[applause] good evening. How is everybody doing . This is my kind of crowd. When you talk through the video, that gives me a good feeling. Everybody is excited to be here and talk with each other. Im the director of him for him and Innovation Lab at the Commonwealth Club. Welcome to tonights conversation with leila janah, founder and author of the excellent book gives work reversing poverty one job at a time. Tonights conversation is moderated by laura tyson, phd, graduate of the school of business at uc berkeley. I think you already did this, but heres a challenge. Turn to somebody you dont know and introduce your self before we get started. [inaudible conversations] okay. That is the perfect 82nd friendship. [laughter] lets come back. This is my kind of audience. I hope that you are like this and it comes time to the audience questions. You are at the second event to take place in this auditorium. [applause] that is worth a round of applause. We are in our brandnew home where 114yearsold weve been [inaudible] so this is nice, we are incredibly excited and its possible because of the donors and members and volunteers like people like you, so thank you for showing up and giving us a reason to buy build a brandnew building. Anybodys first time here at the club . For anybody that doesnt know, we are a nonprofit and we can only do this with 400 programs a year with our members and donors and volunteers. Membership includes events like this on advanced notic have adve Exciting Events like the program with Richard Branson next week. If you are interested, the front desk staff is happy to talk or you can check your email for a discount card on membership. After the 24th, we have gabriel union, october 25 we have entrepreneur and startup expert eric ries. Reese. November 22, the new cookbook. November 9, we are hearing from the artist and writer of a graphic novel about drone warfare. So we cover all the bases here at the club. Now tonight, like i said, i will be talking to folks that have questions, so the last 15 minutes there is a microphone. You will hear a reminder and you can start lining up. If youre not familiar with questions, they are short, they dont include personal stories and they end with a question. Laura is a professor and will crack down if you get winded so keep that in mind. We are Live Streaming on facebook for any friends that cant be here, feel free to inform them. We will also be live on twitter and their handle as well as ours are on the screen to the right and left so please, china and on who you really want to hear from i will introduce to the stage please welcome leila janah and laura tyson. [applause] good evening. Its nice to be at an event of such a nice space. When i first came here years ago, i did numerous things with the Commonwealth Club so it is nice to carry that tradition. Its a great pleasure to serve as your moderator tonight. We have an outstanding and inspirational leader, entrepreneur, ceo and founder of a Nonprofit Organization but also the ceo and founder at and i wasnt clear if you use the acronym. We are here to talk about her work in both areas and also to help her launch her new book, which we have here. I am married to a writer and it is important that we buy books. So i will be buying a book. [laughter] and i hope that we will get a preview of what is in the book in the conversation. Following the discussion, there will be a reception and books available. There are so many questions that one could ask. She has accomplished so much in such a short amount of time and in my conversation with her backstage, shes already thinking about the next steps and what she can do, so she is a great inspiration. Has a great inspiration. I want to start with the company that you first founded that gets a lot of attention deservedly so and i want to start with if you were doing and elevator pitch and its mission and everybody has a sense of what it is that this is trying to do, can you give us that . It means equal or balanced, and our mission is to connect lowincome people to work through the internet and put them out of poverty. We do without any really interesting way. We work with Large Data Services and Technology Enterprises that provide Services Like image tagging and other content services that use their Product Offering so we are for example giving the image tagging that powers a self driving car self a few prominent automakers. Given that missin mission, ye to link up to a number of organizations to help find these jobs. You have to find them, train them, link them and can find all those other organizations. And you are using the internet, so talk a little bit about the challenges or the way that you go about it how do you find a set of jobs at the people that you want to help train . I will start on the site of the people the whole train. Ive been working in africa for many years studying Development Economics and folks like the most powerful way was to give them a living wage jobs and one of the best ways to do that is through technology because all of a sudden you have a way to connect to someone living in a poor part of the world which means that they could make a lot more than they could make doing anything else selling to a local market, so it is a big council. What if i created a company that only recruited people that came from poor backgrounds which is obviously an unusual recruiting criteria. The only recruit people who make less than two or 3 a day the average income of all of the workers is about 2. 20 a day which means if they are employed at all it is in the informal economy doing things like early working in a quarry breaking big rocks into smaller rocks or selling stuff by the side of the road or to make a dollar 50 a day so these are the jobs people have before joining us we recruit and partner with many nonprofit status and abundance of the them in for the simple nairobi where we work and we train basic computer skills and we pull people into work with us fulltime. When i get into the details of the backgrounds the story they pitched to the client is we are a very highquality Data Services firm we provide Training Data for the best companies in Silicon Valley and the most machine advanced learning working at the forefront of technology so for example, the worker that i mentioned that used to brew this moonshine was one of the most prominent Auto Companies in the country working on self driving cars. We can train someone in a relatively short period of time because weve breaking down the process into smaller units of work. So that is how it works. The front facing operation here in the area is focused on highquality delivery results being a competitive enterprise and then on the background looks different from what people might imagine recruiting people from the backgrounds to do the work and pay living wages along the way. Your outward facing links have big projects and lots of ways they might source labor. Its being served on a project basis. What is your pitch for why they should come to you . There must be other ways you can source this kind of talent. I got wise enough to hire better salespeople can be. We are the highest Quality Service provider and interestingly when you hire people from the marginalized grounds especially in the areass the work there were no formal Work Opportunities and they take this extremely seriously. They will show up early to work and often people as ask isnt it hard to train people from these backgrounds and how do they show up. At the least of the problem is the work force. Its incredible. They are incredibly loyal to an employer that is willing to quickly pay far and above what they would make doing anything else and so as a result, quality is something that we can sell as a major attribute and the social Mission Peace comes in after we convince the client that we offer the best services. In terms of cost, we are not the cheapest option but increasingly for someone whos in charge of developing the next self driving car algorithm were smart chip for your phone to recognize spaces and images, that person is more concerned with quality and cost and wants to make sure that the data going into the algorithm is good data and i think that is of most social enterprises should focus on rather than selling the customer on the social mission we talk about it as the trojan horse. Its the icing on the cake. Thats an interesting point because also in your work you talk about the importance of the impact sourcing that there are companies out there for whom the social mission of the job for this kind of population or sourcing for diversity or some positive social mission has become more important, so its interesting you are saying essentially is secondary to the quality of the labor you can make the social case but it is an addo add on you get these hy professional committed individuals to be part of a team and you are addressing a social mission. All other things being equal as long as you are sure they thy will get quality results, why wouldnt you choose the vendor and once you find people start getting embedded in the contacts with us, i got so many stories of people that work at the Big Companies i was about to quit, i wasnt motivated by wanted to do something more with my life and then i started working directly with people moving out of poverty from places like kenya and india and haiti and i feel like i have a purpose again when i come into work and i can name the names of people because they felt more motivated to come to work every day and at some point we should quantify that and told up to the customers. Your book sites and people in the room no there are a lot of statistics indicating that certainly for the nova kneels the meaningfulness of their work as well as the technical challenges of their work those things determine whether they are loyal to the company and the job. Some of the project workers in Peace Companies may have as you said left, but the combining of the mission and the work is important for the younger generations. To use the statistics that they used the millennial in the workforce and found 80 of the millennials only want to work for a company that has a Strong Social mission and increasingly thanks to technology were able to discern who is actually delivering more and more we can show with factory on the floor looks like and the result of income surveys for the workers in the factory it becomes harder and harder to create a page that doesnt translate to the compans doing. Before we move on to other questions, i want to talk a little bit about the sum of the source that may be involved in doing similar activities in the u. S. , and i think that given the conversations going on in the ability of creating jobs for the workers and the various farflung often poverty places in the u. S. Is involved in that and how. School started several years ago and weve been running these ads on who, the Internet Tv Service its the refugees to do work for the companies he had we had a cute Public Service announcement and i got the nastiest email. Not joe the plumber, probably less charismatic visit the subject line was you are ruining america and then it said you and your kind are ruining america and sending our jobs to africa and its th the middle of a rec, how dare you do this and i read the email and my First Response was i was so livid at the time. Enjoying all the profits i am raking in i wrote this nasty email to him and then i wrote a nice email back and said i have looked at the unemployment statistics, i get where youre coming from, maybe we can adopt the model to work here and they wrote back the nicest response and said thank you for listening im sorry about the tone of my last email i lost my job recently and your ad made me upset because i want to do more to create jobs here in america and i feel like we are getting left behind so it inspired me to say maybe we can do something here in the u. S. And i think its important for the International Organizations to not be a silo. We have the distinction between people who work for the foreign ngos and people who work on domestic poverty and its tragic because it is the same issue. We tried a couple of different experiments working in the u. S. We tried to adapt a more similar model and it doesnt work because they have been outsourcing it for a very long time already so it is futile and we said what can we do to make sense for america so it turns out theres a study between 2005 and 2015 that have been in the independent work arena and that is contract work and get the workforce training in america aa has no instruction on how to benefit. Theyve done the jobs that have gone away ten years ago. What if we create curriculum to benefit from the platforms that gets a bad rap. We are not going to shift the whole economy by boycotting instead lets work with them and find out how to employ portable benefits and how we can prepare the most marginalized people in the society to benefit from these platforms and so thats what the school does. We have the first economy training or independent worker training for lowincome americans weve deployed in San Francisco and the signed a contract with the office of education and Workforce Development so that training is now going out to people. Weve seen amazing Success Stories going from 8 an hour where they have no flexibility, no online reputation to making 25 or 30 an hour on a platform like field nation where not only do they get this money but they also get the benefit of having an online reputation. If you do a good job on the task you get more clients and that reputational equity is something that they are used to having through the employee or reference checks. Its been many years in the city working to connect because you have to have the connecting organizations as well. You said in your work you often work with nonprofits because youve got to find a way to connect to the communities of the workers that were serving and debate help you do that. I think that in this case having the Mayors Office involved may help bring more opportunities to the workers that are going through this. I feel like we can do things i think you should be incentives for every City Government to procure the social enterprises. Lets talk about procurement because i think the impact sourcing has a lot to do with procurement as i understand it. So, your number we have 12 trillion of procurement going on. Thats just the top 2,000 companies. I did a task last year to empower women around the world and i said to the governance one thing you might do is procure. But isnt that hard of a task. In some developing countries the government are like 30 of the economy in terms of procurement and goods are bought and sold. So, if you actually want to work to bring jobs to those without jobs at the 2 or less a day or you want to bring jobs to the women within that category, you can do that through procurement. Its so simple. Its like weve hear heard that holding teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime, first it should be a woman, that is about 90 back we forget the best way to help someone isnt to give them a handout which is fundamentally a patronizing relationship saying look at me, i can give you this money but its to engage with them on a level to buy something from him or her and when you purchase something youre saying i value your contribution and i am willing to pay my hardearned money for what you are able to create and i think it is an empowering relationship especially for low income women who are so often told that they are worthless. One of the things i read when you were talking about your journey and how you got to come up with this, you were in high school and went to do a special semester teaching english and very poor part of the country in africa and one thing that struck you was people were really poor but they were talented and hardworking and people who if you gave them an opportunity they would make the most of it. So how can i possibly create utilization. That is a big part of the personal story of how you got to this place. My father is here in the audience and i owe a lot to his judgment education. [inaudible] [laughter] i can we have more allowance and he would say luxury is more ruthless than war, that was one of his famous lines. [laughter] i wish i could take all the credit for that philosophy that we were educated on this stuff and my dad would subscribe to the new internationalist calendars that have photographs of people in developing countries and aggregate statistics about povertwould gie would remind us we are here by an accident of birth and if it were not for that we could have easily been born in a slum in kenya were rural part of india so we were always told you are lucky by being born here and its not because you are a great gift to the universe that you are doing well. But it really stuck with me and i got the chance i got a scholarship i was one of those firstgeneration indian kids who applied for every scholarship in the Counselors Office and knew that was the only way i would afford to go to school so i got one from of all places a Tobacco Company. I remember they sent a 10,000 check in the mail to my house and my mom opened its like you got a check from a Tobacco Company and it was a scholarship for Community Service and at the time i wanted an adventure and to leave home and i was kind of reckless. So the Community Service you couldnt take it and go to africa. It was for a scholarship and i was convinced that it would be far more educational for me to graduate early and i found a Program Teaching english and i would love to see that it was a sense the motivation that was more the desire to have an adventure so i show