[0:17]I'd like to begin with two beliefs these beliefs have dictated most of my young life and they predicate today's talk
[0:27]my first belief is simple it's that entrepreneurship is the answer to most every single issue we face today
[0:37]my second belief is maybe a little less uncommon but when I look at the world today I believe that the world is in a better place than it's ever been before
[0:45]in the history of human kind my belief is that I choose to be an optimist but the data speaks for itself illiteracy rates have halved since the
[0:57]last century the number of democracies have tripled since 1940 and today billions of us have access to the world's information ubiquitously at our
[1:09]fingertips we have more power today than we've ever had before in the history of humankind and the world is better poised to be in a better place ever before in the history of humankind now I'm not
[1:20]just an optimist my dad if I just stop they would say that I was any naive optimist but the truth is I'm an impatient optimist because when I look at the world today we may be in better shape than we've been before but we also
[1:32]know the numbers and we're facing some massive challenges you know the data there are over 2.6 billion people living on less than $2 a day there are 1.1 billion people who don't
[1:43]have access to clean drinking water we live in a world where preventable elements like diarrhea just last year killed 1.7 million children under the age of 5 so the world may be in a better
[1:54]place than has ever been before but it's not good enough and it's this juxtaposed belief this impatient optimism that has drived me towards a bias towards action and so when I was younger a couple years
[2:05]ago I decided to research what is the world doing about these challenges and when I was in university that took me to studying the United Nations what I
[2:15]learned was that in 1990 the United Nations got together and they created what they call the UN Millennium Development Goals these goals were to be reached 25 years
[2:25]later by the Year 2015 number one on their list of millennial development goals was to have the number of people living in absolute poverty on less than a
[2:36]dollar and 25 cents a day so now it's 2013 23 years later after these goals were set they had 186 nations signed that charter they had hundreds of billions of dollars
[2:47]that they put into it we had the global infrastructure to make it happen and the question is what happened were two years out from 2015 and if we zoom in on a one section of the world if we zoom in on
[2:58]sub-saharan Africa specifically which is most ridden with extreme poverty I think the situation is very telling now the good news is we have seen a decrease in
[3:08]the proportion of sub-saharan Africans living in absolute poverty the bad news is that decrease is far from enough in 1990 there were forty four point six percent of the population in sub-saharan
[3:20]Africa living on less than a dollar 25 a day we fast-forward 20 years to 2010 forty four point zero percent we are going about this with incredible
[3:31]inaccuracy and what's scariest about these numbers is because of population increase in sub-saharan Africa this means that there are now a hundred and forty million more individuals in
[3:43]sub-saharan Africa now in absolute poverty than the were in 1990 Albert Einstein has a great definition of insanity he says it's when we do the
[3:52]same thing over and over again and we expect different results now this is where my obsession and my belief and entrepreneurs kicks in because entrepreneurs they disrupt the status
[4:04]quo they refuse to accept things for how they are and they're constantly adapting and changing our modes towards what we want to achieve and what I'm hoping to
[4:14]do and this talk is tell you a couple stories about three entrepreneurs that I've had the privilege to work with over these past few years and as my role at the unreasonable Institute and at a
[4:24]reasonable group now I've worked with dozens of entrepreneurs like the three I'm about to tell you about and the common thread throughout all of them is they refuse to accept the status quo they have too much a DD to fall victim
[4:36]to Einstein's definition of insanity they can't do the same thing over and over again and just wait for different results they demand action now so I hope that after I tell you
[4:47]these three stories you will join me in believing in this notion of impatient optimism the first arch bird I want to tell you about is this man his name's Michigan he's an incredibly bright young
[4:58]guy and he was working at the global consultancy firm called McKinsey and a couple years into his job he decided that he wanted to jump into a boyhood dream that he always had which was to
[5:09]jump on a motorcycle a motorcycle ride across the subcontinent of India with one of his best friends so he did it he takes a month off of work he flies out to Mumbai which is where he's from he
[5:19]jumps on his motorcycle and he goes two hours north to a small village where his friend who just so happens to be a doctor is waiting for him that's where they're gonna start their trip he gets up to this voice in this village two
[5:29]hours north of the city and he looks for his friend and he can't find his friend anywhere and so he asked some of the villagers and one of the villagers tells him that his friend the doctor is actually performing a birth right now helping helping a woman perform a birth
[5:41]I in in a small in a small shack at the edge of the village so Myshkin rides his bike out to that small Shack and he waits outside he waits for his friend who's helping to
[5:51]perform this birth any waits in ten minutes goes by and thirty minutes goes by an hour ago 'he's by another hour and finally his friend walks out of the shack in michigan looks at his friend and he knows something terrible has
[6:03]happened they connect eyes and his friend's face goes completely white michigan asked his friend this is what's wrong and he said that the mother died during the birth and her baby girl died
[6:13]too Michigan looks at his friend and he doesn't understand what happened and he says well how could that possibly be and his friend the doctor tells him that what happened was postpartum hemorrhaging
[6:24]which is caused by excessive bleeding which is the symptom of anemia now Michigan isn't a doctor right he's a consultant at McKinsey but he knows that
[6:34]this issue of anemia is incredibly easy to treat all you need to do or take iron tablets what's most upsetting to Michigan about this whole situation is that a mile away in the middle of the
[6:46]village there's a there's a health clinic subsidized by the government for free where iron tablets that would have prevented this death a mile away was the solution and yet a mother
[6:58]and her baby girl both died Michigan looked at this issue of anemia he dove into it and he realized that he had to figure out what was really going on and as he researched he realized that anemia
[7:08]is a really big issue much larger than just that small experience with it today it's the number one killer of women and their children during pregnancy using during birth I every single minute
[7:19]unfortunately a woman and her child died caused by postpartum hemorrhaging just like the woman that Michigan experienced that day and so Michigan decided he's
[7:31]gonna quit his job he had to dive into this he had to listen to his heart and he rallied up a small team of doctors and engineers they didn't necessarily know what to do but they realized they wanted to solve the problem what they
[7:42]realized is that the issue is in treatment its detection because our system for detecting anemia requires that you draw somebody's blood you have to take a sample what that means is in
[7:52]rural villages in places like India where specialists don't exist you need a specialist they'd have to travel out to that village they'd have to convince the women to prick their finger to draw blood this takes trust where Trust
[8:02]doesn't exist then they take that blood go back into the city process and in the lab and then go back to the village and they have the results this never happens the real issue is because you have to
[8:13]draw blood so Michigan's team they decided to devote themselves to creating a new type of biotechnology that wouldn't require that you draw blood to detect anemia what's amazing is through
[8:23]blood sweat tears and a couple years they built it this is their biotechnology it's called the touch HB you can see there's a little clamp on this device it goes onto your pointer finger and it shines a light on your
[8:34]finger it reflects and refracts off the amount of hemoglobin in your blood with 95% accuracy instantly it tells you if you are anemic or not this invention was ranked by the World Health Organization
[8:46]as the six most important inventions of our lifetime one of the six most important inventions not over the year of our lifetime this was created by a foolhardy entrepreneur the next arch but
[8:57]I want to tell you about is this man named Moses Stanga songes from a small village in Uganda he grew up from the middle of a civil war he didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old he had
[9:07]never seen the computer until he was 17 years old but he was those rare individuals in his village was fortunate enough to get an education and to step outside of the village and a couple years later when he was in his
[9:19]early 20s he found himself working a job at a microfinance institution in the capital of his country in Kampala and after working there for a couple months he missed his family he decided that he wanted to go home and visit his mom and
[9:30]so he travels back to his village the last leg of this trip back to his village is walking down a dirt path and he's walking down this dirt path and he runs into his little sister it's amazing
[9:41]he hasn't seen her in forever and this should have been a joyous moment but it wasn't his little sister had a bundle of twigs and of wood on her head and she was walking like this down the road and when she saw her older brother she broke
[9:53]down she started crying she dropped all the wood and Sangha asked his sister he said what's the matter and she said that she had to walk ten kilometres that morning to gather wood to bring it back home for cooking fuel that she missed
[10:04]school that day and that she had to do this two days earlier and that odds were she wasn't gonna finish school because she wasn't able to get an education because she had to go fetch wood Sangha felt the plight of his sister he decided
[10:16]he had to quit his job just like Michigan did and he had to dive into solving this problem and when he looked at the problem he realized that it was much larger than just his sister this is
[10:27]an issue that is a symptom of a much larger challenge right now across the continent of Africa that is deforestation ninety percent of the population in sub-saharan Africa today
[10:38]uses wood for cooking fuel because of that countries like Uganda have already seen 70 percent of their force wiped clean the UN is issued a charter that
[10:47]says by 2050 - if we don't do anything to curve the level of deforestation across the continent of Africa we will have no force but no force left by 2050
[10:57]to the continent will fall into desert efficient so saga looked at this and said ok I have to do something about it the solutions very obvious if the problem is that we're using wood for
[11:08]fuel let's find a new material and he did this is a photograph of what a lot of sub-saharan Africa looks like today where women and girls like Tsongas little sister have to walk to fetch wood
[11:20]what Tsonga did is he created a new fuel this is called biochar it's amazing it has the same properties of what it actually burns a little bit cleaner that wood does but it's made not out of wood it's made out of
[11:31]agricultural waste and so he's taking a waste and he's creating it and he's making it into a fuel so Stanga when he decided to quit his job and launch this new company he had only 500 dollars in
[11:41]his bank account he took all that money and he put it into developing a technology that would allow him to create this biochar and created a new form of Kem's and it works today he's working with thousands of farmers
[11:53]collecting their agricultural waste converting it into this biochar and he's employing hundreds of women to go out and sell this biochar in market what's amazing is not only is not wood
[12:03]not only is it a clean fuel it's also cheaper than wood because agricultural waste is plentiful in areas like rural Uganda Moses has effectively created a
[12:13]financially viable and profitable way to combat deforestation across sub-saharan Africa and to ensure that millions of girls like his sister can now go to school not needing to walk ten
[12:24]kilometres a day to go gather wood the last team that I want to tell you about is combating potentially the biggest challenge of our time I say I'm an optimist but when I look at things like
[12:36]climate change you realize the scale at which a global warming is moving at the pace at which it is growing I think it's easy to become a pessimist but I had the privilege of working with
[12:46]a small team of misfits scientists and engineers who are combating climate change in a way that I think will even make the biggest skeptics an optimist their group of nanotechnologists now
[12:58]like Sanga and uganda they're taking a waste and they're turning it into a resource but this waste is the most prolific waste of our time they're capturing carbon emissions what they've done is they've created a simple
[13:10]technology that latches onto the chimney of a factory like this one it uses the heat from the chimney to elicit a process of combustion and they apply an
[13:19]anode technology to the process that converts carbon emissions into this material called carbon nanotubes now carbon nanotubes is a wonder material
[13:29]it's 20 times stronger than steel as five times lighter than steel there's 300 times the connectivity of copper it is literally worth more than gold it's wait quite literally these entrepreneurs are modern-day Alchemist
[13:41]taking carbon emissions out of the atmosphere and profitably converting it into a material worth more than gold the moment that this technology hits the market everything can change because the
[13:51]moment that you turn a waste into a commodity is the moment that will race to capture carbon emissions out of the atmosphere now these three stories the
[14:00]stories of Michigan of Stanga and of the team at Damascus fortune they are evidence in my mind that we have do
[14:09]cause to be impatient optimist and their evidence in my mind that if we're gonna have a chance in hell I've put in a dent on some of these un Millennial Development Goals like eradicating
[14:20]extreme poverty we need to hedge our bets on our entrepreneurs yeah in closing I don't think I'd be doing this conversation justice if I didn't talk about not just the merits of
[14:31]entrepreneurship but also the arch-nemesis to entrepreneurship this is in my mind the worst word in the English dictionary it starts with a B it is the
[14:42]Achilles heel to anybody who is an impatient optimist and this worse word is of course bureaucracy varrock receipt by its very nature thrives off the
[14:53]persistence of the status quo and I believe that is bureaucracy which is crippling our potential to reach these UN Millennial Development Goals if you look at the numbers today they're saying
[15:03]that on average 30 percent or 30 cents on every dollar given through foreign aid actually meets those in need in market that means that 70 percent of our foreign aid is going into the costs of
[15:15]overhead bureaucracy and corruption this isn't effective we need to use a more nimble approach approach based on meritocracy that actually leveraged
[15:26]markets instead of political systems in aid to try to solve our problems in closing I'd like to quote a man who said it much better than myself in Seven
[15:37]Pillars of wisdom it was said that most men dream in the dusty recesses of their mind only to awaken and realize it was
[15:47]all in vain but be wary of those few men those dangerous for you who dream with their eyes open for they may realize their dreams in the light of day I challenge all of us myself
[15:58]included must be a little bit more optimistic let's be a little bit more impatient about solving the hardest problems of our time this be a little bit more entrepreneurial may I say a
[16:08]little bit less bureaucratic and then together we can dream with our eyes open thank you very much no more to go