November 17, 2017 in Entrepreneur Advice
The following is the prepared text of a speech that I gave this month to the students at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I graduated from high school, around the launch of my new book, The Innovation Blind Spot.
When I was in high school, I thought my career options were linear. Get good grades, and you go to a good school. And if you get good grades there, you get a good job at a famous firm. And so forth.
I also thought in high school that you had to make a choice between having a successful career and pursuing something that reflected your values.
My own path has been different — I haven’t had a linear career, and at the same time, I’ve tried to combine success with what I value. It has never been easy, but it’s always been rewarding.
I hope what I’ve shared will be useful for anyone (young or not) who is asking yourself what you want to do with your life.
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I want to start with two questions.
First, how many of you want to be successful in your career?
Second, how many of you want to make the world a better place?
How many of you raised your hand for both?
What I want to talk about today is an idea I learned about the very first time I was in an assembly in this hall. It was the first day of school, and my first day at a new school. The date was September 11th, 2001. I showed up to my dorm and my dorm proctor, a guy named Mark Zuckerberg, helped me set up my computer while everyone, new and old students, gathered around a TV in the common room watching the world crash around us. (Mark ended up starting a tech company called Facebook. He’s done pretty well.)
So there was a lot of change happening on my first day here. Classes were postponed, and two days later we gathered again in this room, and heard the phrase from the school’s founding documents:
“For goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, and knowledge without goodness is dangerous.”
I didn’t realize when I was in high school how much that phrase shapes our world. And I didn’t realize then that as a true leader, it is important to try and achieve knowledge and goodness at the same time.
When I was your age and thought about my career, I saw two choices — pursue knowledge, or purse goodness.
You could go the knowledge route, which means you plan to do good sometime later. The idea is that you go to work in a sector like finance, or for a big investment bank, and make a bunch of money. When you have reached a certain level of success, then you give it all away, to schools like Exeter and wonderful nonprofits. But until you’ve reached the stage of your success, you don’t worry about the rest of society — you focus on making money.
Or — you could go the goodness route. You get involved in government, or you start a nonprofit, or you become a teacher. You dedicate your career to helping somebody. The business world — that’s not something you get involved with. That’s for other people.
When I was in high school, those were the two routes I thought that everyone followed. And I still think that’s how most people think of it today. You’re either a knowledge person, or you’re a goodness person.
The call of being a leader today is different. You need to figure out how to merge knowledge and goodness in the same career, at the same time. That’s the path I have tried to follow. It’s very, very difficult, but so critical for the world to follow.
I’m going to start with what I do today. I founded a firm that invests in startup companies — new businesses. If you’re an entrepreneur with an idea, our company puts money in your business to help you grow.
But my firm, Village Capital, focuses on a particular kind of business — businesses that are trying to merge knowledge and goodness; that are trying to achieve profits while also doing positive things for the world. I’ll give you an example. While most businesses investment in new businesses goes to 3 states (New York, Massachusetts, California), we invest pretty heavily everywhere else. And in most of the country, businesses look a lot more like one of our investments, Fin Gourmet, than Silicon Valley-style companies.
If you’re into environmental issues, you know that Asian carp is an invasive species that decimates our watershed across the country. Fin Gourmet, headquartered in Paducah, a small town in Southwest Kentucky, goes out into the Mississippi River watershed and catches these carp. They take the carp to a processing plant, chop it up, and ship it off to five-star restaurants in San Francisco and New York rebranded Kentucky Blue Snapper.
Fin Gourmet is solving a major environmental problem. And in a county that has sky-high unemployment (like most rural counties in the US), they employ dozens of people who were formerly in prison, people who have high school degrees. They pay a living wage for these people to turn Asian Carp into Kentucky Blue Snapper. And this isn’t a feel-good non-profit — Fin Gourmet does millions in revenue each year.
Fin Gourmet is pursuing knowledge — how to run a profitable business in Paducah, Kentucky — and goodness — how to employ people in your community and improve the environment around you — at the same time. And they’re succeeding. Village Capital has worked with or invested in nearly 700 businesses like Fin Gourmet around the world.
But it’s really hard to pursue knowledge and goodness at the same time. When I’m traveling to places like Paducah, I will typically have breakfast at a McDonald’s. In rural America, McDonald’s is a gathering place — for a dollar, you can get unlimited refills and talk to a few dozen people over the course of the morning, learning what’s going on in the county.
Recently, I was at a McDonald’s in Orange, Virginia, a small town that isn’t that different from Paducah. I was chatting with folks, and they asked me what I did for a living. I told them I invested in small businesses. They said, “that’s great because, look, here, small business is all we’ve really got.” You know, when that big store opened 20 miles that way, it shut down these four stores on Main Street. When the other big store opened 20 miles that way, it shut down these five stores. Across the country there are towns with 20, 30% unemployment that have been hollowed out by very large companies. And really the only hope that people have for what the town could be is these pillars of the community, like Fin Gourmet.
The reality of Paducah or Orange is a very different reality than the one that you’ll live as a student at one of the best schools in the country. You’re much more likely to go to Wall Street or Silicon Valley than you are in a small town (nearly 50% of the alumni of Exeter end up in New York, California, or Massachusetts). Yet if you follow the “knowledge” path, you might be unintentionally contributing to the hollowing out of these places.
This fall, I came out with a book, The Innovation Blind Spot, that goes into why our society is so divided and broken — and how we got here. I ultimately think we got here because leadership — in business, politics, and civil society — has largely separated knowledge and goodness.
What gives us the situations in Paducah, or Orange, or the poorest parts of any city in America, or Puerto Rico, is a society that maximizes for knowledge, makes as much money as they can, and figure out goodness later. People in the business world decided that it would be better for big box stores to grow — even if they laid off millions of people in rural areas — because the stock prices and shareholder value of these companies was the most important thing we cared about as a society.
The outcome: we have a society where eight men control half the world’s wealth. And we have entire cities, entire towns, entire countries that are left out. We’re socially or politically divided almost beyond repair.
As a top student at one of the best schools in the world, I know you’re going to go out and change the world. You probably hear that all the time.
What I don’t know is whether you’re going to change the world for better, or for worse.
And I think that changing the world for the better depends on whether you can integrate knowledge and goodness in your career.
You think that you have to follow a path that’s linear. Start doing good from day one — you’re a sellout if you work in business — or pursue a business career and do good later.
When I went here, I thought you had to pick. I was really interested in politics and government. And it was striking to me how little my friends knew about how our society worked — even at a really good school. So a friend of mine and I came up with this idea for a technology platform that would help students learn civics, and participate in fun ideas like a mock election. We thought (in the early 2000s!) that America was incredibly divided, and political discourse couldn’t get any lower. (Man, did 2017 prove us wrong.)
We had an idea and some great partnerships — and had even gotten $10,000 in commitments from a couple of name-brand partners — AT&T, Coca-Cola, and a power company in Georgia, to advertise on the platform. But we needed some money to build the platform. I thought I would go out and raise a grant from a foundation, or a successful individual, like any nonprofit did. I pitched a range of people, and one guy, an entrepreneur named Bob, said, “This sounds great. But you don’t need a grant, since you have money coming in. You need a bridge loan!”
I was confused. Why would Bob invest, not give money to, this do-gooder project? Bob said, “Well, you know, if I give you $10,000 today, when that $10K comes in, you can pay me back. I can then use it to invest in other entrepreneurs like you. It gets you the resources you need — and is a a more financially sustainable way of doing things.”
That of taking what was essentially a goodness project — we’re going to help in education — and applying a knowledge tool — an investment — didn’t make any sense to me. They lived in two different worlds.
But for our world to be successful knowledge and goodness need to exist in the same sphere. The consequences are devastating when they don’t.
Take Puerto Rico. We’re worried about the devastation on the island devastated by the hurricane. And we’re giving money out of our “goodness” pocket to support fellow Americans. But after the global financial crisis, there were large financial firms that decided, when Puerto Rico went bankrupt or was close to it, to invest in certain kinds of assets, like hotels, that can make money tomorrow, and ignore other assets, like power and water. The outcome of separating knowledge and goodness is hurting millions.
Even my dorm-mate Mark is starting to see the importance of both. For a very long time, Facebook pitched itself as an amoral platform. It really doesn’t matter to us, Facebook would say, what you put on the site because we just connect the world. Free speech gives you the ability to say racist and anti-Semitic things — even if we hate these opinions we can’t police them.
I think the Facebook team was genuinely surprised when people were buying ads to target anti-Semitic, racist people, or when foreign government started buying ads. I think it didn’t cross their mind that when you run the world’s most powerful technology platform, you have some sort of moral obligation to make sure that things that happen on there aren’t destructive to society.
Last week, our fellow Exeter alum Mark Zuckerberg reflected that yes, Facebook did have a larger moral obligation, announcing, for example, that they are hiring thousands of content reviewers. While it’s an incredibly complicated issue, and I don’t know how things will go, I do know that Facebook is now recognizing that there is a very, very serious cost to thinking that knowledge and goodness are totally separate.
You are going to leave here, and one day, be in positions of power and influence. And the easy, linear path will be to separate knowledge and goodness. It is far, far harder, for instance, to make money in the Kentucky Blue Snapper business than it is in investment banking. Big firms will come to your college and recruit you with very nice salaries. But you will go into a system that largely perpetuates the problems we have.
I graduated here fifteen years ago. My friends who are happiest are the ones who have charted their own path. (One, for example, builds church organs across the country.) My friends who are the least happy are the ones who have followed a linear path — get into X college, go to Y company, go to Z graduate school — and are now the Assistant to the Regional Manager at A Company and don’t know where it is all going. The leadership New York City’s finance sector has never been better, but cities across America need mayors, presidents of regional banks, founders of the next great startup.
Another Exeter friend of mine, Andrew Yang, who graduated a few years before I did, wrote a book about this, called Smart People Should Build Things. Exeter’s alumni ranks is full of lawyers, bankers, consultants. Andrew started a non-profit called Venture for America that places people like you in startups in cities like Birmingham and Cincinnati saying, “We’ve actually lost a lot of civic leadership in most places.”
It’s not easy. It’s a ton of pressure. My wife just had a baby three months ago, and there’s increased pressure to earn a living. I work incredibly hard. I’m not on track to retire at the age of 40 or 45 like other people in the finance sector are, but I do have enough money to take care of my family and my kid. At some point, we all need to ask what is enough is.
And if you’re passionate about a career that is traditionally knowledge, you can integrate goodness as well.If you’re obsessed with the law, good for you. Go work for a big law firm. But think carefully about what kind of cases you take. Who do I defend? Who do I not defend?
If you love investing in the stock market, good for you. It’s really, really important that we have good investors. But, you know, build or work for a firm or build a thesis that says, we’re not going to award the companies that make the biggest headlines for the shortest quarterly earnings. We’re going to invest in good companies that pay people a living wage, take care of our environment, and build a more prosperous society.
The joy of merging knowledge and goodness, to me, is worth how hard it is. But you can apply values to any job if that’s what you’re really excited about.
You have the power to choose a different path.
If we are actually going to have a society where everyone feels included, everyone feels welcome, everyone prospers and we don’t have these rifts, we need the people in power to pursue knowledge and goodness at the same time.
If you guys don’t do this, nobody will.
As Communications Director at Village Capital, Ben works on sharing what we’ve learned from our work in order to amplify our impact and help catalyze the fields of impact investing and entrepreneur support.
