The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Connecting People with Digital Work, the Gig Economy, and More

Episode Date: August 31, 2015

Can digital work fight poverty? Can companies be profitable and also do social good -- especially in a society where the proxy for value is capital and much of that value accrues to platforms? And finally, what's the difference between a mission-driven and 'social' entrepreneur? Samasource, a nonprofit that uses technology to connect marginalized people around the world to digital work, is one attempt at answering those questions. In this segment of the a16z Podcast, we talk with founder and CEO Leila Janah about employment of all kinds -- from sweatshop work to the gig economy to remote work. Janah also argues what the nonprofit world should borrow from for-profit startups -- including attitudes around failure and better measures of success. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. In this segment of the podcast, Sonal catches up with Lila Janah, the founder and CEO of Samasource. Samasource is a nonprofit that uses technology to connect marginalized people around the world to digital work. The discussion that follows covers the gig economy, remote work, and the business of nonprofits. In the end, for Lila, it's all about alleviating poverty through impact sourcing, which is where Sonal begins the conversation. Laila, let's just start off by talking about what that even means. Like, what is impact sourcing?

Sure. Our impact sourcing is the idea that we can reduce social inequity by building social impact into the supply chain of a product or service. So in the case of digital work, it means recruiting people who are non-traditional workers, people who are marginalized in some way, could be veterans who lack employment opportunity, or in our case, people living below the poverty line in the U.S. and abroad to increase their incomes. through the digital economy. So it's sourcing, it's deliberately sourcing in a way that creates social impact. I've heard you talk before about how one of the, maybe not problems, but one of the trends in the current model of doing a lot of nonprofit work or work that has impact is that people tend to give back at the end of the value chain versus in the supply chain.

Can you actually break down how things currently work now and why impact sourcing is different? Sure. So I think when most people think of doing good, they think of it as a separate category of activity from making money. So we think about making money from 9 to 5. And then on our weekends, we volunteer for the PTA or help out with our children's soccer team. Exactly. It's an add-on.

And it's a, you know, you make profit through your day-to-day work activities and then you donate or you give back with what you make, some of what you make. That way of thinking, we often apply directly. to our philanthropy models at broader scales. If you look at how corporate philanthropy works, there's a lot of emphasis on these 1% for charity kind of programs. So we'll take 1% of profit and we'll give it away, or 5% of profit. Or we will, for every product you buy,

give away one of something else. And while that's certainly an improvement over zero, I think the long-term win is to disrupt the way that we do business, to embed the good in the business rather than externalize it as something that happens after we take the profit and do something with it.

It should be higher up in the P&L. I worked in poverty alleviation for many years and saw a lot of programs on the ground that were trying to address the problems that stemmed from poverty. So, you know, one of the problems I've worked on in the past

is sex trafficking. And the primary driver of sex trafficking is lack of income generating opportunities for women and their families, which force them into this horrible trade. People aren't going into that trade because they don't know any better. They're going into it because there are zero economic alternatives. So if we want to end sex trafficking, educating people, I really don't think is going to solve the problem, but creating better jobs for those women and making sure that they have the appropriate

training to attain those jobs, that's the way we're going to solve that problem. And so many other problems follow that pattern. And that's the thesis of impact sourcing. You're basically talking about people who don't have other opportunities. And so one of the memes we hear about a lot is around the gig economy and, you know, the opportunities it presents or doesn't present. And we don't have to focus on that. But in the broader context of that, one thing that's interesting about the scenario is a question that I heard people ask often is, well, what's the alternative? Like, what else would they be doing if they weren't doing X, Y, or Z?

So I want to hear your thoughts about that and how that plays into what you guys do for the communities that you impact source from, if that's a right way to express it. Sure. That's a brilliant question because it gets back to a debate that's long been raging around sweatshops. And people like me and famously Nick Christoph have argued that what we often would consider a sweatshop here in the West could be what people in a developing country regard as a decent job. You know, I think that there is a very clear line, and that line is paying a living wage. I think factories that pay living wages and respect basic worker protections like working hours, paying overtime, sick leave, etc. Sure, we might say this is boring work. You're working on an assembly line that, you know, can't be great for your brain, etc. but I often think that's a very paternalistic view because people who I talk to who are in poor countries are typically desperate for job opportunities and happy when a factory opens up. And so I think our challenge is not to regulate those factories out of existence, but to ensure that they are providing the right sorts of social protections and benefits for workers.

And the gig economy is interesting because I think we see a similar pattern. I've seen many people quickly criticize the gig economy for not providing adequate social protection. I think in that case, it's a little bit different from the factory model or the sweatshop argument, in that people have a lot more choice in agency with smartphones and with more flexible working arrangements that the gig economy allows. And I have yet to meet a worker. This is just anecdotal, but we talk to a lot of lower income people who benefit from the gig economy who feels exploited through one of these platforms. I would say that the biggest risk we face is that the network effect that's produced by many of these marketplaces, which creates this incredible dividend for the founders and investors and those companies, isn't shared as widely as it could be with the workers. And I think there are many smart ways to solve that.

You could increase, this might be unpopular, but you could increase the corporate tax rate by a very small amount and use that increase to fund, you know, the equivalent of 401Ks for those workers or other types of benefits that are necessary. There are all sorts of creative things that we could do that I think would not be totally opposed by industry because I think industry leaders realize that in order to have strong marketplaces, we have to have motivated. workers who want to do a good job. And healthy workers. Well, it's interesting because you bring up an interesting meme that I think applies to a lot of the startup world too. Like we talk a lot about, you know, the passion that entrepreneurs bring to their jobs. And oftentimes we talk about, you know, there's a thesis out there that mission-driven

entrepreneurs are likely to be more successful or not. And I'm curious to hear your take on that. I think one of the things we've seen is that the people who've been most rewarded are in industries like finance. and I think particularly about big financial services firms that have made a killing off of essentially rents. And that's not as desirable from a macro economic standpoint as incentivizing true innovation, which is kind of what we do here where I'm sitting. So, you know, I guess my view of that is that I think we have tremendous opportunity to shift that with policy change. And I think that part of the challenge that Silicon Valley has with government is that there's a perception that people just aren't very forward thinking.

So instead of telling Uber, you know, we should think about a different tax regime that would not be so much skin off your back. You might save a lot of money in lawsuits, you know, and you're getting sued left, right, center. So we could kind of find a smart compromise. And I think instead there's been so much backlash and just sort of anti-Uber or anti-Gig economy sentiment. that's really unproductive. So my philosophy as a social entrepreneur is to try to find that happy middle ground and to, you know, to try to find solutions in the short term that get poor people what they need to live decent lives and that get the people who hold the reins of power what they need, which is a happy and motivated workforce and a middle class that can buy their services. You just called yourself a social entrepreneur,

and I don't know if I've heard that that often. Like, what does that mean? to be a social entrepreneur. Because I think a lot of people would argue that what they do is socially beneficial in some form. I have seen a lot of companies in the Valley get funded that are working on Me Too problems or problems that only affect extremely wealthy people and extremely wealthy countries. Personally, that's not very compelling to me. And I don't think those types of business models radically change the world. However, you know, I think of Facebook and I think of the value that Facebook has created for a lot of our workers. We were actually the first nonprofit that I know of to do longitudinal studies through Facebook because our workers log into our platform.

Originally, they had to authenticate via Facebook platform. So for us, you know, it's been a way to connect people like refugees in northern Uganda to our system. And while I don't think that makes Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook co-founder's social entrepreneurs, because I don't think their first concern was social justice or improving, improving poverty outcomes per se, or improving the lives of marginalized people. I think that the social benefit created by Facebook has been enormous. And I think that there is a new wave of companies that are resulting in some net positive effects that we didn't see in the prior wave of the biggest companies like Exxon and Walmart.

The philosophy of capitalism is that, you know, money flows to those entrepreneurs that do, that solve social problems, right? Because the proxy for value is capital. I think, unfortunately, because of market disruptions, value and capital are not always correlated. The things that people are willing to pay for are not necessarily the most socially valuable things for various reasons. And so I think that the social entrepreneur is someone who puts the social mission above the profit motive. or on par with the profit motive. And I think there are ways to build companies that are both profitable and do that, follow that goal. But it's quite tricky. To me, social entrepreneurship is the middle ground between the traditional nonprofit charitable model that receives no earned revenue and the profit maximizing business whose goal is to maximize profit above other concerns. So where does a B-Corp come in? Because, you know, I've read a lot about a couple of companies that have become certified as B-Corps. And there's a lot of misconceptions around it.

B-corporations are a new class of business. They exist both as a social label like fair trade and as an actual legal category of business called the benefit corporations. You can incorporate as a B-Corp in several states. And the person who designed some of that legislation is actually our lawyer at Sama Group who's helped us a lot. The premise is really interesting. The premise is, what if we could take the trust? triple bottom line idea of companies that have strong social and environmental goals, companies that say, you know, don't put toxic ingredients in their products, you know,

pay a living wage to all of their workers, participate in recycling programs, have a cradle to cradle philosophy, et cetera. Many companies have acquired tons of these certifications. And what the B Corporation model is is essentially an amalgam of those certifications. It is a rubric for running a socially and environmentally responsible business. And the idea behind B Corporation, I think, is, you know, let's go one step beyond avoiding being bad and actually embed good into our model. Right. I think the old school way of doing things was like, okay, let's mitigate risk. Let's avoid, you know, buying stuff from sweatshops because we don't want to have a bad reputation.

Let's make sure there's no child labor in our supply chain. B corps would go one step further and say, not only should there be no child labor, because that's obvious and terrible, but there should be impact sourcing, right? So let's go one step further and create good. And my favorite examples are Method and Patagonia, plum organics, a popular baby food company as a B corp. And I really think that that's the future of business. I think in the future, every business will be a benefit corporation. One of the memes that came up in the early, in the mid-90s around some of this was, you know, this trend of CSR washing and greenwashing. So how do they enforce that it's actually working?

It's pretty tough. So a lot of it relies on self-reported data, and because of the way they collect the data and the questions they ask, it's not easy to fudge those numbers or make them up. And there's a regular data review process. I'm not quite sure what the auditing mechanism is, to be honest. But there is an auditing mechanism. I believe there is an auditing mechanism. And companies who participate in the B Corporation label the revenue model for,

or B Corporation itself as an organization is essentially like a licensing fee. So you pay every year to get this label and then that cost covers the certification and an auditing mechanism. It is really tough. And frankly, like, you know, a lot of the critics of this way of thinking about business have said there's no possible way to measure all these different kinds of social impact and all these different kinds of environmental impact. And you're comparing apples to oranges. Why not just use profit? It's the easiest measure. But I think profit is so, it's so reductionist.

I mean, just looking at that alone ignores other things that a business could be doing and frankly could be getting credit for from consumers. And I think that, you know, one day we'll probably have more advanced holistic metrics. For now, we can slice it up. In our case at Sama Group, we're not a B-Corp, we're a nonprofit, but we look at the outcome of poverty reduction. So we look at how many people were able to move. from a baseline of below the poverty line to a living wage level and how long we can sustain them there. And that's our key metric that we report. So talk to me a little bit more about

this theme of measurement because in both the nonprofit world and the for profit world, you know, we talk a lot about aligning your activities to those kinds of outcomes. So for far too long, and this is something that Dan Polota has done an excellent TED talk on, so I won't plagiarize too much of his thinking. But for far too long, those of us and the the nonprofit sector have been frustrated by the plague of being measured by overhead. So in other words, you know, if a donor gives you a dollar, they want to know what percentage of that dollar is spent on your quote-unquote programs. Well, actually, that's how I decide what to donate to. So that's good to know. I didn't realize I was going about it wrong. So what's interesting is that that

measures, that uses overhead as a proxy for efficacy. And we only did that because we had to, because we didn't have outcome metrics, right? So, for example, if I give you a dollar to buy a cupcake, I don't care how much money you're spending on flour versus sugar versus salaries. I just care about having a delicious cupcake at the end. Right. That's actually a good point. And my measure of success should be like, okay, what is the input to output ratio? So my input is a dollar. How does that compare to the output I'm getting? Am I happy with that output? Right. So it kind reverses the model and shifts it. Jacqueline Novagrats from the Acumen Fund. has promoted this metric, which she calls the best available charitable option. So she kind of looks

at what is the next best thing you could do with this same amount of money. And that's a much more outcome-driven approach. That's what an investor would do if you're investing in a company. Again, you don't care how they spend their cash. What you care about is the return that you get at the end of the day. So, you know, one thing we talk about a lot is this notion of failure. How do that apply to the nonprofit world? Because it seems like it'd be almost the opposite there. So it's such a good question. You want to be lean and you want to be efficient, but if you starve the business, you're going to prevent it from ever reaching scale. And I think most nonprofits, I would venture to say, are in starvation mode. And they're in starvation mode largely driven by this culture of measuring them based on how much they spend on overhead versus program, which is just so sad. I think of one startup that raised $40 million. It was a photo sharing app. What's interesting is they tried something new in an arguably less critical space than, say, preventing sex trafficking in Benin in West Africa or eradicating childhood malaria or reducing brain stunting in refugee camps because kids don't have basic vitamin access. So why are we willing to spend $40 million to experiment on an app that could make our lives marginally better?

And this is not to criticize that spend or that app. I think I use lots of apps. I think they're wonderful. It's just to say that we should be willing to take the same level of risk with our social investments. And we should demand of them the same level of innovation and willingness to learn. And when we talk about failure, you know, when I've heard about it in the lean startup context, it's less about celebrating failure and more about celebrating the spirit of experimentation and innovation. Right.

That's exactly right. To me, the only obligation you have if you take. public money and spend it on a nonprofit is to report back truthfully, objectively, and to a great level of detail on what you learned, what was the outcome of the experiment. It's okay to spend the money, but let's make sure we're learning something from it. Something you mentioned that's kind of interesting is where that money goes. And, you know, one thing is you don't obviously want a startup to be building an edifice complex for their beautiful, like, just gorgeous office space. But at the same time, you have to have a decent working space so you can draw the culture

of employees that want to work there and that are excited to work there and that they're enjoying their job. How does that play out in the nonprofit world? I'm grinning as you say this because one of our employees told me yesterday and she's like she's she's traveled throughout rural Africa and so she's a pretty gritty kind of entrepreneurial person, but she saw someone pooping and peeing on our doorstep in the Mission District yesterday. We're at 16th in Mission which is basically like a locus for prostitution deals. drug deals and there's not enough police support. She kind of came to me and she was like, look, I've kind of reached my limit of, you know, fecal matter on my morning commute and I kind of need

to take a break from our office for a while. And that to me is the limit. Like you, you know, we hire people who are resilient. So that was a little bit of a wake up call to me that if we don't, if we're not taking care of our people, they can't possibly do this work that we're calling them to do, which is so difficult and can be so emotionally strong. stressful and can, you know, people get PTSD via doing this kind of work in extremely difficult environments, not necessarily in our case, but, you know, working with some of the populations that we work with. And so you need to make sure that you're taking care of them. And I think those investments in people usually pay off in the long run. The great challenge in nonprofits,

and you see this in international aid environments, is that, you know, country governments where the budget is largely composed of aid from richer countries are much more accountable to the donors than they are to their own people, which is why we see these really perverse outcomes and scenarios where we think, wow, how is the government of XYZ developing country so bad? Why do they care so little about their people? Well, it's their rational, right? And so I think one of the ways we solve that is for donors to kind of force that accountability by demanding and their donor reports actual feedback from the beneficiaries and having that

be the primary metric that drives their follow-on gifts, as opposed to what the donor thinks is important in their strategic plan or, you know, some other measure like overhead. So how do you do that for Somasource? Because I mean, do you have like customer feedback mechanisms? I mean, do you actually go into these communities and which many of them are distributed around the world and talk to them about how the products are working for them? And what are those products actually? Because we haven't even talked about that. So our, you know, product, and I'm using air quotes here, our product that we're delivering is poverty alleviation through digital work. So for us, the most important thing is to measure how much money people are making

as a result of samasource work. And what happens to them when they leave samasource? Did they continue on that trajectory or do they fall back into poverty? So that's kind of the holy grail of outcome data. And then in addition to that, we do qualitative surveys to find out whether this work makes people's lives better in their own terms. So you might make more money, but if you're making more money doing something that makes you miserable, that's not serving our broader aim, money as a proxy for well-being. And so we do both quantitative analysis, looking at actual observed income increase at the base, you know, so we look at people at the baseline when they come in, we do detailed impact surveys, and then we do that at six months in at a year, you know,

following the start date, and then a three-year survey after that. So we have quite a lot of numerical data. We look at increases in expenditures on health care, education, food, sanitation, and housing. And then we look at, you know, all kinds of well-being indicators. For Sama school, our domestic program, we spend a lot of time talking to the trainees because we don't yet have so much outcome data because people have been out of our program for less time. So we ask them, Do you feel like you know more about the digital economy than when you started? 100% of them say yes because that's what our boot camp does. But we ask some other things.

Like, are you more hopeful about your prospects for finding a job? Are you likely to recommend this program to a friend? Some of the same things that you might see in like a net promoter score. You also mentioned earlier that you did a longitudinal study, probably one of the first of its kind. So how did you approach that with Sama? So I said we used Facebook for that and we basically collected people's Facebook user IDs. and then use that to track them down many years later. The longest, I think we've surveyed someone is four years.

So that's in our world of being only around for seven years. That's some of the best data we have is like four or five years old. That makes sense, too, actually, because given the kind of work you do, you would expect to see the biggest on ramp in the first four years. And then after that, some kind of a stabilization. It's not necessarily tapering, but maybe just sort of a steady state. Wouldn't go down, but it would probably plateau. Plateau, exactly.

We've basically seen people continue. to earn more money. So it's continuing to increase. And I don't know when that's going to plateau. Maybe we're a few years out from that. What we tend to see is a pretty strong upward trajectory that mirrors what you see in the most successful workforce development programs where once you place someone into the formal economy and they get their foot in the door, if they are, you know, hungry enough, they'll keep rising. And, you know, we look at internship programs that have been very successful in America that have done essentially that. And that's kind of what we're trying to replicate overseas, less through an intern model and more through this basic digital

work as your starting point. Were there any surprising findings? Like people say spending income on non-necessities, like things that are just more discretionary income? Definitely. Well, one of the things that's really important to all young people around the world and our average age for Somersource workers is in the early 20s is image. And if you come from a slum and you have been kind of marked.

marginalized your whole life and thought of as someone who didn't deserve to wear anything nice or, you know, look nice or wear makeup and you're bombarded with images on billboards and televisions. We forget a lot of the young people in these urban environments are as exposed to media as we are, and they're constantly seeing images of things that they can't attain, which is deeply damaging. And so one of the things that we've noticed is in addition to, you know, we have workers who will pay the school fees, for younger siblings in their household, if they're not yet heads of household, they'll pay rent for aging parents

or household expenses. Many of them will remit money back to rural areas where their extended family reside. They might be the only person living in the slum or a few people from the family have kind of made it to the urban environment. And then they'll spend money on clothing, sometimes makeup, getting their hair done.

One of our workers who comes to mind is this beautiful young woman who is an orphan and aged out of her orphanage at 18 and was on the street and at risk of prostitution. And she joined Samasource and started doing this work. And the last time I saw her, she had a great hairdo and a really snazzy outfit. And she still lives in relatively modest circumstances. But the way that she carries herself and the pride that she has in herself as a result of being a breadwinner who can now cover all of her own costs and support friends when they need to is it's really incredible. So we think of those things as important. And I feel like

as long as someone's well-being is improving how they choose to spend their money is their own choice, we just want to get them to the point where they're no longer wondering where their next meal is going to come from or worrying about their basic needs being met. What kind of work are these workers doing? I mean, you've talked about your connecting a digital economy, but specifically, what does that mean? So we prepare people for two types of work. With Sama Source, which is our work program, we actually win contracts from large companies, generally tech companies, but companies that have a lot of data that they need to process. And we perform services ranging from image tagging to content review, content moderation, content generation, basically discrete tasks that can be done

with some training that need a high quality level. So, for example, one of our best clients is Getty images. We do a large range of image tagging services for Getty, everything from tagging pictures of celebrities to, you know, informing Getty what might not be in pictures, when something should be there, et cetera. And really essential to monetizing images is knowing what's in the photograph. And it's still pretty hard for computers to understand. understand categories like dogs or trees or, you know, lamps. And so we still need humans to

do some of that. It's easier for computers to identify specific people. We're finding a lot of opportunity in the machine learning space. That's actually kind of counterintuitive because it feels like machine learning would disintegrate what you guys are doing. It is. It's kind of strange that we're doing work that is going to land us. It's going to put us out of a job in a few years. But we also think it's very important to be at the forefront. And there's pretty wide spectrum of evolution. So there are many companies that have data that don't have machine learning teams or don't have higher level engineering teams that just need people to process this. And I think that will be true for quite some time. The most advanced companies that have the biggest R&D budgets are using

our services to teach their algorithms to do things like self-driving cars, auto detection of things and images, all sorts of really interesting applications. And it's tremendously motivating for our workers to know that they're part of some of the most cutting edge software in the world. In the U.S., and now in Kenya, we have a second program called Sama School, which trains people to get jobs in the digital economy beyond those that we hire for in SamaSource. So it's a much broader pool of people that we're targeting with that. We're aiming to sign up 10,000 people to that training program this year. So it's like a skills training program for people who aren't like say tech savvy or it's a it's a don't know how to code. Exactly. It's a program for injecting them

into the digital economy. And so we train people to harness the skills they already have. If you can drive a car, you can make money through Uber, Lyft or a number of different car sharing services. If you can walk a dog, you can make money through a number of different websites. If you can paint a house, et cetera. So there are all kinds of offline jobs that you can do that are mediated by technology that require a level of proficiency and marketing ability to get money. And then there are all kinds of jobs that are intermediated through these platforms that are online jobs. So things like data entry, things like social media marketing, things that can be done remotely that you can find through a gig economy website such as Upwork. So the Sama School part of our work appeals to people

who can find their own projects, but just need that extra push to understand how to do it. And we've found tremendous demand for this program. We're the only nonprofit. We're the only organization that we know of offering job training for the digital economy that teaches low-income people how to take advantage of all of these new resources. Are there any plans to sort of spin that a little bit more further up the skill stack? Because, you know, it's not so much a hierarchical thing, like these are lower or less valued skills, but in terms of the skills that have the maximum value accrued to them, do you have any thoughts on that for the school and the program you're doing?

We have seen that there's a huge number of organizations working on coding, and we thought there was a big gap beneath that, because to really make money, to make a living wage as a coder, there's quite an intense level of training that's necessary, and the feedback we've received is that a lot of people who go through these coding programs, especially if they're light touch, don't actually end up with a job. So we thought if we can be the entry point, then they can finish Sama school, start making some money, then sign up for the coding program, and really be able to invest in it and improve their skills. Essentially what we're teaching people in Sama school is how to learn through the internet, if that makes sense. No, that makes great sense.

And I'm actually really relieved to hear you say this. I think it's incredibly important to have the skills, just like digital literacy is as important as reading and writing and some of the other skills that you have, as is empathy and other important things. But we do have a tendency, I think, to forget exactly what you're talking about, this sort of gap between if people have gone through that kind of a coding program or education program and then people who have had some of the more automated jobs that are getting taken over by robots literally. So having that address is kind of great. So I guess one, I want to hear one thought from you about remote work, the nature remote work, because we have a lot of people that probably have distributed

workforces. And there's a lot of debates about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. And I'm not so interested in the value judgments of that. But I am curious to hear your thoughts about how that's been changing, because you've been doing this not for seven years. I think I met you five years ago. And it's changed a lot. And the world has changed a lot. The nature of the work, the availability, the platforms. What are your thoughts on the evolution of remote work? So in the most optimistic sense, the biggest problem with capitalism is that money can move freely across borders, but people cannot, and the internet economy completely turns out on its head. And that was the thesis of Tom Friedman's book, and that's, you know, the most optimistic lens on remote work. The most pessimistic lens is the farther

we are away from the people who produce our stuff, generally speaking, the least emotionally and morally connected we feel to them and the farthest, the farther they are outside of our circle of empathy. And that typically leads to bad outcomes. I mean, I think about factory farming. If we're familiar with the way that our meat was produced, nobody would want to touch a piece of pork in America. Average people would find it horrifying. Similarly, average people found horrifying the factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed a thousand people because of completely negligent, you know, building standards that could have been avoided and saved the lives of a lot of very poor women, right? And most Americans would find that appalling and would never allow that to happen in their backyard or, you know, with their knowledge.

And so sometimes when we move production far away from us, we reduce the amount of oversight and control and empathy, ultimately, that we have for the people working there. And that's a bad thing. The beauty of technology-driven remote work is that we still retain that connection and, empathy to the worker because we can communicate with them. They can be our friend on Facebook. I love that my lift driver sees my Facebook profile and that I regard that person as a peer and not some sort of subservient worker. And that, you know, if I need to make extra money, I could be a lift driver and it kind of levels the playing field. And I've seen this really interesting dynamic through digital work platforms where especially when workers can rate the employer, there's a level of

transparency and sort of connection that happens, that's an ultimately really good thing for the worker. So I think that the evolution of platforms that really respect the worker, that allow the worker to raise the employer, that report transparently on income data, that connect people to information about benefits and training, I feel like that's a world in which we want to live, we want to live in. Yeah, no, I do too. And I would probably even argue that we're so early on that, because when you say platforms, I would also argue for mediums because when I think of things like VR and the ability to connect more emotionally in a way that you can't with someone you're talking to over the internet or on the phone that's distributed in a distributed workforce scenario, you can do a lot of different things that we have never been able to do before.

So I think that does add a lot of interesting value for sure. And the other thing I will just mention because I feel so strongly about this, like generally, you know, when people have something to hide, they don't. don't welcome that transparency. And again, I think of factory farming and the utter refusal of factory farms to put any kind of transparency around the way things are done. And, you know, I think about police brutality cases and the demand for body cameras. Technology can help us build greater empathy through, you know, giving us a clear view of what's happening on the other side of what we choose to buy. So one final question then. I'm going to actually channel my friend Bianca here, who is talking about this as a theme that she cares about.

But how do you think about building trust in these communities that you're working, that are actually workers in the Samasaurus platform? I think it can be difficult for outsiders to come in, especially when I think about communities like Mathare, one of the informal urban settlements we work with in Kenya, where people have seen NGO after NGO and they're jaded. With us, I think there's a sense of possibility because we deliver jobs. And that makes you pretty popular in a place.

But how do they know? It's just because previous people have succeeded at it or is it marketing? Right. We now have an alumni community of around 2,000 people in Nairobi. And so a lot of our workers recruit their friends. And when we screw up, you know, there was an issue where one of our delivery centers wasn't paying the wages. We thought they were paying to workers.

We found out about it. They were posting stuff on Facebook. You know, I got emails about it. Part of the beauty of working in the internet economy is that you can communicate directly with the worker, which you can't. It's like if I buy a t-shirt made in a factory in Bangladesh, I have no idea how the woman who made it was treated. Inspector number six, a sticker on your shirt. Exactly. In the best case scenario. And so we encourage our workers to communicate directly with us. In fact, I'm going to Nairobi on Monday to launch a new center with 70 workers. We have invited all of our

alumni in the area to come. And I fully expect some to come to me and criticize what we're doing or give me some feedback and that's important because we don't know what we're doing wrong if we don't hear from them. And I think the future of philanthropically funded organizations like ours, I won't say charities, but the future of social enterprises and nonprofits, is really reporting out on what the beneficiaries think, not just what we think is good for them. Right. It goes back to your point about even that's the same community you're getting feedback from in the first place for the product. I'd love to keep talking about this. I think we can talk about so much more, but this is all we have time for. Thanks for your time, Lila. This is wonderful,

and thanks for being on the A66 and Z podcast. Thank you so much, Sonal.