RDVP Seminar: Lakshmi Pratury (10/13/2004)

Lakshmi Pratury, of the American India Foundation, came to speak on her experiences on working in high tech and venture capital, and making the transition to the foundation world and service in India. She spoke from a very personal basis, describing how key decisions (mostly avoiding something that she didn't want rather than affirmatively selecting something she did) and accidents conspired to create a life journey that none, herself least of all, could have predicted. After reveling in the freedom of dorm life at IIT Bombay, she realized that she didn't like the mathematics course she had signed up for, and switched to an MBA program. Her choice of a marketing role at Intel was made with reluctance and some necessity, but led to a decade long tenure of growth--both personally and for the company. She cited the discovery of the pentium flaw as the wake-up call to Intel and the 3 lessons that it taught:

1. The importance of communication at all levels
   
2. The power of branding (both the upside and the downside)
   
3. The power of the apology (once they offered to take the flawed chips back, most people decided that it wasn't worth the bother)

As a VC, she made an eye-opening trip to India, returning to her school, where she and her colleague gave a talk about computers, but discovered that only 2 of the 600 10th graders had ever touched one. That motivated her to work with Schools Online, raising money to build computer centers in underprivileged schools around the world. The Digital Equalizer program was not just about teaching technology, though, it was about using technology to teach the whole curriculum. Each subject had 2 periods per week in a computer lab. The 104 centers and 1,500 trained teachers have reached some 30,000 students. They've developed the plan to continue scaling up, relying more on state/government funding, and have made efforts to include the government along the way. The eventual target is the 1.98M schools in India, though as she mentioned, these sort of systemic changes are measured by the decade, not by the year.

Lakshmi's Personal Philosophy

While many of our speakers are doing good work (both from a social and academic point of view) and make compelling presentations, I felt that Lakshmi succeeded in making a heartfelt, personal connection with the fellows. Part of that success was in her willingness to share personally; here are a couple of snippets:

• Consider the tradeoff that is made between impact and personal recognition: Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? (here I'm not sure that I quite agree with her example of Google! co-founders being in a "small" pond, but you get the idea, compared to the anonymous engineer that designed the satellite that enables world-wide communication)
  
• Think of the thing that you value most, then give it away. Giving is on-going, not one-time, and should be done recognizing that the act of giving itself generates personal happiness, not an obligation from the recipient.
  
• Your personal passion isn't something you wait to do when you retire. Why not do it now?
  
• Choose people that are good at what they are needed for, not just because they have degrees from impressive institutions.
  
• Your definition of what you are changes as you grow (both personally and as a company).
  
• Leave something when you're still happy with it (don't wait until you're miserable to make a job/career change.)
  

Advice for leading social change

• Be patient, these changes take time on the order of decades.
  
• Spend time with the people you intend to help, talk with them at their level, and when you get to know them, you'll probably find that their wants are the same as yours.
  
• Development activity is the seed capital of social entrepreneurship. Is there a revenue stream to make it sustainable? Another funder that can pick up subsequent rounds of investment? Are you building the skill set?
  
• We need to educate a whole generation of entrepreneurs in developing countries, but it's not the case that we can directly apply the same methods for teaching entrepreneurship from one culture to another.
  
• Raising money is hard and time consuming, but so is grant-making (to find appropriate groups to fund). OTOH, you can build an organization that's not based on direct monetary exchange (barter system or a developer network) but then you have to spend even more time and effort to make the social stuff work.
  
• The ideas really need to be locally owned in order to succeed. One option is to work "cleverly" with a group so that they think they came up with your idea (e.g., My Big Fat Greek Wedding). A better option is to choose the group your supporting carefully, so that the ideas that they really do generate are the ideas that you want propagated. Then let them take the lead and make key decisions on their own.
  
• For those of us coming from industry, realize that things go slower: If the time scale of the corporation is the fiscal quarter, the timescale of the NGO is the 3 or 5 year plan.
  
• Use connections shamelessly, have them help you find the real change agents.
  
  

The importance of India

With 1/6 of the global population, India is too big to ignore. We can't afford to have India become a non-democratic country. Therefore, part of the goal of the AIF is to connect the world's richest democrary with the world's largest democracy.