Leila Janah
Leila Janah
Leila Janah is the Founder and CEO of Sama and Laxmi, two companies highlighted on Fast Company’s 2016 Most Innovative Companies list that share a common social mission to end global poverty by giving work to people in need. She is also the co-author of America's Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age, a book by Rework America: A Markle Initiative...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinesswoman
Date of Birth9 October 1982
CountryUnited States of America
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The core concept of Samasource is essentially that technology helps us unlock human talent wherever it may happen to reside. That we should no longer be victims of the birth lottery. That no one should be stuck in a poor place where they don't have a job simply because of an accident of birth.
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The best way to make employees happy is to set realistic goals and achieve them. The big job is to make sure those small steps are pointing us in the right direction and demonstrate at the end of the year that they all add up to something pretty great.
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Impact sourcing, a new initiative piloted by the Rockefeller Foundation and several key partners, including my company Samasource, promises to connect poor and marginalized people to digital jobs on a massive scale.
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I grew up in Los Angeles, where long drives on packed freeways make everyone a fan of radio and, particularly, of America's national treasure, National Public Radio.
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I'm the founder and CEO of Sama Group, a family of social enterprises - Samasource, Samahope and SamaUSA - that are working to alleviate poverty by connecting the global community to opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and here in the U.S.
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Social business lies in the spectrum of possibility between the traditional, profit-maximizing business, which directs little to no profit to doing good, and the traditional charity, which relies mostly on donations to sustain itself.
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FlipBoard is the 'W Magazine' of the iPad-app world. The sleek interface makes content from your friends' Facebook and Twitter feeds much easier on the eyes by displaying them in a magazine format.
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We spend billions on international aid annually, but we don't find ways to connect people to dignified work. I realized that if we don't think about ways to harness private capital to solve problems, we're leaving large amounts of money on the table and doing ourselves a disservice.
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Often, we think that things are the way they are because of intelligent design - because somebody super-smart, or some group of academics, came up with the best system ever to do XYZ. Actually, things are often the way they are because of an accident of history.
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The thing that the Internet does is it allows labor to move freely across borders in the way that capital does but, traditionally, labor cannot. So the Internet frees workers to be based anywhere and work for employers anywhere.
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I used to think that the worst form of discrimination for women was being hit on or hearing something disparaging. What's even more challenging for young women is a very senior male who will take an interest in you, who see themselves as father figures or mentors.
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So often, we leave the selfless side of ourselves for nights and weekends, for our charity work. It is our duty to inject that into our day-to-day business, into the work that we do, to improve corporations, to improve civil society, and to improve government.
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Technology is a tough realm to navigate as a younger woman who is not married. It can be hard to cultivate professional relationships because you have to be conscious of how to engage potential investors.
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Samasource's largest clients are technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Getty Images, and TripAdvisor, which contract with my company rather than a traditional outsourcing company in order to participate in 'impact sourcing' - conscious efforts to reduce poverty by moving money into places that need it.