Chief Change Officer - Chris Schrader: Turning a Modest Charity into an 8-Figure Marathon for Change – Part Two

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Part Two. A simple idea to honor a friend sparked something extraordinary. Today, the 24 Hour Race stands as the largest student-run effort to fight human trafficking. In this episode, Chris Schrader, the founder and executive chairman, reflects on the journey from a single event to a global mission, with students worldwide raising $20 million for this critical cause. Key Highlights of Our Interview: From the Wilderness to the Workplace: Business Team Building 401 “Business is a watered-down version of an expedition, and an expedition is a hyperbolic version of business. The success of both depends on understanding team dynamics—bridging the gap between the strongest and weakest players.” “Your performance isn’t defined by your best players; it’s defined by your weakest. In the expedition world, you have two choices—get rid of your weakest link or rein in your top performers.” Don’t Be the Adventure Tour Guide—Leadership Takes Tough Calls “You’re not an adventure tour guide. You’re there to achieve a specific goal, and sometimes that means making tough calls against your team’s individual interests to keep the whole expedition on track.” Nietzsche, Space Dreams, and Paying the Bills “Nietzsche teaches us to live life with vitality, to focus on what brings joy in the moment. But, let’s be honest—sometimes that joy includes paying the electricity bill for your sous vide obsession.” It’s Not All About Musk and Zuckerberg: Real Impact Starts Closer to Home “The hardest thing isn’t creating global impact like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg—it’s investing in the people around you and making a meaningful difference in their lives.” Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Chris Schrader ______________________ Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 2.5% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI 3.5 Million+ Downloads 80+ Countries

Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Chris Schrader, founder and executive chairman of 24-hour race, which is a global movement against human trafficking that has raised over 20 million US dollars in the last decade. I've known Chris for almost 10 years. Our first encounter was back in 2016 when I invited him to be a panelist at an event I hosted on education technology. Chris is sharp, well-read, and definitely unconventional.

He took a leave of absence from Harvard, spent an extended period of time away, and eventually finished his studies in neuroscience, while also building and growing tech businesses around the world. Along the way, he founded a charity based on his love for expeditions. And it's safe to say he sees life and business leadership as a journey too. We have talked for about an hour split into two parts. In the last episode, part one, we touch upon the genesis and evolution of the 24-hour race. What started as a casual suggestion on a rainy day turned into a life-changing journey for a teenager.

The walk across England raised five figure in US dollars and sparked an 8 figure US dollar global movement at the end. Today's episode, part 2, will focus on Chris' approach to leadership and team building. Drawing parallels between leading an expedition and managing a business team. Here, we'll highlight how lessons learned from life or death situations in the wilderness translate into effective leadership strategies in the corporate world.

Chris also offers his genuine advice for young, ambitious talents on balancing life goals, family expectations, and career direction. Let's get started. As you walk us through this journey from the humble beginnings all the way to raising 20 million US dollars over the years, it almost sounds like magic, but I know it's not magic. There must have been plenty of challenges along the way, not just in the beginning when teachers were dismissive of your idea, but throughout the whole process. Could you tell us more about some of the difficulties or obstacles

that you and your team faced? And how did you eventually figure things out? Maybe you can share some specific examples. Yeah, that's a great question. Look, we've honestly had hundreds of thousands of challenges and they can really span from existential through to incidental. So existential, for example, was just identifying our purpose. What are we?

We're not quite a grassroots organization. We put these races together. We raise quite a bit of money. Are we in a grassroots NGO? Are we an events provider? Are we an anti-slavery charity? Just figuring that out in the early days was really tough. We've had other stuff since, for example,

we had one event that was literally received a threat from ISIS at the peak of the ISIS terror wave in the 2000 teams. And we had to make a spot decision whether to cancel our event or to continue it. So you have these sort of momentary hurdles and you have the existential ones. The way I always think about it is like climbing a mountain. When you climb a mountain, and let's say it's a totally novel new mountain that hasn't really been climbed before, use identifying approach from where the perspective that you have,

you'll of course miss things, and then you attempt to summit wherever you attempt an approach. And often there are obstacles, and maybe you get about halfway and then there's an ice field and it's insuppassable and so you turn around and you reevaluate your approach. But fundamentally the goal is the same, which is to summit that mountain. And sometimes you get really close

and you're so close that it's very chanting to carry on. But again, there's some kind of threat, a big crevasse or whatever that just isn't worth the risk. And of course, if you're very lucky and if you're very good at what you do, some at the mountain. But as any mountaineer will tell you, when you get to the top of a peak, what's the first thing you see? Another peak that you want to find. There's this sort of aspect to a charity where I would describe, for example, an ISIS threat to a group of students in a particular city trying to fight slavery as a similar situation to a crevasse on that mountain analogy versus what is the actual mountain we're climbing is more existential and more akin to.

What is the 24-hour race? What's its role in the world? If that makes sense. I really like the analogy used. It's actually quite philosophical. It reminds me of a Chinese saying, which is, However high the mountain is, there's always an other one higher. That idea of always seeing a higher peak resonates with what you are saying. This philosophy seems not apply only to how you've built this charity,

but also to your approach in many of the business ventures you've been involved in. Yeah, let me expand a little bit on that analogy by going into the realm of the absurd. So in 2011, I took a gap year after graduating high school. And while all my friends were heading on trips to Phuket and various destinations in Asia, I got on a train and then a plane and arrived in the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, where I met a team of 14 in total seasoned explorers. And then we went all the way out to the west of Mongolia and we began to attempt to walk across the Gobi Desert and I was young I think I just hadn't turned 18 yet

I was 17 and as we began this journey the Gobi Desert itself sometimes for whatever reason back then the GPS signal wouldn't work. Now navigation was a little bit more simple in the early days because you basically had a series of mountains to your north and you had a series of mountains to your south. The sun rose and you just followed the sun and you kept the mountains between you'd more or less be on track. But as that mountain range, the Altai Mountains subsided into the flatness of the Gobi. You know, we struggle with navigation to the point where we'd have to double check

where we thought we were with stars. And what I think is interesting about stellar navigation, this millennia long way of getting around the world, is you follow stars, but you never really expect to set foot on them. So you can follow the North Star, with the Colaris, which is the one everyone talks about, or you can navigate by it,

and it can guide you to incredible destinations. It can get you to exactly where you want to be at various points of your journey. But by following this thing, you're not gonna ever reach it. And I think in some way, good goals are like that. Good goals guide your day-to-day decision-making, whether they're immediate, random threats

to whatever it is you're building or doing in your personal life or in your business life, or totally big decisions to make. You can always refer to your so-called North Star, or whatever star it is that you navigate by. I think about that analogy a lot. What's a goal worth pursuing? Were you to spend your whole life pursuing it and you were to never reach it and you're

in your old frail years, you could still say to yourself, that was a hell of a shot and it was totally worth it. You know, what are goals that are so important that failure is expected and not a disappointment because the goal itself is just too important for that. And that just that was a full process I had back on the Gobi expedition some time ago. So far, our discussion has been focused a lot on your charity work. But I also know you've been involved in a wide range of businesses over the years. Rather than focusing on one industry or one firm, let's talk more broadly about your business endeavors. You've had your hands in so many different ventures across different cultures.

Tell us a bit about your overall approach. You've shared your philosophy earlier, but how have you integrated that into the full-profit business world? How do you use it to drive business growth, build strong teams, and achieve financial goals for the businesses you've been part of? Okay, so in short, I worked, I studied at Harvard from having graduated in Hong Kong, took a gap year in that gap year applied to uni, ended up going to Harvard, and a year and a half into that degree, I dropped out. I did what's called an indefinite leave of absence.

So you don't lose your seat at the university, but you're basically allowed to take as much time as you want at the university. And in that time, I transitioned from being a charity founder to a software founder. And I have a lot of thoughts about the evolution of software since I started working in the industry in 2014 till today. As a matter of fact, my background, I started at Harvard studying a very generically named field East Asian studies, mainly focused on China and in particular, Ming dynasty Chinese

history onwards. And I transitioned to the field of computational neuroscience, which is eventually where I got my degree. So I was always attracted to the field of technology. And anyone who was alive in 2013 or 2014 could see it was really early days for adopting and deploying technology into various industries. So I made that transition. That being said, everything, every success I've had, and for that matter, every failure I've had while working in the full profit technology

and software sector, I can basically trace to an analogy from an expedition that I've taken on. So talking about, for example, team building, there's an expression that I first heard when I was rowing in high school, at boarding school, which was the first boat is only as fast as the second boat. And I think what was meant, I was on the second boat, by the way, I wasn't on the first. I think what was meant by this is that you define your performance is not defined by your best players, it's defined by your weakest players. And in business, this can be a little bit of a trope, because

our attitude often in the business world is to give people chances and to make sure they perform. But the expedition world, there are no such, there's no such forgiveness. So I can think of one expedition that I was on, for example, where the expedition leader, who wasn't me, was himself an accomplished explorer, but was not very good at understanding that distinction between your top players and your, I wouldn't say bottom players, but your weaker links. As an expedition leader, you need to make sure that your top players are humbled and understand that they're only as strongest

as their weakest player. And so as an expedition leader, you have really two choices. You can either get rid of your weakest link, or you can rein in your top performers. That's really what happens. And by the way, to be quite honest, by the time that an Expedition actually takes place, it's really too late to be making these decisions. They should be made well before you do the expedition itself. And this particular person didn't really understand this concept very well. And the result was that small discrepancies in the abilities between team members were not managed properly, led to huge discrepancies in morale and expedition success. And on this particular expedition, I think over 70%

and expedition success. And on this particular expedition, I think over 70% of the participants ended dropping up and they dropped out for health reasons. There was some very close calls. And when I say close call, I mean near death, okay? This doesn't happen in the business world, but in the expedition world, it definitely does. And just due to low morale,

we lost some really great team players. So there's a sort of like a motto in the startup world, fire, fast, higher, slow kind of thing. With expeditions, it's very much like this. If there's an issue, you almost immediately have to try and address it, but you have to address it in a way where you're not just benchmarking everyone against your most capable person. And moreover, what I'll add is I've been on plenty of expeditions where you have to be extremely

wary of the type of person who is extremely physically confident, mentally competent. Often these people end up being quite weak in the expedition environments where you operate absolutely as a team. So I guess what I'm saying is that a business is a watered down, in my opinion, a watered down version of an expedition. An expedition is a hyperbolic version of a business. And especially when it comes to thinking about team dynamics. Who's your weakest? Who's your strongest? How do you get those two? How do you bridge that gap between the two? And because I experienced a few failures in expeditions very early in my life, I think I was able to see the crisis of building a team and how that can win or lose a goal in a sort of high-stakes boiler environment and translate that to work.

I think more recently, yeah, so in summary, when I think about the successes I've had, all failures in the world of software, it basically comes down to the team and the realization that, yes, I'm supposed to be really good at what I do, whatever it is that I do in that particular company, but I'm never supposed to be really good at what I do, whatever it is that I do in that particular company, but I'm never supposed to be better than any individual who works with me.

As an expedition leader or as a business leader, I'm effectively the secretary for the team. My job is to check in on everyone, make sure that they're aligned, and get rid of any obstacles in their way so that they can do the best jobs possible, which I think is a very different attitude to the sort of gung-ho lead from the front attitude. Don't get me wrong, I think that's important.

I think leaders demonstrating their commitment to a particular cause, to a business venture, to an expedition, whatever it is, through self-sacrifice, that's key there. It's not necessarily competitive, though I think competition has a lot of good benefits for both business and expeditions, at least in the lead up to them. It's about being a servant for a team where each team member in their respective domains

is a much better performer than you are, and enabling them by guiding the direction of the home. You are a servant leader. You are the type who wants to make others shine. If you can help your team members grow to become better people, better leaders, better managers, then you are the silent force behind the success. Look, I have Edo and I failed more than I've succeeded. So I think it's a goal.

So I think it's a goal. I don't know if I'm a good leader, but I'm trying to be and introspective about it. I don't think the only factor of being a leader is being a servant. There are many cases where you as a leader have to build a kind of myth around yourself. You have to be something that people aspire to be toward or to be like, you have to demonstrate qualities, the best qualities that maybe they see in themselves, you have to exemplify that. But those qualities don't necessarily mean obviously beating everyone else at their own game.

Those qualities could be patience, wisdom, experience, humility, strength, ruthlessness. This is an underrated one, I think. Every one of your team members trusts you not to make the best decisions for each of them individually, but to make the best decision for the expedition as a whole, right? This is a typical lesson you learn as an expedition leader. You're not there to make everybody individually

happy. You're not an adventure tour guide, let alone just a regular tour guide. You're there to achieve a particular goal. That's what expeditions, that's what sets expeditions apart from tourist holidays, right? They have specific goals, typically scientific goals, or attainment goals. You try to do something for the first time. And everybody should walk into this experience, understanding that they're walking into the unknown. And then ultimately, they're gonna have to trust one person who will make decisions, perhaps against your own interests, maybe with you, but

incidentally, but overall contributing to the final goal. And I think this analogy is particularly important when it comes to low performance in the business world, by the way, which is that too often I've seen great leaders in every other sense who go, this particular person's maybe dragging their feet a bit or is lagging a bit, but you know what, the team performance of a role is so strong that we can just basically mask that and I can avoid an awkward conversation. The expedition world has told me that you nip that in the bud as soon as you sense that, right?

Whether it's with a particular plan or just understanding what's going on, you need to address that almost immediately. Too many times in life, I've made so many mistakes, but too many times in life, I have a gut sense, like a gut inclination towards a particular direction, and it becomes vindicated months or even years later, even though I knew what I needed to do a year ago or months. Now, in an expedition scenario, that's life or death, right? So you don't,

the pressure to make that type of decision is much more preferred to a business decision where someone loses their livelihood or their income, which is still a big deal, but obviously not as big a deal as on an expedition. And I've seen a lot of leaders who just fail to understand that. And so they let low performers continue working in their organizations. But guess what? The people you work with, if you've done a semi decent job, are not stupid. They can see that this person has, has slack and is being let off. And it really affects the morale in particular of your top performers.

So what's the point? What's the point of me pushing towards this big vision that I've been sold on that I want to work on that I wanna work towards if I don't have to put in the same effort and still be around? And it's the same thing on an expedition. The last thing you really want on an expedition is someone who requires a lot of energy

and a lot of support, but contributes very little. You have to be agnostic to the reasons for this, right? You can be very sympathetic with someone on an expedition who's having a really difficult time. And at least on the expeditions I've organized with people that I haven't done expeditions with, they're always in generally well-supported areas. So if I need to evacuate someone or get them out,

I don't need to be an ass about it. And if I'm about to say that, yeah, I can basically be sympathetic to them and help them get out the expedition without it affecting them or the team. It's the same for a business. In fact, in many ways a business is an expedition on easy mode. If you need to let someone go tomorrow and you need to do it and you do it in a responsible way that gives them the support they deserve and need, you can make that decision without worrying about whether they'll find work again or whatever. You cannot do that in an expedition in mind. This is the last question of the day. It has two parts. I see you as a purposeful leader,

a world explorer, skilled in technology, but always human-centered. Yet in a place like Hong Kong, where both of us are from, there's often a set path. Study finance, engineering, medicine,

become a doctor, lawyer, or banker, for example. You chose a different path. You didn't follow the typical expectations. Yet, you grew up in an environment where those expectations are strong. So the first part of my question is about the people around you, such as your parents, family members, and friends. How did they influence and support you in becoming who you are today. The second part is about leading a purposeful life and career.

We are all in some kind of pursuit of success and fulfillment. But there's always a lot of noise. External pressures, expectations, people telling you what you should and shouldn't do. How do you balance all of that while staying true to your own purpose and building a life that feels fulfilling to you? It's a big question, but I I love to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah. Okay. With regards to the first part of question, I think I got very lucky.

Anyone who's had any reasonable success in their life and relies on their own sheer will to explain that success, I think that's something they're not telling you. Although I greatly and deeply admire those types of people. That type of gov-tion per se, I think it's actually quite cool. That being said, for me, it first started at home, in particular with my parents, my mother and father.

They had, going back to my analogy of mountains, they had particular goals and peaks that they wished I would summit. But those peaks were actually, they weren't even peaks, they were more like those North stars. They were values. So my parents didn't tell me that they wanted me to have a particular career or to earn a certain amount of money or to go to a particular university. In fact, I can even remember that when I, I did very well in my application.

I got into almost every university that I applied to. And I remember telling my mom and dad about, so I remember calling them. And I remember that my father, when he heard about, for example, Harvard, which for your average Hong Kong, it's like a big deal, right? You ain't going to Harvard. He thought I was going to be studying in New York. They just had no idea about where these universities were.

And in fact, had very little input in me applying to the US at all. I had a university spot before I applied to the US in the Netherlands, which I was happy with and they were happy with too. But more importantly for my parents were values. In particular, start something, finish something that you start was a big one. Do the right thing ethically.

That was a big one for my father, who was my first board member at the 24-hour race and was always the guiding pillar in terms of its moral and ethical framework, which as a young man in my late teens and early twenties, I could often forget about what are we doing here and are we doing it for the right reasons. So I had a really good network. Even I remember one of my first non-familial mentors was a man called Paul Salnico, who started a very successful business here in Asia called the Executive Center. It's very high-end service to office arrangement.

And I remember talking to him about our goal, our mission, our vision of the 24-hour race, which he was an early board member of, to be the end of slavery. And he said, Chris, if you think that you can set this kind of mission, you don't understand human nature. Humans are always going to be exploiting each other to some degree. And you need to be thoughtful and mindful of this as you pursue your journey. It really hit me like a ton of bricks, right, at the age of 18 or 19. But he was absolutely right. I can't change human nature.

And there's always going to be people willing to exploit other people for a dollar. So at best I can mitigate it. And I think that's a nice segue into meaning and purpose in life. I go back to that analogy I said earlier, could you spend your whole life fighting for something that you will dedicate every minute you have to and still fail, can you still have a smile on your face at that passing moment? I don't think that's a really easy question to answer. It really isn't. But judging your own life success based on comparisons which are really easy to make

in the digital age, because a years ago, you compared yourself to 50 neighbors. Today, you compare yourself to anyone who's online. And I think that creates a lot of anxiety, by the way, for young people. Look, you as an individual will always have the tread of balance between what you want to be and what you need to be. You know, I want to be an astronaut. No joke, for a long time, my life goal, my ultimate expedition was to become the first man

to circumnavigate the moon. It still is, by the way. I don't know how likely it is, but it still is. It's still a big goal of mine. But what I need to be is a really good son to my parents. What I need to be is a really good partner to my girlfriend. And what I need to be is a really good son to my parents. What I need to be is a really good partner to my girlfriend. And what I need to be is an excellent chairman for the 24 hours. What I need to do is pay my electricity and gas bill,

which will be really high because I've gotten into the sous vide cuisine recently. So I need to find constantly a balance between these two things. And I explored, as any person does, regardless of their age, I explored lots of different philosophies that I thought may provide the answers with this tension, what I want to be, what I need to be. And ultimately, what's given me the most fulfillment has been a sort of vitalist Nietzschean sort of approach.

Nietzsche, in my opinion, is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. And I wouldn't be surprised if he accrues almost religious-like deference in the next century or two. And one of Nietzsche's most important tenets is to live life with vitality, which means, contrary to a lot of different religions, to live it with energy in the moment, to think about what gives you pleasure and what gives you joy in the present right now, and to use the past and the future only as guiding posts, but mainly to think of what maximizes your human experience today. And this is a philosophy, I think, in today's world, which is so full of challenges, I can't

even begin to talk about them. A very helpful philosophy. So I think aspire toward values that are important, but accept that you're not perfect and you'll never be able to embody those values. Just aspire towards them and try and do things that will make you happy even if you fail at them. And I wanna end with one analogy, which I think summarizes this philosophy in some way.

You know, when I was really young, at the start of the 24 hour race, the types of people I looked up to were like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, people who had transcended the hierarchy of impact to the point where everybody knew who they were and everybody had experienced some benefit from these people. And I thought, okay, if there's a hierarchy of giving back, it starts with family and friends, it elevates to a community, and then finally it's maybe something global. I think today I realized I had it the wrong way around.

You know, the easiest thing, even though it's not easy at all, and people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have my utmost respect, is to create this kind of incredible, but kind of minute change to people's lives versus the hardest thing is to look at people around you today, your family, your friends, and to help them in meaningful ways, like beyond just a phone call, which I think is important, don't get me wrong, but to actually invest in them and invest in their future. And I can think of people who said small things or did small or big things for me that will be forever more important in my life than any Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These are just people I met and encountered briefly or have known for a long time who made huge and

lasting impacts and all of us have that opportunity today. All of us have that opportunity today to look at the people that we know and make a difference in their lives in a positive way. And I think that's the paragon of the human experience. The paragon is being someone who's not always a nice guy, right? Sometimes it involves giving tough love, but who can provide that value, provide that feedback to the people closest to you. And I think you can live a very satisfied life just by emailing them. Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.