an entrepreneur, that is perhaps the most satisfying feeling. What happened first? I'll call it the first year, but it was actually before the company existed, when you were trying to get people on board because One of the number one things I get asked is: What's the first step?

How do I start? Do not know anyone. I have no money. What I do? How did you overcome it tactically? Yeah, I mean, I think um. Another good tip is side hustle so I started the business plan for samasource when I was working as a management consultant and I started working on it in the evenings and on weekends and really because I was bored with my consulting job and I wanted to do something more significant i knew i wanted to build a social 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 saw speeches made by other social entrepreneurs and in this learning I created this business plan and applied for online contests.

I just sent the business plan. There was a social business challenge in Amsterdam that I found on the internet and I sent in the application and lo and behold, they called me. I went to the semi-finals and got one of those big checks. I received 22,000 euros from that competition and at that moment 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 get first place in any of them, um and uh, and that was another like fourteen thousand dollars, and I put it together and did that stretch for over a year um in building and building zamasu from the beginning, how you like me?

How do you decide which books to read? What Internet searches are you doing? I literally think people like it, okay, I heard Lila say I need to like it, go see. I need the speeches I need to read books, but what books, how the speeches, where do they begin? Yeah, well, Amazon's recommendations are pretty good, so yeah, yeah, they're amazing things that you've already read, yeah, so if you want, check it out. In what muhammad yunus has written, they will suggest other books in similar categories. Personally I found inspiration in entrepreneurs. I read a lot of books about entrepreneurship and the journey people have been on.

In fact, I posted a list of books on my medium account if anyone is curious. um my 108 life changing books, artwork and I think I even have some podcasts and music on there alright we'll have to check it out actually where would you put your name in the middle and then it would show up? Everything will appear fine, perfect, so you're reading, reading, reading, taking in information, but you don't stop there. You actually like to put it into action. Do you remember what was the first really tangible thing you did? Yeah, I mean, me. He was no stranger to the hustle and bustle of the right, so I think one of thebenefits of having immigrant parents is that you are used to taking action all the time and I think almost to the extreme I have this paranoia about one day being on the street. and not having enough money and not being able to survive and like always I've always been doing things and trying hard 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 thought if I got the money from these business plan contests and start winning some contracts and really economize and reduce my expenses and maybe take on an extra tutoring job, that's what I did in the first year of sama to keep things going , then at least I can have something resembling a business, so I put this plan into motion.

I remember asking a professor friend I had worked with if he could get some kind of access to university. that he was teaching at stanford and I was like, look, I'm not going to go to grad school, but could you tell me that you could make me a visiting scholar or something so that I have something resembling an official title? I don't look to everyone like I'm just a crazy person and I quit my job and I'm starting this crazy nonprofit, so he gave me a library card and I became a visiting scholar at Stanford's global justice program.

Basically because I asked him and because he's a very generous person, he didn't come with money, but I think it helped to be part of that Stanford community, even from an emotional perspective. This was before the days of coworking, so it was pretty lonely. start something on your own and at that time all my friends were joining Facebook as early employees um and uh and it was hard it was like they were home schooled um when all your friends are part of high school cool walk me through of that. that had to be hard since your friends are early employees at Facebook and they're making careers, like how did you handle that comparison, so there wasn't anything like that that wasn't part of the emotionally difficult part of getting started is seeing people get started. to make money even though it hadn't cracked and become what we think of today, but um, I imagine that wouldn't be too easy since you're struggling to get this thing off the ground, you're struggling to make ends meet, people are writing.

Are you saying you're destroying America when none of this is for money to like? What advice would you give to someone who is in the middle of that path and is looking at someone who took the more traditional path? It's easier maybe you have had children and can support the family. What would you say? It was very difficult to hold on to them. At one point, my best friend who works in finance took a month off between jobs and moved to San Francisco just to be near me because I think he was really worried. This was at my lowest point. when I was 20 years old, I referred to that depression, um, what really helped me was going back to the stories of the people that we were helping because they were just providing me with this lifeline.

I got an email one year around Christmas time from one of the people who ran our job center who worked primarily with women who came from inner cities and she said lyle, I just want to tell you the story of this woman who is a mother. single and likes what she has been able to do for her children and you may not see it, but I am here in Nairobi. I see this every day. I can't tell you what a difference you personally have made in the lives of all these people and I am so grateful that it was just a simple Christmas card and I cried when I read that I needed to hear that at the time I stuck it on my wall.

I still refer to those types of letters all the time and to me that's worth a lot more than money. You know, I think some people live their entire lives. lives and they don't get that kind 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, you know, compensation, yeah, no joke, so one from The most interesting things to me in your story is actually when you were 17, when you went to Ghana, I think you explained that to us, so one time while I was doing a live stream, people asked questions and I answered them in real time and someone said you know I would like to, I want to do something with my life, what do I do?

I've been reading I've been through all this and I just lost my and I thought just act would you like that for God's sake? just go do something and I said: if you've always been thinking about going to Africa and you like to do something good, book a ticket today and go tonight, stop thinking about it, just go and of course the review was: are you out of your mind that you can't tell people to just book a flight to Africa like you need vaccines if nothing like this is a crazy city and I thought that was fine, but at the same time I would rather that person roll the dice and take a risk and go than spend the rest of your life trapped in paralysis you're 17 like you roll around without having any connection not knowing where you're going or what you're doing um how did you make that work how you did it? finding the courage what was that all about um well first of all it's funny because everyone was like to my parents oh my god you're negligent your daughter will get hurt like rural Ghana is probably the safest place in the world , as much safer. that in urban Los Angeles, my neighbors as soon as I moved were always looking out for me, their first goal was to make me fat because I said I was too skinny, I would never find a husband if I continued like this and they would. like bringing me the excess, you know, cassava and things from the farms.

I remember the first day I got there, a little girl came running with a plastic cup and I looked at my host mom, I was keeping this, these grandparents actually made this. They work for fun basically they got these foreign volunteers and then this girl comes with this cup and she has eggs in the cup and she says something I don't understand and she looks at me expectantly with this cup and I say why why why why is she giving me eggs? and my host mother explained to me that eggs are a very precious commodity here?

These chickens often don't lay many eggs because they don't have enough nutrition and so they are giving you the most valuable thing their family has. to welcome them, so there was an incredible welcome and generosity and it made it very easy, in fact the most difficult thing was returning home. I had a reverse culture shock. Culture shock going to Harvard from Ghana, where everyone was super friendly and smiling all the time. and then getting to Harvard, where it was much colder and harder to survive and there was a much more "dog eat dog" atmosphere, which is really interesting.

In fact, you have an amazing date. I'm almost sure I have the exact quote here. I have shaped my life around the fact that work is the best way to lift people out of poverty and that work is the core of human dignity, but it is not all there is, in the context of what You just said, it's real. I find it jarring to hear him describe human warmth, human connection, and then go to a place like Harvard, in Western civilization, and feel more distant, more disconnected, and ultimately that becomes the beginning of the emotional. anguish that you go through, how do we reconcile that?

What are your thoughts on the disconnection from 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 these Western ideals, that's pretty fascinating, I know, and it's such a strange juxtaposition because, you know, I find that some of my happiest times 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 are the rural areas of northern Uganda, which is just stunning, is pristine. You know, I've had so many incredible experiences of a deep connection to the land but also to people and I think there's a certain vulnerability that comes with it. of not having many things when you are 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 you know that there is this social capital that helps people overcome that and It's difficult 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 other hand, there are things like, for example, "do you really know what is the avoidable suffering in healthcare," and I remember talking to a doctor in Kampala who told me that he regularly watched people die in his hospital because the hospital didn't have enough sutures, so people came to like they had an accident on the street and they were literally bleeding to death because the hospital had no stitches, so that's the kind of thing that should never happen in 2017, not on our watch, right?

I also think we are learning more and more that more money after a certain level does not equal more happiness or a more fulfilled life. This is something I want to talk about before I get to my final question and that is your notion of untapped potential, so I have literally, accidentally, taken exactly zero credit for this, in fact, going back to your notion that a Sometimes you're selfish ends up with really great results for extra credit. I started working in the inner cities of America, so they say, "Hey, who wants extra credit?" like a weirdo for getting good grades, so I raised my hand and they sent me to a school in the south central to teach first.

I was teaching oceanography and then they asked me again who wanted to give me credit and they did it one by one. and that one on one relationship that I got into with this little boy named Rashaan um turned into an eight and a half year relationship just because I made him a promise that I would help him with his homework and so it becomes All this and like that moment I had no concept that this child is changing me as a human being on a deep and fundamental level, true, but I don't understand that I'm 19 years old, but he's leaving. this indelible mark on my life and then I continue my crazy entrepreneurial journey going through periods where I realize okay, I've been chasing money and for me maybe not for everyone, but for me it was like it was just crushing me. the soul and that's why I needed to do it. connecting with something again, people of humanity, kind of like when you were talking about that juxtaposition of being in rural Ghana and then coming to Harvard, that's how I felt in the business world, chasing money versus actually connecting. with people and I wanted to connect and So in the end, we created search nutrition out of that desire to connect and add value to all of that, but, again, without meaning to, I find myself in the center of cities because that's where you can afford 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 pulling from a local population and here I am again with these just amazing people and I used to say I'm pulling astronauts and I don't I don't know why that was like a con to me as a kid, like an astronaut, like you could never be an astronaut, right, that was like an unattainable dream and I thought these guys could be what they are, they're just as smart.

Like me, I'll define smart as the ability to process raw data at a given speed, right, they could do it as fast as me, so I thought it's purely my opportunities, my way of thinking that sets me apart and you've talked about that. you said the problem is not potential, the problem is opportunity, guide us through that and then what awaits us on the other side when these people can express their potential? Sure, it's just like you said that talent is distributed equitably and opportunities are not, and we live in a world where more than two billion people live on less than three dollars a day and that number is adjusted according to purchasing power, so That's what three dollars can buy in an American city in modern times, so imagine what that means, I'm serious.

It means you are living in a constant state of scarcity. Now we know that there is a very interesting book called scarcity that talks about how scarcity reshapes your brain. They took Fortune like I think Fortune 500 CEOs and had some of them volunteer for a study where they basically voluntarily starved them for a week and these guys stopped being able to make good long-term decisions in Everyone because their brain chemistry focuses on finding food, it focuses on what is scarce, so when people live in a constant state of scarcity, it is not possible to let them know what we would consider good decisions.

They are trapped in a state of suffering and do not reach their full human potential. That is just tragic and it is tragic not only on an individual level, it is tragic in the sense that this is the greatestnatural 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 discovering how we can exploit the talent of the billions of people below who have been left festering and I think it's a tremendous loss for the world and so for me I think it's very exciting to be able to go to places like Nairobi or Uganda and see people shine, see people who could easily be astrophysicists if they had the chance and, hopefully getting them down the path where they can reach more of their human potential and it's the most personally satisfying job that I could ever imagine having and I think as a society when we do this, we know that we also feel more collectively fulfilled, yeah , it's interesting.

I used to tell people that I'm looking for Elon Musk's next 100,1000 and what the world looks like when you have so many people who can play at that level, so I totally get it before asking that last bit. question, where can these guys find you online lilajana.com? I'm on Facebook at lila janna and then on Givework.org where I talk about samasource and luxme perfect and we'll leave it all in the show notes. Okay, final question. This is a big one for you and it was clear in the interview, but what impact do you want to have on the world?

The world's 2,000 largest companies spend $12 trillion a year on goods and services, dwarfing international aid and charity budgets if we could allocate even a little of that money to social enterprises that provide jobs. We could lift millions of people out of poverty very quickly without even changing corporate business models. I think there is a lot of potential in providing work, not only on an individual level. Not only do we choose brands that do good in the world, but companies choose to source goods and services from these types of suppliers and that is the next evolution of our mission.

I love it. Thank you very much guys. You're going to want to read this book. It's absolutely incredible. The 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 it. world is that she talks about that fascinating balance that she mentioned earlier between really wanting to do good by being who you are, bringing the full weight of your personality, understanding what works in for-profit companies and delivering it and demanding that we be able to do it. in the service of a greater good and that there is no compromise, you are not giving up something by doing that and that is what attracted me to his world, if you know me, you know that everything is results, baby, and that's it.

It's the only thing you should focus on and from the beginning that's what she's talking about, you have to look at the result that people are getting from these, it doesn't matter if they're an NGO, it doesn't matter if they're a non-profit organization. profit or for profit, you need to look at the results they deliver. People are helping, what can they do with a dollar? And that's what surprises me. She's setting the world on fire in two ways: One, she's creating best-in-class companies and that's something I didn't ask her enough. When you dive in, you'll see that she creates products that people really want, products that people really want, she solves problems and she does it in a way that's humanity and that's it, man, it's a new way of doing business and I think that she is a vanguard, jump on over and see what it's about because it's really good, guys if you haven't already make sure to subscribe and until next time my friends will be legendary, take care.