Trust the World

Advice from Women Who Lead

I’m the founder and CEO of a nonprofit organization called Sama. We connect very low-income people to work over the Internet, through a model that nearly got me laughed out of the room when I introduced it, six and half years ago. We divvy up big technology projects from companies like Microsoft and Google into various small tasks, and then we teach extremely low-income women and youth how to do those tasks. That model has lifted about 27,000 people out of poverty since we started.

I wanted to share three pieces of advice from a very rocky road. The first comes from my Belgian grandmother, whose name was Christiane. She hitchhiked around the world after World War II — starting with just $5 — over land, from Europe all the way to India, and eventually to the U.S. When my parents were buying their first house in the U.S. as new immigrants, and they were extremely afraid of signing this mortgage, she looked at them and said:

“The world is a vast and wondrous place. The world is beautiful. Trust the world.”

So that’s been amazing advice throughout the founding of Sama.

The second piece of advice is to question everything, all the way back to the first principles. Often, we think that things are the way they are because of intelligent design. Because somebody super-smart, or some group of academics, came up with the best system ever to do XYZ. Actually, things are often the way they are because of an accident of history. So it is our duty to challenge things and to make them better than they were in our parents’ generation.

My last piece of advice is to remember that in our quest to conquer the world, human beings are a combination of selflessness and self-interestedness. 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.

So that’s my last piece of advice to remember: that selflessness should be embedded in everything that we do. Thank you.