The Pathways & Padlocks Conversation
00:26:40 · Sachin
[00:26:40] S0: Yeah, so it definitely took years and don't think that it's like an official process. As I mentioned before, that it's actually an analogy I came up with just on the spot. For me, those habits are really important and the most happiest people I know have those habits. And I think it's more about the individual habits. It's the fact that you're showing up for yourself every day. It's the fact that you're kind of telling yourself that you matter. And I almost say these habits as an extension of self love. Like, you're showing yourself that you matter and that you're important and you're doing things that make you perform better, which I think that is important for everyone to do because being a student these days can get chaotic. Have all these stimulus around us all the time. It's really hard to find time for yourself. Yeah. And so the way I came up across it is I've always been a macro thinker. I've always believed in having a big vision. But I've also always believed in the small things. Like I think the beauties of life are those little moments you have every day. So it was combining those two things together. And also funnily enough, as a philosophy subject I did at university, which was the philosophy of happiness. And we talked a lot about fulfillment in the long run. And we talked about how a lot of religious people are more happy than non religious people because they have that macro thing, they have that thing that gives them meaning, they have that sense of community that obviously makes them happy and that sense of purpose. So I was like, how can I combine those elements to make religion so good into my own life? I wouldn't really consider myself a religious person.
00:28:10 · Sid Dissanayake, Sachin
[00:28:10] S1: Yeah. I mean, I wanted to transition now, Sachin, just in the interest of time, to one of your passions, which is for social impact and social justice. You mentioned previously that, you know, since a young age, you know, there's have always been, you know, some burning desires of yours. And you've more specifically stated that you're passionate about the intersection between two things, that being business and impact. And you've already touched on previously about how you're interested in quality of opportunity rather than outcome. So I just wanted to get an insight into where exactly that passion has come from. And, you know, how have you expressed that in your, you know, university life or professional capacity in different positions or roles or experiences that you've undertaken? [00:28:58] S0: Yeah, so this would be a pretty long answer, so feel [00:29:01] S1: free to interrupt.
00:29:02 · Sachin
[00:29:02] S0: I've done a lot of thinking about this. So from a very young age, I've always had this kind of this passion for social justice. And it manifested itself in high school when I was involved in a lot of social justice projects. But I think that where it came from is my brother. So my brother has a disability, cerebral palsy, and he's the most amazing person you'll ever meet. So he gets up every day with a smile on his face. He's done so much. Leaves like he makes me my achievements seem like they're nothing because he's just done so much in his short life. And I think growing up every day, seeing my brother show up, try and create as many opportunities for himself as possible, see my family unit changing so much so that it could facilitate the best life for him as possible, I realized that this stuff could happen for other people. My brother was so lucky to grow up in Australia to have access to all these opportunities. Lucky enough that my mom could stop work when he was born to kind of look after him and give him the best opportunity full time, right? And so my parents also were both born in Africa. My family spent a lot of time in East Africa and I've spent some time there as well. And I think from a very young age, it was nights I couldn't sleep because I'd always think about someone that's the same age as me, characteristics, but through no, but through pure luck, I'm here in Australia and that in, let's say for example, Uganda, I'm struggling, struggling to eat right and not having opportunity for education. And that's something that's really bothered me from a young age and I didn't really know what I could do about it. Still don't really know. So as I graduated high school, I graduated with that kind of duality of experience with my brother and that kind of, you know, understanding of what people go through. And so as I transitioned to university, I thought, first of all, I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. And then I looked at how many human rights law subjects you do in a degree, and I realized that it wasn't for me. Second of all, I thought I wanted to work for the World Bank. And so that's why I originally started economics. But as I came into high school, I'm sorry, as I came into university, I discovered entrepreneurship.
00:31:16 · Sachin
And that really of stood out to my personality because I'm someone that like doesn't like status quo thinking. I like creating stuff. Like moving fast and that energy of the space really stood out to me. And then further down my journey, I discovered social entrepreneurship, which was the best of both worlds, right? It was my passion for social justice and also my passion for business combining into one kind of very convenient package. And I was like, cool. And that really made me rethink the narrative about business that I kind of grew up with, and I imagine most of your audience would have grown up with, is that business is bad. It's all about money. Have social impact, you need to join a not for profit, not make the best salary, etcetera, etcetera. And I've realized now that that narrative is complete bullshit. Like one of my biggest mentors, Chamath Palihapitiya, I say mentor, but I've never met him. It's just someone I look up to. He has a fund called the social impact capital. And essentially, they invest in businesses that he thinks is going to change the world. A lot of kind of climate change tech, a lot of med tech, and he's compounded more returns than Warren Buffett. And he's going to be on track to be returning 15, 20% a year to his investors, which is absolutely phenomenal. Another kind of experience that stands out to me is I was watching an address by the chairman of the World Bank. I'm not sure if chairman's the right word, maybe it's president. But he was saying that he thinks that this frontier of business and social impact will be on the precipice of a lot of change. He gave an example of a drone company that delivers blood in Africa to remote communities via drones. And they have a viable business model and they're scaling up and they're doing so much cool stuff. And to me, that's the space that excites me the most.
00:33:07 · Sid Dissanayake
[00:33:07] S1: Yeah, 100%. And I mean, touched on it there as well, but off air you wanted to emphasize that particularly for university students, as a general principle, they come in with good intentions. They want to make an impact in the world, they're kind at heart, whatever the case may be. But I suppose what you touched on off air was that during your university experience, I guess they get impacted by a sense of realism, and there's a process of almost disillusionment along the way. So along the same lines, talked about how there's this misconception that social impact and making money aren't mutually exclusive. So I was just wondering if you'd be able to explain that a bit more, particularly for university students out there who might be listening.
00:33:58 · Sachin
[00:33:58] S0: Yeah, sure. So I'll start with that second point. So, as I mentioned before, with the Chamath example, we're at a stage in society now where solving our most important problems are also the most viable business problems, so to speak, right? I truly believe this is something that Chamath says, that the first trillionaire is going to come from solving climate change. And that's already reflected in Elon Musk. He was briefly for, I think, three or four months the richest man in the world through Tesla and SpaceX. And his fundamental purpose in starting those companies was to combat climate change, right? So I think we're living in an era where those two things aren't mutually exclusive anymore. And you can solving important societal issues, things like even like biotech, things like breast cancer, there's been a lot of innovations in that space recently. They're also financially lucrative. And I think that's awesome. I think that our smartest people should have the market incentives to go after our biggest problems and improve the biggest lives as possible. Another example I'll give, because I think this point is best kind of showing you examples, is a fund called, let me think for a second. I think it's called Leapfrog. So it's a private equity fund by a guy called Andrew Cooper. And I think when all of us business students think about private equity, they think of the evil KKR, cutting jobs, etcetera, etcetera. They're actually a social impact private equity fund. And what they've done sorry, are you going ask for question?