Book tv is on twitter and facebook if we want to hear from you. Treat us or post a comment on her facebook page. Good evening. How is everyone doing . [cheering and applause] this is my kind of crowd when you talk to the video. Weirdly, that gives me a good feeling. Everyone here is excited to be here and excited to talk to each other. My name is marissa, im intractable in four of here at the Commonwealth Club. Welcome to this [inaudible] tonights conversation will be moderated by laura tyson, phd at uc berkeley. I thank you already do this but here is a challenge. Turn to someone you do not know and introduce yourself before we get started. More fun with a new friend. [background noises] that is the perfect 32nd friendship. All right. This is my kind of audience. I hope you are like this when it comes to Live Audience questions. That would be good. In extremely exciting news you are the second event to take place in this auditorium. [cheering and applause] that is worth a round of applause. We are for sleep moved into our brandnew home. Were 114 years old and we have been resting. This is really nice. Were incredibly excited and it is possible because of donors and members and volunteers and attendees like you. Thank you for showing up and giving us a reason to build a brandnew building. Once first time here at the club . People who do not know we are a nonprofit so we can only do this and by this i mean more than 400 programs a year with our members and our donors and volunteers. Membership includes perks like discounts on tickets to events like this, advance notice of various events like our soldout program with her next week and if you are interested we have friends were happy to talk or check your emails tomorrow for a Discount Code on membership. Other great things coming up, october 24, actress and entrepreneur gabrielle union. October 2025th, eric reese, november 2nd, state bird [inaudible]. Tonight, like i said, all of you talkative folks that have had questions for leila and laura, there is a microphone and your back left and he will get a reminder from laura and you can start lining up. Questions do not include personal stories, they are short and they do not includ they enda street with a . I would love to introduce them to the states. Leila and laura. [applause] good evening. Its great to be at an inaugural event the lovely space. Ive been in San Francisco a long time and when i first came years ago i did do numerous things with the Commonwealth Club so it is lovely to continue that tradition. It is a great pleasure to serve as a moderator and we have an outstanding and inspirational leader for newer and co and founder of sommasource and also ceo and company ceo and founder of how do you say this . I wasnt sure how you use the acronym so, we are here to talk about her work in both areas and also to help her launch her new book which we have here. I am married to a writer and its very important that we buy books. [leftsquarebracket i will be buying a book. I hope that we will get a preview of what is in the book in our conversation. Following the discussion there will be a reception and there will be books available. There are so many questions that one could ask leila. She has pushed so much in such a short amount of time and just in my conversation with her backstage she is already thinking about next steps and what she can do. She is a great inspiration. I want to start with the company that you first found it, the one that gets a lot of attention deservedly so that is sommasource. I want to start with if you are doing an elevator pitch to describe sommasource and its mission so that everyone has a sense of what it is that it is trying to do can you give us that. Sure. I have my head of communications right here in front so this is like life judging. It means equal or balanced in sanskrit and it our bit mission to balance low income people with the internet. We do that in a really interesting way. We work with Large Data Services or Large Technology enterprises to provide things like image tagging another Credit Service that boost their president offerings. For example, we are doing image tagging that does self driving cars and a few prominent automakers. Given that mission you have to link up to a number of different organizations and you have to link to the individuals who you want to help find these jobs. You have to find them, train them, lead them to and then you have to find all of those other organizations and their jobs. And youre using the internet. Talk a little bit about the challenges or the ways you go about that. How do you find the people in the jobs . Sure, i will start on the side of the people that we help train. I got into this and ive been working in africa for many years and Study Development economics felt like the most powerful way to help people was to give them living wage jobs. One of the best ways to do that in the modern era is through technology because all of a sudden you have a way to contact someone in a very poor part of the world the job in a rich part of the world which means they can make a lot more money than they could make doing anything else selling to a local market. Theoretically its very powerful. I thought to myself what if i created needed only recruited people looking for fair background which is obviously an unusual recruiting criteria. It might even be illegal. In our case, we only recruit people who make less then two or 3 a day. The average income of all of the workers at some azores is about 2. 20 a day which means that prior to working with us they are if they avoided all its in an informal economy doing things like literally working in a quarry breaking big rocks and smaller rocks. If an actual job that someone had before sommasource or selling stopped by the side of the road or we have workers who would brew a local kind of trying and sell it on the street to make a dollar 50 a day. These are the jobs that people have for joining us. We work with them and partner with many local nonprofits and theres an abundance of them. For example in the slums of nairobi where we work and we train basic computer skills and of that group we pull some people into work for a time. Here in San Francisco our sales Team Clinches sometimes when i get into the details of our work is background because the story they pitch to archelaus is we are a very high Quality Data Service firm and we provide Training Data to the best companies in Silicon Valley and the most advanced Machine Learning is working at the forefront of technology. For example, the worker that i mentioned who use to brew this line trains people to tag images for one of his most prominent Auto Companies infantry working on some cars. That work, believe it or not, we can train someone to do in a relatively short period of time because we have broken down these Fake Technology products into smaller units work. That is how it works. Front facing operations here in the bay area is focused on high quality delivering results and being a competitive enterprise and on the back and it looks very different from what people might imagine in the sense that we are only recruiting people from very poor backgrounds to do the work and we are paying living wages one way. So your outward facing links here and these companies have big projects and they have lots of ways they might source labor and i assume most of this labor source is being forced on a project space because these are longterm Employment Contracts but why would and what is your pitch for why they should continue . There must be other ways you can source this type of talent. Sure, i used to say fight poverty and get your work done. Obviously, that didnt work well for most product managers in the bay area. [leftsquarebracket luckily, i got wise enough to hire better salespeople than me who educated me on how we win these contracts and the first Value Proposition we put forward is the highest quality provider and interestingly when you hire people from marginalized background they had no other formal Work Opportunities and they take this extremely seriously. They will show up early to work and they are interestingly people ask isnt it hard to train people from these backgrounds and how do they show up in the least of our problems is our workforce. It is a credible. These are the most motivated people they are incredibly loyal to an employer who is willing to quickly play far and above what they would make doing anything else. As a result, quality is something we can sell as a major attribute and the social Mission Peace comes in after we have convince the client that we offer the best services. In terms of cost we are not the cheapest option but increasingly for someone who is in charge of developing the next self driving car algorithm or developing a smart chip for your phone to recognize faces and images that person is more concerned with quality often than cost. They want to make sure that the data going into training this algorithm is good data. That is how we went. I think that is what most social enterprises should focus on rather than selling the customer on the social mission we often talk about it as the trojan horse but we have to sneak in the sustainability and its a nice and that the icing on the cake. That is an interesting point because in your work you talk about the importance of and its a term i had not heard before so i will give you credit for. In fact sourcing which is there are companies out there that actually for whom the social mission, say of sourcing this job through jobs this kind of population or sourcing for diversity or sourcing for some positive social mission has become more important. It is interesting that essentially you are saying that is secondary i guess it should be to the quality of labor. You can make the social case but the social case is an addon. You get these highly professional committed welltrained individuals to be part of a team and in addition, you are addressing a social mission. I think it makes it sticky. To be honest, all other things being equal as long as you are sure their spenders are giving you quality of why wouldnt you choose a vendor that is also fighting poverty. What we find is that once people get embedded in these contracts with us we have had so many stories of people who work in Big Tech Companies who said literally, leila, i was going to quit and i was demotivated and i wanted to do something with my life more than this huge tech company. Then we hired sommasource and i work with people who are moving out of poverty from places like kenya and india and haiti and i feel like i have purpose again when i come into work. I can name names of people who stayed two years longer at their Product Management job that Big Companies because they felt more motivated to come to work every day. At some point, i think we should quantify that and tell it to our customers. A survey of millennials in the work force and found that 80 of millennials only want to work for a company that has a Strong Social mission. And increasingly, thanks to technology, were able to discern Whose Mission is full of fluff and whos actually delivering. And more and more we can show what the factory on the floor actually looks like. We can show the results of income surveys for the workers in that factory. It becomes harder and harder to, you know, to create a glossy csr page that doesnt actually translate to what the companys doing. Felicia, theres more and more work we can do on these metrics, and i agree with you, i think theyre very compelling. Before we move on to other questions, i want to talk a little bit about what i think is something called sama schooling which is related to sama source and may be involved in doing similar activities in the u. S. And i think that given the conversations going on in the u. S. About the ability to create meaningful jobs for workers in various rural and farflung and often poverty places in the u. S. , is sama school involved in that, and how . Im so glad you brought it up. I own a lot of sama domains presently [laughter] right. So schools started several years ago. It actually has a funny origin story. Okay. We had been running these ads on hulu, the internet tv service, the hay lighted our work highlighted our work in a refugee camp in kenya. Its one of the poorest places in the world training these very destitute refugees to do work for Big Tech Companies. And it was working, and we had this really cute Public Service announcement that ran on this channel, and i got the nastiest email as soon as we started running these ads from this guy joe in ohio. [laughter] not joe the plumber. Was it joe the plumber . [laughter] because he was, he was emailing everyone, i think, at some point. Thats right, thats right. Not joe the plumber. Not the plumber. Probably less charismatic. The subject line was you are ruining america. And then it said oh, my goodness. People you and your kind, your kind, are, you know, ruining america, youre stealing our jobs and sending them to africa, and its the middle of a recession and how dare you do this. And i read the email and, of course, my First Response was, i was so livid. At the time, literally, sama source is a nonprofit. I was sleeping on my exboyfriends futon at one point. I was so poor myself, and i thought, you know, he probably thinks im some sort of millionaire sitting in San Francisco enjoying all the profits im raking in from sending these jobs to refugee camps. So i wrote this nasty email to him, and i slept on it, and i wrote this really nice email back. Dear joe, ive looked at the unemployment statistics in ohio. I guess where youre coming from. Maybe theres some way we can adapt our model to also work here. And believe it or not, joe wrote back the nicest response. He said thank you so much for listening, im really sorry about the tone of my last email. I lost my job recently and i just, you know, your ad just made me upset because i want to do more to create jobs here in america, and i feel like were getting left behind. It was an interesting precursor to whats been happening. Yes, absolutely. So it inspired me to go to my board and say maybe we can do something here in the u. S. And i think its important for International Organizations to not be siloed. We have this unfortunate distinction between people who work for foreign ngos and people who work on domestic poverty, and its tragic, because it is the same issue. Its often the same bad guys. So we need to Work Together more. So we tried a couple of different experiments working in the u. S. We tried to adapt a more similar model to what we do overseas here, and it didnt work, didnt work because companies have been outsourcing this work for a very long time already already. To places like india and china. So trying to get that basic Data Services work to come back onshore, i think, is futile. So we said, okay, what can we do that actually makes sense for america. And we looked at the gig economy. It turns out that all net employment growth, theres this katz and krueger study that came out, all net improvement growth has been in the independent work arena. So that is, you know, contract work, basically. Including all of these new gig economy platforms. And yet our Work Force Training in america has no instructions for workers on how to benefit from this on how you connect, how to benefit now, were teaching people to do jobs that have gone away ten years ago. So we said, well, what if we focus on applying our learnings in the tech world to creating curriculum to teach people how to benefit from these new platforms which sometimes get a bad rap. But, look, the data speaks for itself. Were not going to shift the whole economy by boycotting one or two labor platforms instead lets work with them, how we can insure people are paid living wages and, importantly, how we can prepare the most marginalized people in our society to actually benefit from these platforms. And so thats what sama school does. We have the first gig economy training or independent, you know, worker training for low income americans. Weve deployed it in San Francisco. In the city we just signed a contract with the office of education and work force development. Oh, great. So that training is going out to people here, and weve seen amazing success stories. People going from 8 an hour, minimum wage retail jobs where they have no flexibility, no online reputation, theyre not getting any longterm benefit from doing these jobs to making 25 or 30 an hour on a platform like field nation or task rabbit where not only do they get this money, but they also get the benefit of having an online reputation. If you do a good job on your task you get rated well, and you get more cliented thats something that white collar workers are used to having through linkedin, but low income people are often denied that. But i think thats actually the future of job train anything this country. So its really interesting, that story. So right now youre working with the city of San Francisco. I actually think that one of the interesting ways to imagine in this happening is mayors in cities actually really working to connect. Because you have to have, you have to have the connecting organizations as well. You said in your work in the developing economies you often work with nonprofits because youve got to find a way to connect to the communities of workers that youre serving, okay . And they help you do that. And i think in this case having the Mayors Office involved in this may actually help bring more opportunities to the workers who are going through this. I think thats really i even think we could do t