Room to Read | John Wood & Don Valentine | Talks at Google

My name is Greg Powell. I'm with the Innovators at Google program. And today we have the privilege of John Wood and Don Valentine here to speak with us. So I'm going to start off with an excerpt. "Dear friends, congratulations. You've been selected to participate in one of John Wood's Random Ideas. Unlike most of my rambling stories from the road, this one will not take long to tell and will do a lot of good for a large number of children whose lives are less fortunate than ours. While trekking through the Nepal Himalayas, I was invited to visit a local school. Over dinner at a small trekking lodge, I had met Pasupathi, a man who administers 17 local schools in a remote province of Lamjung. In the West, the term school administrator brings to mind visions of a desktop bureaucrat, but Pasupathi walks 10 miles of donkey trails every day to visit the rural, dirt-floored schools set up to educate children in small mountain towns."

His goal is to help children to gain an education, and his job is made more difficult by lack of resources. In 2000, John founded Room to Read, which is a program that's dedicated towards providing education and educational resources to the people who need it. I think that's our video conference in New York or Boulder, possibly. The mission is to provide education and educational resources to people now globally. Don Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, is an early investor in... He basically has the ability to see a good thing, to know a good thing when he sees it. He's one of the first investors in Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and he was not coincidentally one of the first investors in Room to Read.

So with that, I give you John Wood and Don Valentine. Thank you.

I'm on.

You're on. We rehearsed this.

It doesn't appear like it. Actually, I'm here for a personal reason, beyond Room to Read. I'm here to thank you. Google has been a rather spectacular experience for Sequoia. We were there sort of at day one, so you can imagine what our price is. So we have other members of our family who are so enthusiastic about Google, they came to see it, to hear it, and have a sense of what Google is. Before I left this morning, my wife, Rachel, asked, "Well, what's the dress code?" And I said, "I don't think you own it." It is true, and it's interesting. At the time, the Google investment was made roughly nine years ago. The Room to Read investment was made roughly eight years ago. And the opportunity for Room to Read came through an epiphany that John will tell you about.

And he will take you on a geographic survey of parts of the world that are pretty unbelievable. They're unbelievable in their sense of beauty. And they're hideous in the sense of education, opportunity, sanitation. All the things that you're so comfortably ensconced in and with don't exist in these places. And it's our daughter who got us interested. She's very sexist. So our first investments were scholarships for girls. It turns out that the boys are taken care of by the system. And Hilary determined that in an attempt to get the playing field at least going in a direction of flat, we would invest in Room to Read. And you notice I use the word invest. I don't use the word donate or any word that implies anything different than a Google-like decision.

We invested in girls' scholarships. I am here largely to hold John's jacket in case of a fight. So I'll turn it over to you, John.

OK, well, it's really great to be here as an ex-Microsoft guy, especially. Thank you for the warm welcome. I'm so glad Windows didn't crash during that little technology scandal we were having there, trying to get... And I do want to say hi to everybody in Boulder—I'm a Colorado alum; everybody in Seattle—I'm a Microsoft alum; and everybody in New York who's tuning in—was born in Connecticut. So I kind of feel tied into the places where this is being watched remotely. So we want to make this a dialogue, so I don't want to do a long presentation. But I think for me it's great to be here because what we're trying to do is enlist white-collar professionals around the world in a cause, in a mission, which is to bring education to the poorest of the poor.

We're going to talk about this, that education is the best-proven, long-term ticket out of poverty. We are asking the world's people to fight the war on poverty with one hand tied behind their back. Because a child who does not go to school—how are they going to get educated? And throughout the developing world—and many of you, I know from talking to you during the lunch, have traveled through the developing world—what you see is that people say, 'We are too poor to afford education.' And that's just the world's worst Catch-22. Too poor to afford education, but if you don't have education, how are you going to break the cycle of poverty? So these people are being asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.

We were talking this morning. Do you want to talk about your theory about how these people will never actually be Google customers or Microsoft customers or Dell customers?

We were wondering how to relate this story directly to you. And economics, in some respects, is the difference. The people in the part of the world that Room to Read has chosen to help basically will never be customers for Google unless we can get them to read, unless we get them some semblance of a beginning in education. So you can say there is a direct connection between you and other fabulous companies that will continue to sell products that require people to be literate. I mean, it's extremely simple. And we're talking about, in round numbers, a billion people where there's an opportunity to change their lives, to make literacy common, and to tee them up as future contributing citizens to the evolving technology of the world.

John has some slides which I think maybe we'll flash just to...

Yeah, let me give you the cold, hard, depressing statistics. And then for those of you who are glass half full kind of people like I am, don't worry. We're going to get to the solution. So I want to just set the tone, though. 2 billion people in the world today live on less than $2 a day. 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day. 800 million people are illiterate in the developing world. It is 1 seventh of humanity cannot read or write. I think that is an indictment on society. We've never lived in an era that has a greater accumulation of wealth. Yet we have 800 million people who are illiterate. And I'm not doing this to create customers for you or for any other company. I'm doing it because it's just the right thing to do.

But as a long-term investor, as a guy who studied a lot of economics, and a guy who wants to be a long-term philanthropist, I think there's nothing better than we can do for kids than to give them education as a ticket out of poverty. There are 100 million children in the developing world who are not enrolled in primary school. 100 million. Think about that. Kids in that nice sweet spot of 5 to 10 years of age. And what percent of the brain develops before the age of 6? It's an incredible percent of the brain's capacity develops before the age of 6. All of us probably had very stimulated childhoods during that age. Can you imagine telling a kid at age 5 or 6, you don't get to go to school? So we have a sense of urgency, because reaching these kids next year or next decade, it's too late.

We have to reach them now. As Don was mentioning, and as Hilary, who's now our board co-chair, knows all too well, 2 thirds of those who are illiterate and who are not enrolled in primary school are girls. And this is an absolute tragedy. I am proud to say that Ich bin ein feminist. I believe in education for boys, but I believe in equal access for the girl child. Because if you educate girls, you educate also the next generation. No offense to the men of my gender in this room, but in Nepal, there's a saying that is when you educate a man, you educate the man. When you educate a woman, you educate the next generation. We're going to talk about how cheap and inexpensive this is to actually provide this gift.

Let me show you a couple of very quick statistics. I know that you guys are all about organizing the world's information. I asked my summer intern to help me organize the world's information using United Nations statistics that graph basic rates of education against GDP per person. Can you prove that education is a ticket out of poverty? I don't know if you can actually prove it. I'm not a scientist. What I can show is a very direct link between education levels and GDP per person. What you see in the upper right-hand corner is the countries that all of us are blessed to live in, places where people have education and, as a result, they have $35,000, $40,000 per capita of GNP. The depressing lower left-hand side of the graph shows

places like Ethiopia, Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa, where people are living on $2 a day. A very direct link between education and economic growth. You can also look at other things that make life worth living. Life expectancy. Who would not want to live to a nice, ripe old age? What you see here are the places like Japan and Iceland and the United States and Canada that have educated their citizens, as a result, have a longer life expectancy. What you see again is you can see in the lower left-hand side these places. Haiti has the lowest rate of literacy in the Western Hemisphere. It also has a life expectancy of 50 years. Zambia, 38 years. Swaziland, 33 years. So I would posit that there's nothing better you can do if you think long-term than investing in education from a young age.

Your turn.

Is it my slide? No. No. Well, these are yours, John. I'm waiting for my slide where we do the coffee slide.

Okay. So I guess what I should do then is talk about the point of departure for Room to Read.

The epiphany.

The epiphany. I'm not a biblical scholar. What's the story? Who got knocked off a horse?

St. Paul.

St. Paul. And why did he get knocked off a horse?

God was trying to get his attention. And used lightning. It was quite successful. Attention-getter.

I'm really lucky, because in my case, it was not lightning. In my case, it was a headmaster, as you mentioned in the opening remarks, a headmaster. I went to Nepal. How many of you have been to Nepal? Excellent. About seven or eight of you. Go. At some point in your life, definitely go. The reason I went to Nepal was because I went to a slideshow. When I was Microsoft's Director of Marketing for Australia, I'd been with the company from 1991 through 1999. And probably like many of you, you're here during these steep growth years. I was there during the steep growth years and was fantasizing about getting away for a while and actually going somewhere remote. Nepal is one of the world's 20 poorest countries.

The illiteracy rate is 70%. People are living on less than a dollar a day. I didn't know any of this. I just saw a slideshow that an adventure travel company did. And I was fantasizing about getting out to the mountains and trekking for 18 days, this legendary place called the Annapurna Circuit. You walk 200 miles of donkey trails, and you don't see a car or a newspaper or any vestige of what we have just taken for granted in our own life. My goal in going to Nepal was not to change my life. My goal was just to escape. I wanted to escape from conference calls. I wanted to escape from email. I wanted to escape from the dreaded Monday morning management team meeting that I had come to absolutely hate.

But mostly I wanted to escape from certain executives who were driving me crazy. Then, I was having these nightmares where Steve Ballmer's big bald head was yelling at me, going, 'You're not making your numbers, numbers, numbers!' And I'd wake up and I'm like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, it's only a dream, it's only a dream.' And there was a rumor that if you went high enough in the Himalayas, you could escape the sound of Steve Ballmer yelling at you. And so I decided to go test this proposition out. What I found in Nepal was absolutely incredible in terms of the poverty and the conditions in which kids were learning. I met this gentleman, Pasupati, who asked me to come see a school. We crossed a very scary set of bridges to go to this remote school.

When we got to the school, it was incredible to see the conditions in which the kids were learning, or in many cases not learning, due to completely overcrowded conditions—in this case, a dirt floor that turned to mud during the rainy season because the sheet-metal roof leaked and they didn't have school during the monsoon season, which, of course, there's no better place to be during the monsoon than in school because you can't be out in the fields. When the headmaster invited me to see the school's library, I was naive. I thought, 'Okay, the library, that will be a place with bright, happy children reading books. That's what a library is all about, right?' I was very, very naive. In reality, the library was this empty room where theoretically a library could have existed, except for the fact that they did not have the proper shelving, they did not have a librarian, and they did not have books.

And I asked the headmaster—I didn't want to be obnoxious, but I had to ask—I said, 'Where exactly do you keep your books?' And he pointed to a cabinet in the back of the room with a padlock on it. And he explained that they had so few books, the books were a precious resource, and they did not want the children to destroy them. And he found the teacher who opened the padlock, and they opened the cabinet, and they had about 20 books. They had about 450 students at this school. So, being a math genius, I thought that was a really bad ratio of books to students. But what was most troubling was the quality of the books. These were books that backpackers and trekkers had left behind out of sympathy.

But obviously, when you go trekking in Nepal, you don't put Clifford the Big Red Dog in your backpack. Apparently, people do carry Umberto Eco and Hermann Hesse novels. And I'm the literary snob. I believe that every child should read Danielle Steel at some point of their pedagogical development. But these books were not appropriate for children. And the headmaster spoke a sentence that would forever change my adult life. Chapter one of my book—and I think you are getting a copy of my book today—chapter one of my book is titled, 'Perhaps, Sir, You Will Someday Come Back with Books.' The headmaster's very simple request. He said, 'We wish to inculcate in our children the habit of reading.' And that stuck with me.

I thought about this for the next 16 days of trekking. I said, 'I will definitely come back.' And one of the teachers looked at me skeptically and he said, 'Will you really? Many people tell us they will help us, but we never see them again.' And that was just like throwing down a gauntlet to a Type-A personality like myself. I was like, 'OK, I will be back. Give me a year, I will be back.' And what I wanted to do is basically find a way to share my good fortune. I had made a good, decent amount of money at a young age, not enough that I could be a Larry or Sergey or Bill Gates level of philanthropist, but I at least had a lot of energy and some money. I wanted to do something. And I thought a lot while trekking.

I had this vision on day 11. And it may have been because I was drinking the local alcohol at 17,000 feet that I had this vision. But rather than a Buddha popping into my head, what popped into my head was Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, as we all know, democratized access to information. In Carnegie's day, and this should relate to everybody here since you are organizing and making accessible the world's information, in Carnegie's day, the poor did not have access to books and the rich did. Carnegie grew up poor in Scotland. The rich were 2% of the population. They had thousands of books. They had yards and miles of books in their homes. The poor 98% had no books. Carnegie thought that was wrong.

What did he do? He worked with 3,000 communities across North America to build basic libraries. So I thought, 'I can't be the Carnegie of the entire world, but I can at least be the Carnegie of Bahundanda, Nepal.' That was my goal.

Just a little bit of color. Carnegie built libraries. No books in the library there, either. Rather strange statistic that I only learned when I heard more about Carnegie and his great fascination with making reading available to the masses. He built fabulous-looking libraries, but they neglected to fill them with books. The thrust of Room to Read is make slightly less elegant libraries, but fill them with books—locally written books.

Yeah, so that's a great point of departure. So let me show you something about the books. This is my yak. I wanted to be Carnegie with a yak. And the goal was to go back. And the first trip was actually English-language books that we had gotten collections of. And what you'll notice about this is Zach the Yak. He costs $5 a day to rent. And what you'll notice is that actually, the critical design flaw—do any of you guys do user interface design? Anybody? Who can tell me the critical design flaw with the yak? What's that? 'No flat space on top.' 'No flat space on top.' Very good. That's correct. Anybody else want to guess? 'No steering wheel?' Yeah, well, the steering wheel actually—what's critically important here is that the guide rope is actually shorter than the horns.

And this led me to believe the Microsoft Windows development team had been in Nepal before me, designing guide ropes. This is actually a shot of one of my first book delivery trips back to Nepal. This, for me, really said it all. When you watch the children who had never had access to children's books before—these kids had never seen wildlife. They were looking at giraffes and zebras and elephants with wide-eyed fascination, looking at the solar system. Kids were journeying beneath the ocean and looking at sharks and starfish and coral. And to me, it was just an incredible experience to actually go and see these kids. And I actually spent three days going to 10 different schools. This is in 1999.

And watching the reaction of the kids and knowing that we were giving them something that was a hand up, not a handout, that it was education, for me, it really crystallized. And in my head, I wrote this really short memo to announce to myself and to the world that I was planning to leave Microsoft and start Room to Read. Now, as Don mentioned, let me go ahead and go to the local language books. This is a critically important point. Oops, we got a little off track there. But let me—we can come back. Sorry about this. Local language children's books. We were talking this morning over coffee about the fact that what makes an entrepreneur great, and Mr. Valentine's theory is—one of his many theories—is that what makes an entrepreneur great is that entrepreneurs abhor a vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Entrepreneurs abhor a vacuum. Social entrepreneurs also abhor a vacuum. You have to basically go in and fill that vacuum. In the developing world, why are 800 million people illiterate? One of the most basic reasons is because they don't have children's books in the local language. It is a problem as old as the Himalayas. Parents can't afford books, so publishers don't see a business case. So they don't publish them. So again, children are fighting with one hand tied behind their back, because they don't have access to books from a young age. So we've had to actually jump-start a program to do local language children's publishing. I've got a couple of the books right here.

I'm going to flash them on screen. But maybe, Hillary, if you could just maybe pass a couple around so you have. And Lisa and Laura, if we have more, just feel free to kind of pass them around. Let me show you a couple of these books. These are, by the way, these are not translations. This is all original content that is being developed by local authors and local artists. This was something that actually—how many of you know Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, who now, along with Sally Osberg, has the Skoll Foundation? The Skoll Foundation gave us seed funding. And this is very important because in Silicon Valley, people are allowed to take lots of risks. In the charity world, you're not often told to go out and take risks.

What we did is we went to the Skoll Foundation and said, "We want to start publishing children's books using local authors and local artists." Now, a lot of the experts told us, "You don't know how to do this. We're not going to fund you. And how are you going to find the artists? How are you going to find the authors?" And my first thought was, when you go into a market anywhere in the developing world, what do you see? You see colors. You see vibrancy. You see creativity. You see textiles. You see paintings. You see handicrafts. You see people in Guatemala who have carved these animals from chunks of wood and painted them in these bright colors. So why can't we take that creativity and harness it and start producing children's books?

So this is a book from Nepal, Sani Tempo. And tempo is a Nepalese version of a tuk-tuk. And this is all about a little misbehaving, anthropomorphic tuk-tuk who goes and creates chaos on the streets of Kathmandu. Little boys love this book. This is a book called Gahana Ko Basana, a story about a Nepali girl who becomes obsessed with her mother's jewelry and wears her mother's jewelry to school every day and makes the kids draw pictures of her, and becomes so obsessed with beauty that she gets failing grades. And when I first saw this book in our Nepal office, my first instinct was to immediately grab a copy, and I Federal Expressed it to my girlfriend, because I thought there was a very valuable lesson inherent.

She's now my ex-girlfriend. Yeah, right.

No surprise.

Yeah. This is a cricket book in Sri Lanka. This is a book that teaches about ethnic and religious tolerance. It's about two boys, one who is Tamil, one who is Sinhalese, who team up to win the cricket championship. So understanding through sport. A book about wildlife and teaching kids about the environment. We grew up with Ranger Rick and Woodsy Owl and all kinds of great environmental messages. Guess what? Kids in the developing world don't have role models around the environment. What we're trying to do is teach them, if you cut down a tree, plant two. We've got to inculcate these lessons from a very young age. And this publishing platform becomes a great way to do it. This is a Khmer book.

The Khmer Rouge, as many of us know in Cambodia, burned down the libraries and burned the books. We're going to help the Cambodian people rebuild and get these kids access to books from a young age. We're even working with young authors. And this is one of my favorite programs, because what we are doing is finding children who have story ideas. And through our Young Writers Competition, giving them incentives and rewards to actually write children's books that we can then publish and then illustrate. This is one of our authors. She's a 10-year-old Sri Lankan girl. She wrote a book called Baby Fish Goes to School. And this is a really cool book because basically it's about a little fish who wants to go to school but doesn't get to go.

And every day the baby fish cries and says to its mother, 'Why can't I go?' And the mother says, 'Well, the school's on land. Life is tough.' So the baby fish is left out until one day the animals do a little powwow. And the animals are all about inclusion and including the girls. And so the animals go out and they buy a fish bowl. And every morning they scoop up baby fish with some water. And they parade to the school. And they place baby fish next to the chalkboard so baby fish gets to go to school. 10 years old has come up with this idea. We are really trying to unlock that creativity across the developing world. That what if the next Toni Morrison is out there? What if the next Salman Rushdie is out there?

And they have stories to tell. Let's get them telling them from a young age.

I think he wants me to comment on the 10-year-old. And actually, I've never met her. But it's remarkable. That book is in circulation, and you'll find on the back there are photographs of the author and the person who's done the drawings and illustrations. And the oldest one that I noticed of all of the people profiled was 19. The youngest is 10. It is not something that's going to be compelling bedside reading for you, but if any of you are facing grandchildren on the horizon, these kinds of books would be amusing kinds of books for them. And they're written and published in three languages. So the child gets to see her language and English side by side, as well as some other language. This particular book I have is in English, Tamil, and Sinhala.

Am I saying it wrong?

It's all right, Venkat. I'm from Madras. You're forgiven.

Okay.

In some countries, public correction like that is death by hanging. Back to the main event. You're the main event.

You're supposed to be asking me questions.

I asked you a question. When do I get my favorite slide?

Okay, your favorite slide. I only have one slide. Okay, we're going to go back in time then. Sorry about this, but we're going to go back in time to Don Valentine's favorite slide. We are all about scale. In my mind, if the charity world gets one thing right in the next five to ten years, it has to be scale. We have to figure out what an effective solution is and then figure out how to scale the hell out of it. You guys do it. Dell does it. Public companies do it. Why does the charity world not scale? So what we actually have Room to Read, because we are all Type A, measurement-driven, performance-driven, and we have a lot of investors who insist we be performance-driven. We actually update our results on a quarterly basis on our website, as though we're a public company, listing out the number of books, the number of scholarships, the number of schools built, the number of libraries established, the number of books published, et cetera, et cetera.

We basically have internally the Starbucks test. We basically say, if a public company sees hundreds of millions of potential customers or billions of potential customers, what does it do? It scales. Well, in my mind, if the world needs a good latte, the world damn well needs literacy. So if Starbucks can do it, why can't we do it? So what you see here is a growth comparison. We went and we benchmarked Starbucks' first eight years as a public company. After their IPO, how many outlets did they open each and every year for their first eight years? Room to Read. We're now seven and a half years old. It's our eighth year. What are we doing? And what you see here, and hopefully my pointer will work, you see that in the first year, they're kicking our butt.

In the second year, they're still kicking our butt. In the third year, we're drawing even. In the fourth year, we're actually pulling ahead. Six, seven, eight years, we're ahead of them. In their eighth year, Starbucks opened 1,000 outlets, which is kind of cute. We're opening 1,600 libraries this year. So we are literally out-Starbucking Starbucks. If you think about that, how many times do you see a Starbucks outlet opening? They're probably opening one in your men's room right now as we sit here. So can the charity world scale in that way? What does this mean for us? Well, this year it means we're doing 1,600 bilingual school libraries. These are, as Don mentioned, incredibly low-tech. It's not about creating a Carnegie-esque huge building that costs millions of dollars and then having it sit empty.

We're basically trying to create a cheap and cheerful reading space. We'll do questions in a moment. Cheap and cheerful reading space that has local-language books, English-language books, a trained librarian, monitoring and evaluation to make sure that the libraries are being well-run. This year, 1,600, what does that mean? It means four new libraries per day. We reach over 1,000 children a day with this program. It means a new library every six hours. Between the time you go to bed and the time you wake up, we've opened a new library. Between the time you eat lunch and the time you eat dinner, we've opened a new library. Between the time you get on a plane in New York and land in Los Angeles, we've opened a new library.

That, to me, is all about scale. And we're really excited about that, because we can take this to whole new levels. By the end of this year, we will have opened our 5,000th school library. Carnegie did 3,000. So we're actually out-Carnegieing Carnegie. And we're doing books. We last week were at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, and Bill Clinton invited us to come on stage and present something that was gutsy. What could we do? What would we commit to? So our chief operating officer, Erin Ganju, and I had the pleasure of standing on stage with Bill Clinton and announcing our goal, that we would be at 10,000 school libraries by the end of 2010. So we're going to do 5,000 of these things in the next three years, in the next 36 months.

Yeah. I'll repeat the question. I know people are joining us by video, and I was asked to repeat questions. So I ask your forgiveness. But basically, the locations, and do we build them across the street from each other? We don't. I mean, our hope would be that we could build them village by village by village, but certainly share the wealth and not have more than one per village. We're working right now across eight countries. And if you look at a map of the world and say, where are your potential customers? 84% of the children who are not enrolled in school live in a little swath of the world, sub-Saharan Africa through the Middle East, through South and Southeast Asia. So that's where we are working.

We're working in Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos. We launched last year in South Africa, and we're currently launching in Zambia. And we're now in eight countries. We're seven years old. Our goal is to hopefully double that number of countries so we can find the capital. And capital is very important. You can't do anything without capital. And we're not well endowed. So we basically have to find the capital to do that. But we hope to go into at least seven or eight additional countries in the next three years.

The only unfortunate difference between a Starbucks outlet and a library is one makes unconscionable profits to fund the opening of the next Starbucks store. As you can imagine, our libraries do not produce great revenue and certainly no profit. So we're introducing this idea to you just in case you figure out that having your own library somewhere in the world is an appealing idea. And I should explain why the example doesn't include Google. And it's simply because we needed a company that opens facilities rapidly against which we can measure ourselves. And the most recent Starbucks I was in, in New York City, is about the same size as a library. The output of the library has a lot more long-term useful features beyond getting your caffeine high for the morning.

So that's what it looks like.

This, by the way, is $3,000. If you've traveled in the developing world and you've seen the situations that kids live in, the mud huts, the poverty, and then think about a child. What would it be like to be that child, whether it be a five-year-old girl in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, or perhaps an AIDS orphan in South Africa? And walk through the village. And then walk into here. This is the only spot in the village that is designed around the needs of the child. Many of you are engineers, right? You need to design things around the needs of the user. What do you see here? You see brightly colored walls, sun-splashed, color-drenched walls. You see books on shelves that are at the eye level.

There are no doors. There are no padlocks. There are no glass cabinets. The books are at the child's eye level. There's child-friendly flooring. There's posters on the wall teaching kids about hygiene and gender equality. There are maps and puzzles and globes. There's even little block things. So if a two-year-old or a three-year-old wanders in with their older brother or older sister, they can have their synapses firing and their neural networks developing from a young age because they're being stimulated. I want to point out the $3,000, though, because this reaches about 300 kids. So it's $10 per child to reach a kid with access to books and a trained librarian from a young age. That $3,000 doesn't just set the library up.

It also pays for the first three years of additional book donations, of monitoring, of evaluation, of ongoing library training. So it is incredibly inexpensive. And what we're doing now is going out to corporations and asking corporations to fund not one or two or three. We want them to fund hundreds, if not thousands. So Goldman Sachs, as an example, is our biggest corporate donor. They're funding 450 libraries across the rural areas of India over the next three years. It's only costing them $1 million to do that, to actually have 450 villages have their first library. Credit Suisse is a very big funder of this program. Accenture is a very big funder of this program. So that to me is, I think, hopeful because if you look at all the kids in the developing world who lack access to books, but you can reach them for, on average, $10 a child, then there's no reason we can't do this.

There's no reason we shouldn't do it. There literally are no excuses.

There's an incipient donor who wants to ask a question.

Yeah, the question is a good one. How do you make sure that the thing survives after three years? I think, first of all, what I will say, to be blunt, there are no guarantees. There simply are no guarantees. What we want to do, though, is design things right up front. One of the best things you can do is make sure that the parents are involved. When we build a school, we ask the parents to donate labor. We don't ask, we insist. And when I say we, Room to Read is employing local people in each country to run things. The parents will come out, and I hopefully have a few pictures somewhere. I'm a little bit discombobulated on my slides here, I apologize. But we do have a couple pictures of the parents.

And I just want to show these because it brings to life what the parents are doing and how excited the parents are about these projects. This is a school in Nepal, in a village called Khatryack. It's in the Nepalese Himalayas. It's about a two-hour walk up a steep mountainside on donkey paths. I visited this school in 2002 with my team. And we were walking up a donkey trail. And I was almost run off the trail by these women carrying these huge bags on their back. And I asked my local team, 'Where are the women going in such a hurry? Are they coming back from the market?' And he explained that these were the mothers who woke up before sunrise and walked an hour downhill to put 110-pound bags of cement on their backs and carrying them back uphill for two hours.

That's how badly these mothers wanted their kids to have education. And these mothers still had to go out and work in the fields for the day. That is incredible. We can build a school like this for $15,000, including the library, and including boys' and girls' toilets, and including running water, because the parents are willing to donate labor. And that helps us to keep our costs down. Most importantly, though, to your question on sustainability, it helps to show the community is bought in from day one. I've traveled the developing world. I've filled about five passports by now. And what's always striking to me is how many kind of hulks, shells you see—something that had great promise. But what happened is people came from outside the community and they plunked it down and they said, 'Here's your hospital, here's your school.'

Good luck. We literally do not let volunteers go build schools. With all due respect to Habitat for Humanity, we have a different model, which is the local people will donate the labor, whether it's parents painting a library wall, whether it's parents building the shelves, whether it's parents carrying cement, the husbands, thankfully, mixing the cement. And in this case, in rural Laos, this was groundbreaking. And we actually had a big problem this day. We ran out of shovels. We had more parents than we had shovels. That is a good problem to have. So one thing we're trying to do is make sure the parents are involved up front, that the Ministry of Education is involved up front. We work in close cooperation with the Ministries of Education at both the national and provincial level.

And then basically we do ongoing monitoring and evaluation. So if something's going wrong, we can know about it. Because things will go wrong. If this was easy, it would have been done by now. So we know that things are going to go wrong. So through monitoring and evaluation, we basically test our hypothesis that this is going to work. And if the library is not being well run, or if the librarian's not showing up, or if you go to a school and there's chickens in grade one where the students are supposed to be, you intervene. And you try to get it right. And so that plays a very important thing for us. Monitoring and evaluation is one of the most important things that any NGO needs to do. So we're investing very, very heavily in it.

Before we leave you with the impression that this is all about bricks-and-mortar, because the emphasis has been about building the library side of things, let's switch, John, and explain how we're doing on scholarships. Great.

Certainly.

It really depends on the country you're talking about. I can tell you that where we work in villages, less than—I mean, this is anecdotal, but I'd say less than 2% of the villages that I've been in in these communities where we work have Internet access. Less than half of them even have electricity. So I believe that technology and computers will eventually have a role to play, but in most of the places we're working, you literally are starting from the very beginning and trying to do the sexy, unglamorous, low-tech stuff like setting up the libraries and publishing books and endowing scholarships for girls. So right now, the build-out is simply not there for the Internet.

Are you looking at all into the One Laptop per Child collaboration, perhaps?

Right now, no. No. They basically are close to launching. They do not yet have the critical mass to actually get it out there and test it. I hope it works, because anything that anybody can do to help children in the developing world to gain access to education, I'm all for. But I do think that we have to be very careful that we don't forget that the most basic things have to be there first. The whole idea when people talk about some of these projects and say, 'Well, if we do this right, then the kids don't need teachers. They can teach themselves.' That's a nice thing to say when you're talking about somebody else's child. If you're talking about your own child, who can make that statement with a straight face and say, 'Well, the kids won't need teachers'?

They can teach themselves. So I wish them luck, and I hope it's a success. And if it's a big success, then I'm happy to become a customer. But for now, for me, really most of what we're doing is about the most basic things like training librarians and publishing books.

Let me just put a point on this. This is a definition problem of what the Third World is. So you can think of it as the Third World or the Fifth World, but if they don't have electricity, we can't do any of the things that imply internet, computers. There's no electricity, there's no power. So unfortunately, some of these countries and some of these communities are really behind the power curve. But back to scholarships, John.

Back to scholarships. So let me just briefly talk about this. This is one of our three flagship programs. Our three flagship programs are bilingual libraries, schools, and scholarships for girls. In the developing world, as we mentioned, two-thirds of the children who are left out of the system are girls. And what happens in much of the developing world is if parents can only afford to send one child to school, and it usually is a small amount of money, but it may be the school fees or the uniforms or the bicycle or the shoes are a problem. Parents who can afford to send one child to school typically send the eldest son. If they can send two, they send the two eldest sons. What that means is in the developing world, there are literally tens of millions of girls who are on the outside looking in.

They want to go to school. They're being told, 'You can't.' I call it the lottery of life. Can you imagine being told at age four or five, 'You don't get to go to school'? That, just to me, that's that girl's path chosen for her forever and the path for her children. Let me give you a statistic that is shocking. There are 500 million women in the world today who are illiterate. There's a direct link between illiteracy and the number of children a woman has. If you are an environmentalist, there's nothing better you can do than educate women, because educated women have fewer children. If 500 million women in the world today are illiterate, and each of them has four children, you have two billion children growing up with an illiterate mother.

2 billion. That's a third of the Earth's population right now. That's where we're heading. Last week at the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton stood on stage and said this. He said, 'If you're an environmentalist, think about going from 6 billion people today to 9 billion people 20 years from now. That's where we're heading if we don't educate women and girls.' Now, thankfully, the cost of this is very, very low. I think one of the reasons you chose to be the seed funder of this program, Don and Rachel, is because it is not expensive to put a girl in school and keep her in school. What we want to do is support the girls in every way possible. $250 per girl per year does everything a girl needs to be surrounded with an ecosystem of support.

School fees, books, bicycles to get her to school, shoes, school uniforms. We have female mentors on staff who look after the girls to make sure they're doing well and that they're set up for success. We have after-school tutoring available for the girls. We have health care available for them. We have lunch stipends if they need money for lunch. We even have these ridiculously oversized Room to Read backpacks. We are a very forward-thinking organization. There will be no need to upgrade to version 2.0 of the backpacks. These girls can read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky later in life and still have room in their backpacks. Perhaps they could put their laptop eventually in these backpacks. So I think this is important because if you think about that, how do you democratize philanthropy?

You democratize philanthropy not by setting up $40 million schools. are setting up $10 million libraries. You democratize philanthropy when you tell people a little bit of money can go a long way. If anybody gives us permission to whack their credit card for $1 a day, or actually less than $1 a day, $2.50 a year, one girl goes to school. We've had donors who literally have said, put 100 girls in school, here's my check. Put 50 girls in school, here's my check and my company's matching gift form will be filled out so that 50 more girls can get put in school. This is a program that is massively scalable because there's hundreds of millions of potential customers. The cost to reach them is not high.

Anybody can do it. I have an 11-year-old girl in Seattle who was adopted from Cambodia. Her name is Lily. When I see her, you know what she gives me? She gives me a Ziploc bag full of coins from her piggy bank. And she says, 'Can you give this money so that girls in Cambodia can go to school?' Yes? 'Do you find that the social stigma is too much against having a girl—' The question is, do we find social stigma against the girls getting educated? Thankfully, we have not. We have chosen our geographies wisely, I think. One of my goals, if possible, is not to sail into the fierce headwinds. I'd rather sail where there's very strong tailwinds. And so we've chosen countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam,

Cambodia, where the government has a commitment to equal access for the girl child and where the communities have that commitment also to equal access for the girl child. So far, our biggest problem has not been resistance. Our biggest problem has been we have twice as many applicants for this program as we can afford to put in. And that, to me, is just a tragedy. When it's this low of a cost to change a girl's life forever and every future generation forever, that, to me, is something we've got to work on.

We may be in trouble, John. A device was passed to someone in the third row. It's either a microphone or a German-made hand grenade from World War II. Hopefully, it's a microphone.

It is. We're very data-driven here and I'm wondering if you can give us some data points since you're about the same age as us: the literacy increases you've seen where you've been able to put these schools, and kind of talk about education as it relates to books in the community?

Yeah, definitely. So let me give you some of our statistics on the quality and the success. First and foremost, with the girls' scholarship, and we'll start there, last year 98.5% of our girls passed the next grade. These are literally the most destitute—I mean, many of them are orphaned, many of them are living with parents who have no education, living in conditions of poverty. Yet our attrition rate would make a U.S. school proud: 98.5 percent passing to the next grade. In terms of the libraries, what we're doing really is surveying the things that are the most basic to begin with. You have to survey access. What kind of access are you creating? We're looking at sustainability. What are the sustainability measures?

Are the librarians trained? What percent of librarians have received top-up training? How many hours a week is the average library open? We survey the children. We don't assume these books are good. We go out and we ask the children, 'Do you like the story? Do you like the pictures?' Last year, 97% of our students told us they liked the stories. 98% of them said they liked the illustrations. We will also talk to the 2% or 3% who don't like it and say, 'Why? What's wrong? What do we need to do more of?' This whole program of local language publishing came out of the fact that when we did our first monitoring of our Nepali libraries, and Nepal is our first country, the biggest complaint we received was there's not enough books in the Nepali language that are culturally relevant for kids.

And we looked at it, and we stared the data in the face. I'm as data-driven as you are. I believe in Jim Collins, the whole Good to Great model, that if you—you get your data, and if it's bad, you stare it in the face, and you admit it to yourself, and you ask yourself, 'How are we going to fix this?' So, this—these are some of the measures we're looking at. We're looking—we go out, we survey the teachers also to ask them what improvements do they see, what improvements do they see us needing. One of the challenges of monitoring and evaluation is, in the developing world, the government's not going out and collecting these statistics. So, unlike one—unlike No Child Left Behind, there actually is not a—a survey mechanism that's being funded by the government that you can piggyback on.

And that is actually one of the challenges. Because to build that out across the developing world is going to literally be, you know, multiple tens of millions of dollars to actually do that. So what we're really doing is investing in monitoring and evaluating. The evaluation is important because we actually hire outside evaluators. William Easterly, who teaches at NYU, has a basic way he looks at evaluation, which is you hire outside evaluators, you let them choose a random sample of your projects, and you go ask the customers, 'How are we doing?' And so we're using that Easterly model of actually going and actually having people outside of our organization evaluate us so we get actually really honest answers.

I see a hand, which I think is telling me we have about two or three minutes left.

No, this was a hand with a question.

I'd like to step back from this particular program for just a moment with a question. So the story is, you went to Nepal, you found a passion, you said, 'Okay, I'm going to create this program to fix the problem.' For me, there is this kind of step number two, 'then a miracle occurs,' between A and B. How is it that a lot of us are here trying to figure out how to be philanthropists, and how is it that once you find a passion, you've created what looks like a fantastically successful organization? How is it that you go from 'here is a problem that needs to be fixed' to 'I now have an organization that works, is scalable in the Third World where I have no prior contacts'? How do you get that set up?

Yeah, well, it's very good that my book is available because—it takes me about, I think, 297 pages to actually answer that question. The book is called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. The nice thing is I grabbed that title before Bill Gates could grab it. So, take that, Bill. And it's available in fine stores everywhere. But we actually have copies here today, and I'm going to be signing copies. I can talk to you more maybe during the signing about that. I will give you the very short answer for me. It was just basically being passionate about education, being tenacious at wanting to do something that I thought could scale. It was finding great people early and convincing them to be very involved.

Paul Haar, who's sitting in the third row. Stand up, Paul. Paul was one of our first volunteers and helped us with our branding. We used to be called Books for Nepal, which is a name that would not scale to new countries or to new programs. And over a few bottles of wine at Paul and Susan's house, we actually came up with—we called it Literacy to Life, and we didn't like that. And we called it Literacy for Life, and we didn't like that. I wanted to call it Books Ahoy, because I could picture the books sailing off. And Paul said that was a terrible brand name, and he would never give money to a group called Books Ahoy. And after a while, and a few more bottles of wine, we came up with Room to Read.

And so we basically then developed the brand around that. The hardest part of it, I'll just be very brief here for those of you who have two o'clock meetings. The hardest part of it really was the first two years when nobody took the organization seriously because nobody knew who I was or knew what Room to Read was. It is the easiest thing in the world to be a critic. I cannot tell you how many people told me this would not work. You're crazy. You're having a midlife crisis. Why are you doing this? It's not scalable. It's not sustainable. How do you know people aren't going to steal from you? Every excuse in the book. In my book, I have my favorite quote. There's two quotes in my book that are my favorites.

One of them is from Oscar Wilde: 'Nobody ever erected a statue in honor of a critic.' The second is a Chinese proverb, which says, 'Those who say it cannot be done should not criticize those who are out actually doing it.' And our board co-chair is a senior guy at Goldman Sachs. And when he was building his business within Goldman Sachs, he actually told me after he read my book that he had written that quote on a piece of paper and hung it to his computer monitor and actually looked at it every day for the first two years of building this business, because there are always people criticizing him, telling him it couldn't be done. I don't know why I did it, really. I don't know why I fell off the horse.

I guess, for me, it comes down to the fact that my parents stressed education. My father went through college on the GI Bill, the only one of seven children to go through college. It was one decision that basically, for my family, broke the cycle of poverty. And I look at it and I think, what kind of people are we if we squander the greatest era of wealth creation in the history of humankind? What kind of people are we if we leave the Earth leaving almost a billion people behind who are illiterate, two-thirds of whom are girls? I just think we can do a lot and would love to do more here with you. Would love to do more with the company. Would love to do more with you as individuals. My email is jwood@roomtoread.org.

And I'm going to sign books now. I'll give you my card. But I do want to be conscious of those who have 2 o'clock meetings. And the books are here. I've got my Sharpie. Thank you, Mr. Valentine, for hosting. Thank you.

I would say, totally tongue-in-cheek, the epiphany was a recognition that there was no future in marketing for him. Books Ahoy, give me a break.