[REPLAY] The Power of Making Big Bets with Dr. Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller

SCS (Intro):

Big Bets, Big Big Bets is what we are all about in Billion Dollar Moves™. And this is exactly why I was so thrilled to have our next guest on the show, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Raj Shah leads one of the most respected institutions, with assets of more than $7.7 billion, working to solve global challenges with lasting impact by improving lives and the planet, unleashing human potential through innovation.

Appointed USAID Administrator by President Obama, he transformed the agency with high-impact partnerships and pivotal laws. With roles at the US Department of Agriculture, and yes, being one of the first few hires at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his influence spans global health to sustainable energy.

As son of immigrants from Detroit, Michigan, I was so inspired by our conversation on what it means to jump first, even if that could mean overstepping authority, building unlikely alliances for the bigger goal, and inspiring sustainable change at scale. I cannot wait for you to dig in.

SCS:

One of the earlier chapters of this book really pictures a very endearing scene of you about 36 years old, walking over to the Oval Office and overhearing then President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden talking about you with a little bit of concern that you might not be up for the job as the earthquake broke out.

Tell us a little bit more about how the son of Indian immigrants ended up in this context.

Raj Shah:

Well, I am the son of Indian immigrants, as you know. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. And just to fast forward to that specific moment, I had been appointed to run and just sworn in as the Administrator of USAID, which is America's primary humanitarian and development agency that carries out foreign policy on a global basis.

And one evening during my first week on the job, the Haiti earthquake happened. And it was in early 2010. And frankly, in just an instant, Haiti fell apart.

Nearly 200,000 people were trapped or missing and were at risk of losing their lives. 21 of 22 ministries had collapsed. The United Nations and its security force had collapsed.

And in that moment, the President asked me to lead a global humanitarian response, including our civilian and military efforts in Haiti. And so the next morning I worked all night, was up all night, back and forth into the White House Situation Room and figuring out some technical elements. But the next morning we had a briefing in the Oval Office and I was asked to brief the team, including the President and the Vice President.

So I get there a little bit early because you certainly don't want to be late for that. And as I walk in, Vice President Biden is looking out the window and talking to President Obama, the only two other people in the room. And he says, are you sure about putting this Raj Shah guy in charge?

Like, he's only been in the job a week. Haiti fell apart for a little bit and he's 30 something. President Obama thankfully saw me and walk in and came over and he said, Raj, come sit down.

And it was great. The meeting went well. Over the course of my time in service, both President Obama and Vice President Biden, now President Biden, became incredibly great mentors, bosses, supporters, and people from whom I got to learn and cherish those experiences.

But that feeling of imposter syndrome is one that I talk about many times in the book. And I know one that sometimes many of your listeners feel. And I just wanted to make it clear that everyone has those moments in their life and you just go forward the best you can.

SCS:

So we jump to the quick teaser here about your life and the highlights of your life. But how do we get to this point? You know, I mean, I know like you growing up with Asian parents, the limitations on what a good job would be doctor, lawyer, architect back in the day, engineer.

But you chose a very different path. Of course, you became a doctor as well. But how did you end up in this trajectory of your life?

Raj Shah:

So my list in my tight knit Indian American community in suburban Detroit didn't include architect or lawyer. It was just doctor or engineer. And my dad was an engineer, worked at Ford Motor Company for more than 30 years.

My mother was a Montessori school teacher. They had both come to this country with nothing other than education and educational scholarships and built a life for their kids to have opportunity. But the thinking was if you were able to, you should be a doctor or an engineer.

And that was it. And so I chose doctor and I was on my way to do that. And along the way, I just got so many different experiences where I got to learn about the world as it is and see extraordinary changemakers and leaders.

One of those experiences I write about in the book was when Nelson Mandela released from prison after 27 years in a wrongful incarceration, showed up, visited Detroit, which these superstar leaders went to New York and Los Angeles. Detroit, we didn't usually get those leaders. And he came to Ford Motor Company. He went to the Tiger Stadium and gave this speech over and over.

And at the end of every speech, he said, he was a reminder and he said, to the people of Detroit, I want to remind you that the people of South Africa, we admire you, we respect you, but above all, we love you. And I was a junior in high school watching this on TV and I just melted.

I was like, oh my gosh, if somebody who's been through so much struggle can express such warmth and love and aspiration, shouldn't we all try to do something impactful and meaningful with our lives? I just never knew how to get there.

SCS:

And how did you get there?

Raj Shah:

Well, I got a lot of trial and failure. I went to med school. That was fine, but not my passion. I volunteered on Al Gore's presidential campaign thinking that would be a pathway to the White House and a cool job in the West Wing being witty and impactful every day. There was a TV show at the time, I think called West Wing, that sort of highlighted how exciting that might be. But then we lost that election, in my mind, unfairly, but nevertheless, I was unemployed.

During that window of unemployment, a few things happened. One was I got a phone call from a former colleague on the campaign who said, Bill and Melinda Gates have just started this foundation. They're looking for a young person who also knows medicine and economics.

It turns out I fit that bill. I joined the Gates Foundation as one of its early employees and spent the next eight years working on efforts like childhood immunization around the world, addressing hunger at scale on a global basis, standing up global development programs.

One thing led to another and I ended up now running the Rockefeller Foundation, but also in the Obama administration.

SCS:

That's a great segue here. Your work with Bill and Melinda really set you up for this Big Bets mindset. It started with a persistent question that Bill Gates had for you and the wider team to solve a particular problem.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that fits into why we should avoid the aspiration trap and a little bit about this framework that you've come up with?

Raj Shah:

Well, the first lesson in the book is called Ask a Simple Question.

And the reason is when back in that early day, Bill and Melinda had made a big bet. They had said there are too many children around the world dying of preventable diseases.

There are vaccines that should be available to save these child lives. But those vaccines were only available in wealthy countries.

And in less wealthy countries, the kids were not getting them. And they said, this feels wrong. We should solve this problem.

And not just solve it for one child or one village or one community with charitable giving, but actually look at what would it take to change the structure of the global vaccine industry so enough volume of vaccines were produced at a low enough price point, so everyone could receive them?

What would it take for 70 countries that house the 40, 45 million kids every year who were not getting vaccinated to invest in human resources, put in place safe vaccination programs, build out refrigeration and cold chain so that you could vaccinate every child? And Bill's simple question, he would pull us into a conference room and over and over ask, what does it cost to vaccinate a single child? And everybody would say, well, it's too complex to think of it that way.

You know, there's, it varies across country, it varies across community. And some places you have to hire people and some place you have to buy refrigerators. And he just kept insisting on getting an answer.

And we spent years running spreadsheets until we had the answer. The reason that answer was so important was it allowed us to say, OK, this multiplied by the 104 million kids born every year is the total cost of annually vaccinating a birth cohort. And that’s the target.

And so we might think we have a lot of resources at this well endowed foundation, but it's actually just a drop in the bucket. And we have to think systemically about solving, not just incrementally improving upon these problems. And that's what a big bet is.

It's solving big global challenges, not just making incremental changes.

SCS:

Yeah, and I love how we landed on that. And I mentioned this earlier. Our audience is global, right?

Primarily funders and founders, next-generation leaders who are very active in the tech space in particular, who won't know as much as you do about philanthropy, the landscape here in America and how it's really, frankly, started a whole revolution of the role philanthropists can play in solving some of the world's toughest challenges, right? So tell us a little bit about where we are here today. Almost $500 billion was given away in charity last year.

There are more private foundations than ever. And yet, you know, when you turn on the news, American inequality is pretty clear, right? The streets of New York and San Francisco is very different and clearly something is wrong here.

What has gone wrong if, you know, we're looking outside in our own home is not where it should be?

Raj Shah:

I think, first of all, in global philanthropic giving, the amount of giving that's actually given for international inequity and inequality issues is actually very, very, very, very small. And so I think that's what you're articulating. The reality is it's odd because you get the best bang for your buck actually on buying outcomes related to reducing inequity through these kinds of global development efforts.

And that was part of the thinking that led to these big bets when we were back at the Gates Foundation on immunizing children.

We thought that was the most cost-effective way to save the most lives and had done the math and the analysis to do it. I write in the book also about efforts I led under the Obama administration after the 2008 food crisis to expand access to agricultural support, agricultural science and technology, and food and hunger programs that helped lift 100 million people out of hunger and poverty over the course of time by targeting the use of agricultural productivity improvement to eliminate poverty.

A proven strategy, but one that's deeply under-invested in and highly cost-effective relative to options. So a big part of what I write about in the book is that these problems can be solved and I hope readers will become both more knowledgeable about how to solve these problems but also become advocates that say, look, let's not succumb to the pessimism and the negativity that's in our news and in our social media. It's realistic to be optimistic about addressing hunger at scale, about addressing climate change in 80 countries that still house energy poor populations, about fighting for health outcomes for the world's poorest families and communities.

We know we can be successful, but it takes a Big Bet mindset to embark on these efforts.

SCS:

And I love how you talked a little bit in your book about sort of the giving it time as well, right? Part of the Big Bet mindset is having patience, thinking about problems from a systemic way versus a symptomatic way, which in fact may cause even bigger issues if we do it the wrong way and put capital where it shouldn't be. I'm curious to hear your thoughts here.

A lot of our audience are entrepreneurs. They are also increasingly trying to align profit and purpose. Where do you see the role of philanthropy globally versus the role of social enterprise or the way businesses should develop over time?

Raj Shah:

I think your audience is the most important audience for this way of thinking, for having a Big Bet mindset, because there are so many people who are entrepreneurial and by nature hopeful about the future. Right now, the world is undergoing, although I'll argue it's too limited in that respect, and the number of people that are accessing it, but the world is undergoing the largest economic transition we've had since the Industrial Revolution, which is the climate transition. That climate transition is rife with opportunity to actually address health, address hunger, address poverty, address energy access in a way that is fundamentally different than the tools we had at our disposal just 10, 15, 20 years ago.

So I would encourage philanthropic givers and thinkers, impact investors, and entrepreneurs to collaborate and work together to figure out how can technologies on the cutting edge of the climate transition actually be technologies that can also address poverty and inequity at scale. And Rockefeller has made our biggest bet in our 115-year history to bring renewable energy technologies to the billion people that still live in deep, deep energy poverty. They just don't have access to affordable electricity that is sustainable and that helps them grow small businesses, create jobs, and begin to move out of poverty.

And we think we can solve that problem using some new solutions our teams have helped invent with entrepreneurs in India, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Nigeria, in parts of Latin America.

SCS:

Yeah, and can you give us a highlight about that? Talk to us a little bit about some of the exciting ideas that you can share with us.

What are these entrepreneurs on the ground doing and how have they really taken on that Big Bet mindset that you talk about?

Raj Shah:

It really is about a whole host of partners that have adopted the Big Bet mindset. Starting with some early Rockefeller teammates of mine that pioneered kind of seeing whether solar panels and batteries and new types of smart meters and mobile phone-based payment could all be brought together in solutions that we called mini-grids that could provide power in rural Bihar and northern India or provide power in northeast Nigeria in a way that didn't require grid connectivity, didn't require public utilities to serve these very poor populations, but gave enough reliable power to these populations they could create jobs and move out of poverty. And you know what?

They endured five, six years of failure because the price was too high, the projects didn't work really well. But over time, the solar panels came down in cost, the batteries got much better, people learned how to use artificial intelligence to manage these battery and energy management systems from afar. And all of a sudden, they started providing power at 20 cents a kilowatt hour to people whose only alternative was diesel generation at maybe 70 or 80 cents a kilowatt hour.

And what did we see happen? Women bought sewing machines and started tailoring businesses. Families invested in agricultural processing.

You could keep the lights on in health and medical clinics, creating both jobs and better health outcomes. Girls could learn at night and schools could run night schools with lighting. And I've had the chance to visit these communities all over the world.

Today, we're reaching 20 million people basically with these types of services based on distributed renewable electrification.

And we think that's a set of solutions that can be scaled up to a billion people. And that's why we launched this Big Bet, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, mobilized about $11.5 billion of blended finance for making those investments and are on the search for entrepreneurs and developers and partners to work with all over the world.

SCS:

I absolutely love that. And you know, in particular, I've always been amazed by in all of your work in building alliances. And yet when you were a little bit younger than you are now, you had overstepped the balance a little bit in forming an alliance.

Can you share a little bit about what it means to jump first, head first, and what are the results that, you know, the great results that you can get from that mindset?

Raj Shah:

Well, you know, Sarah, so many of your listeners are entrepreneurs who are comfortable taking risk. And often in the social sector and in putting together these big public-private solutions, it's very, very hard to take risk. And nobody really wants to go first, but everybody is willing to follow after someone has demonstrated something could work.

And we sort of found ourselves in that position when we were back about 20 years ago, trying to figure out how to reshape the global vaccine industry to create enough supply to vaccinate every child on the planet. And we had done some work with a group of innovative financial thinkers on Wall Street, structured something called the International Finance Facility for Immunization, effectively the first social impact bond for global health. And we wanted a group of European countries to pile in and help us issue this new bond to reshape the global vaccine industry.

Huge ambition, well beyond our scale. No one in the world knew if this thing would work. And so one night I sort of overstepped my own authority at the time.

I was basically a young professional at the Gates Foundation.

And I suggested that the foundation could guarantee the bond issuance as a way of sort of encouraging others to say, yes, let's try this. In the back of my mind thinking if everybody did say yes and try it, we might not need the guarantee and everything would be okay.

So I made that commitment well overstepping my own authority.

Thankfully, it did bring others to the table. And President Chirac of France and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the UK and then half a dozen other European governments.

And by the time years later the bond was issued, no guarantee was necessary. And it raised $6 billion. It allowed us to create different types of contracts for vaccines.

Twenty years later, 980 million kids have been vaccinated and more than 16 million child lives have been saved. And that's an extraordinary outcome for that and other initiatives that contributed to that. But it started by jumping first.

And I'm trying to encourage readers of the book to have the encouragement to take some additional risks, particularly in the social impact work.

SCS:

And this is a challenge that a lot of us face, right? You know, frankly, a lot of social entrepreneurs find fundraising. Well, fundraising in general for everyone is difficult unless you're Adam Newman.

But for social entrepreneurs in particular, it is very difficult. And so partnership sounds like that could be the big solution for a lot of us. How do you do this effectively?

Raj Shah:

Big bets require three core ingredients, fresh, innovative solutions, unlikely partnerships and alliances, and a real focus on data results, measurement and tracking. And people often forget about the unlikely partners and alliances piece. So I'm really glad you asked that question.

The truth is, the chapter in the book where I write about one of these collaborations is called Make It Personal, because I think what I've really learned over time, when it all is said and done, the reality of what makes unlikely partnerships possible is the personal relationships and really getting to know people and really connecting with people so that you can be a good partner. I write about it from my time in government and an experience I had when we were trying to get bipartisan legislative support for basic idea that America should lead the world in fighting hunger and food insecurity. And without getting into all the details, I had made some missteps on Capitol Hill that got me into a very partisan space, a lot of critique by Republicans and conservative Republicans.

And as part of apologizing for that and learning about it, I spent a lot of time with some very, very conservative members of Congress and the House. And a lot of that was not fruitful, but some of it really led to these really deep personal relationships, friendships where we traveled together, we understood each other's values, we prayed together. I was invited to deliver the keynote address at something called the National Prayer Breakfast.

And ultimately, we passed the Global Food Security Act with strong bipartisan support. And it's been reauthorized twice since I left government because that support has persisted. I would just offer that sometimes in order to really build bridges and build alliances, you have to have these deep personal relationships and you have to invest in building them if you want to lead Big Bets.

SCS:

Yeah, one angle that I actually thought was interesting for Rockefeller Foundation to have taken and with your leadership as well was working with Mitch Landrieu and the Confederate statues back in the day. I mean, that was a whole thing in New Orleans. Can you tell us a little bit about that thinking and what the bounds would be for philanthropy and especially in the midst of huge polarization all across the globe?

Where do you take a stand? Where do you not? How do you decide on which bet to take?

Raj Shah:

Well, that's an excellent question. And frankly, in my role now as the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, I get to bet on other people's big bets. And I get to support other people's aspirations for creating change in our world.

And Mitch Landrieu was an outstanding mayor of New Orleans who had spent several years actually working with community leaders and community members across New Orleans to have a discussion about these four Confederate statues that had been put up not actually during the Confederate War, but maybe 40 years later, largely to commemorate acts of violence against black Americans, including the terrorist destruction of the integrated police force in that town. So Mitch had worked with these community leaders. They jointly decided they should take down these statues that were really represented a hateful part of their history and they put resources in place to do it.

And just as they were going to get going, someone, probably a white supremacist group, had car bombed, actually a Lamborghini for those who care about cars, of the contractor who was going to do the work. And the contractor pulled out of the proiect and Mitch asked me on mv verv first visit to New Orleans as Rockefeller president for kind of quick support to step in and complete this project, despite the fact costs had gone up and they needed a contractor from out of state and all of that.

And I made the decision to do so against really the advice of many peers and partners because we didn't really know all the details of what was happening there.

We also didn't know what kind of security consequence would exist for us as a nation. And we certainly weren't prepared to protect ourselves. But at the end of the day, it just felt like Mitch had done the work of a big bet.

He had identified a solution to a problem. He had built unlikely partnerships and worked with communities deeply for years. And he actually had a vision of what results would look like.

Maybe not in quantitative term, but taking these statues down and expanding to a national dialogue around race and symbols across this country. So to make a long story short, we did that. He took them down.

It led to a national conversation. And that, of course, became codified in our minds around Charlottesville many years later, which was an important inflection point in American race relations. But sometimes you just bet on other big bettors and you give them a chance to realize their full potential.

SCS:

Yeah, it speaks a lot to how philanthropy, in some way, you talk about this a lot, plays the role of risk capital, in which we in venture capital are supposed to be risk capital.

And, you know, the genesis is adventure capital. But again, we fall back into so many patterns of success, right, of what has worked before, me to type copycat models that have not really created big breakthroughs. I wonder, you know, with your work, how you set out to inspire others to really think differently.

And what are the parameters for that? How do you actually instigate new thinking?

Raj Shah:

I'd say a big part of the task is getting people to adopt this Big Bet mindset. And I really do believe that too often we have influences that make us believe the problems we're trying to solve are too complex to solve. And therefore, since this work is kind of charitable, it's doing good, that doing a little bit of good is good enough, and then you move on.

I'll give you one example that is related to work we do in the United States, which is around the, it's called the refundable child tax credit. But people look at the fact that one in four American kids are growing up in poverty, in a country that is amongst the wealthiest in civilizations history. And we basically accept that because we don't do enough to fight it.

And I think we accept it because we say, gosh, this is just too complex. There are too many reasons why kids are poor and it's not easily solvable. But we just came out of an experiment during the pandemic era when we demonstrated that this refundable child tax credit offered to mothers with kids, a monthly payment of cash effectively, in a modest form, would reduce child poverty in America by 50%.

We found that nearly every dollar spent in that program was spent for childcare, for food, for nutrition, for educational support and services and for giving families the space to invest in their children's future. We haven't seen that kind of effectiveness in an American social program in probably 50 years. And so we have to have this Big Bet mindset.

We have to believe solutions are possible. We have to search for solutions with the kind of analytic rigor and the intensity of purpose that so many of your listeners bring to the businesses they start. And then we have to fight incredibly hard to make these things part of our policies or part of our nation's character in order to implement them at scale.

And that's what I mean by a Big Bet mindset. It's why I wrote the book is I think too many people succumb to something far more incremental, what I call the aspiration trap. We fail to try because we don't believe we can, but we can.

SCS:

And that makes me think about something that Teddy Roosevelt said actually on the role of charity, right? And he talks about how I believe it's something along the lines of no amount of charity done by fortune will correct the misconduct to build that fortune. And this has taken this conversation almost a hundred years later, has now taken center stage with a painkillers series.

I totally binged on that on Netflix with the Sacklers and their role with Oxycodone and things like that. What are your thoughts here? What do you make of this and where philanthropists get things wrong?

Raj Shah:

Yeah, I think there may be two different questions. One is around capitalism and its extremes, right? Capitalism has been the only form of economic governance that has sustainably lifted the living standards of all parts of the population over centuries.

We're firmly believers in capitalism, but we also recognize that left unregulated and left unscrutinized, it has these extremes that especially in the last 40 years for regulatory governance, tax policy and technology reasons are creating massive, massive amounts of inequity in our world. And so we live in a world where someone can basically unethically sell painkillers in a way that kills tens of thousands of people across this nation and enrich themselves so much that the fines that they're ever going to experience, even when they're quote-unquote caught, are just a small fraction that are going to be unrecognizable effectively in terms of the lifestyles of those individuals. So that's clearly wrong.

But most fortunes are not built on that extreme form of unethical and dangerous behavior and borderline illegal behavior or illegal behavior. Most fortunes are built on adding value, building products, creating new futures for the planet. And I would say where philanthropy makes a mistake is, as philanthropists, so many people believe that they can just solve these problems on their own or that they somehow, because they were successful at building a business, they can be successful at tackling complex social issues solo.

And they undervalue the need for real public-private partnership. And at the end of the day, I think every chapter of this book, whether you're talking about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa or fighting hunger after the 2008 food crisis or even large-scale humanitarian efforts like the Haiti earthquake, required meaningful public-private collaboration. And I think too often we look across that divide with real mistrust.

So I would encourage your listeners to get to know, maybe even encourage people in their companies to spend time in government roles and vice versa because we need more people who have zigged and zagged across those parts of the economy and society and can ultimately build trust and connection in a way that actually allows us to make big bets happen.

SCS:

Yeah, absolutely. Before we go to the quick fire around here, you've been on the road on this podcast tour with your book and all of that. What is one angle of questioning you wish people would ask you?

Raj Shah:

Well, I don't know that I always wish I'd be asked it, but I'm struck, I've gone to a number of high schools like Harlem Village Academies and the Chicago Agricultural High School and a lot of these young students are really hardworking and have really high aspirations and many of them come from a place where they don't have all the same resources as people who are much, much, much more fortunate in our society. A lot of their questions are very personal and they've asked me, what did it feel like to sit in the Oval Office and make a mistake? Or what did it feel like when you applied twice for a job on the Gore campaign and got rejected?

What did that rejection feel like? What did it feel like when started off on this path in Congress around building bipartisan support and got publicly criticized by the Speaker of the House and all these other very powerful people? And I love that question because at the end of the day, we're all human.

And those moments are the moments when you feel really vulnerable and you feel like, oh my gosh, I made a mistake or oh my gosh, I'm getting in trouble or oh my gosh, do I belong at this table? And what I like telling those students is you're going to feel that way. Like every one of us at some point has felt that way.

And you got to have the confidence in that moment to know that you've earned it. Give it your best shot. Just do your best. Be true to yourself and plow through it. And don't be overly deterred by those setbacks.

SCS:

So that makes me think of one important question that I've personally been thinking about a lot. So we're both from the Young Global Leader community. You're the OG, I would say, original gangster, not old global leader, just in case you're thinking twice.

It's called original gangster. And David Rubenstein does this thing with us in Harvard. And one of the things that he says is great.

You all have become young global leaders, which means that you've done something great to get you to this point. But very few, as he's seen sort of the rotations of people, very few have actually gone on to become true, significant global leaders, right?

And so I look at your career and I look at who you've worked with. You've worked with Bill Gates, who arguably has done this really well. Some argue that great Microsoft has changed the world, yes. But even what he's doing with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is even more groundbreaking. And he's had that second chapter of true global significance.

You've done this with USAID and now with the Rockefeller Foundation. How do you keep going?

How do you ensure that yourself, your next chapter is going to be even bigger and better than the last one?

Raj Shah:

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I think you just keep trying. And at the end of the day, perhaps two things can help listeners who want to think about that challenge.

The first is it's easy to get comfortable. You got to keep taking the risks you took in your 20s and 30s as you get a little older, so that you can give yourself a chance to earn those rewards. Now, when I say risk reward, I'm talking about in the context of social impact efforts.

You have to remain optimistic and confident about your ability to change the world at scale. And that can be harder to do when you get seasoned, when you have failed a number of times, when you see what's rewarded in society and what's not. It's easy to sort of lose that mindset.

And so I wrote this book really for people in all ages and all stages of their career to reinvigorate that Big Bet mindset, especially in the context of social media and the like. I'd say the second element of it, at least in my case, has been the power of institutions. Nothing I write about in the book is something I did as an individual.

I could participate in teams of people around the world doing really special things together because the Gates Foundation became a very special institution. USAID is a very important institution for dignity and hope and opportunity for our planet.

The Rockefeller Foundation is an institution that has helped billions of people over time experience more dignity and more opportunity.

Because we created the field of science-based public health, we helped move a billion people off the brink of hunger through a green revolution. Now we're embarking on our third chapter around renewable energy and reaching a billion people who live in poverty. And so I couldn't do any of that alone.

It's all about institutions. And maybe one part of the answer is your listeners can think about, are they in the right institution? What's the next institution they might be able to elevate and make super impactful in the world?

SCS:

Oh, I love that. And that's super important. Well, quick fire round before we end here.

Fill in the blank. Success is?

Raj Shah:

Feeling a sense of purpose and contentment.

SCS:

Failure is?

Raj Shah:

Feeling vulnerable, but hopefully learning from it.

SCS:

What's your most used app on your phone right now?

Raj Shah:

Maybe the New York Times.

SCS:

Money or power?

Raj Shah:

Power.

SCS:

What keeps you up at night still?

Raj Shah:

In my stage of life, mostly are my kids and family.

SCS:

What are you obsessed with that others rarely talk about?

Raj Shah:

Well, I'm obsessed with this idea that the climate transition that is the thing we need to do together to save our planet can actually finally be the thing that helps end extreme poverty and extreme suffering and the violence associated with extreme indignity. And I'm obsessed by that.

SCS:

What is the most significant thing you've changed your mind about over the past decade?

Raj Shah:

I'd say the power of people and the power of relationships built on honesty and vulnerability and transparency. It's easy for everything to be positive. The best, deepest relationships are forged in moments of setback or toughness or vulnerability.

We don't often talk about that or share that with each other.

SCS:

Worst career advice you've been given?

Raj Shah:

Well, that's a great question. I'd say it's followed the chosen path.

SCS:

And the best advice to bring us home here?

Raj Shah:

The best advice is what you've heard from probably everybody is unlock your passion.

SCS:

Love that. And with that, thank you for sharing your passion with us, Raj, and your time and truly your global significant leadership in everything that you do. Thank you.

Raj Shah:

Thank you, Sarah. It's great to be with you.