How to Help a Few Billion People

When Ousmane Conde was a kid in Guinea, his mother worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. And every night she came home and did the same thing. “She would take the knife, cut a hole in a random place in the mattress, and pile cash in.” He knew something was wrong. He didn’t have the words for it yet. The mattress was the safest place she had, because that’s where the family slept, and a th...

Forty venture capitalists looked at Little Thinking Minds and said no. Not because the company was broken. It was profitable. It reached roughly half a million children learning to read Arabic across more than ten countries. Paying private schools, government contracts, third-party-verified results. The VCs liked all of it. Rama Kayyali, who co-founded the company and ran it for two decades, remem...

If you’re building a social enterprise to last, you’re signing up for a decade or more of HARD work. And the longer you’re at it, the more life shows up uninvited. A parent dies. You get married. Friendships fade. The market collapses the week before your Series B. Most founder advice doesn’t account for any of this. It’s tuned for a sprint: eighteen months to product-market fit, forty-eight to a...

In 2021, Disruptia won what every early-stage social enterprise thinks they want: A big business-to-business contract with one of Colombia’s biggest financial groups. Train 200 people across 28 municipalities. Digital marketing, data analytics, front-end development, UX, e-commerce. English on the side. Then, help them find work. They placed three. “We directly employed three people of 200. It was...

Mercedes Bidart left New York on a humanitarian flight during COVID, moved to a country she’d never lived in, and started lending $10 to people no bank would touch. Here’s what she’s learned building Quipu into a breakeven fintech that wants to become the credit bureau for Latin America’s informal economy. In Latin America, nine out of ten businesses are micro-enterprises — fewer than ten employee...

There’s a scene in Julia Taylor’s story that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s October 24, 2018. She’s sitting on a plastic sofa in an RV parked in Moab, Utah. Her parents are visiting. She’s refreshing a screen, waiting for her very first sale — a $97 course she built in real time for a beta group of women who wanted to learn what she’d taught herself: how to code, how to build a website, how to...

In 2014, Vriko Yu was diving weekly off the coast of Hong Kong when she watched a patch of coral community she knew intimately disappear in just two months. “That is the moment when I realized what is really happening in the water is no longer what I read about the books,” she says. “It really is happening at a much faster phase than I’ve ever imagined.” That moment launched a decade-long journey...

Two years ago, Ella Peinovich wasn’t sure her company would survive. Today, Powered by People —her platform connecting 500,000+ artisans across 100+ countries to retailers like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and West Elm—just hit its first million-dollar revenue month. They’re on the path to profitability. They recently became B Corp certified . What happened in between is a masterclass in what it act...

Most health tech founders dream of making billions of dollars. Ed Booty dreams of improving the health of billions of people – 52% of the world to be exact, who do not have access to reliable healthcare and prescriptions. The Reach 52 founder took his company from a solo venture bootstrapped in Singapore to a multi-country operation distributing essential medicines across Asia and Africa - all whi...

The 5-Minute Version: Manuel Rosemberg built Ana.care into Latin America’s leading caregiving platform by doing the opposite of the Silicon Valley playbook. Instead of building “Uber for caregivers,” he picked up workers at subway stations, sat in customers’ homes, and asked one transformative question that changed his entire business model. His journey from bootstrapping with customer money to sa...

Picture this: You’ve built a network of 700+ IoT-enabled water ATMs serving 2 million people daily. Your biggest customer is the government. Then one day, that government collapses, the prime minister flees the country, and authorities shut down the entire internet—including the mobile networks your water ATMs need to function. This isn’t a thought experiment. It’s exactly what happened to Minhaj...

When COVID hit Kenya in 2020, Claire was on sabbatical from consulting, reconsidering her career after her second child. Within 24 hours of lockdown, she launched a GoFundMe called “Farm to Feed” to buy vegetables from farmers who’d lost market access and donate them to families who’d lost income. Then she stumbled on a statistic that changed everything: 50% of fruits and vegetables in sub-Saharan...

From making big bucks on Wall Street to turning trash into treasure in India 🚀 Anish Malpani quit his cushy finance job, spent 5 years preparing across 3 continents, and built a business that does the "impossible" - turning un-recyclable chip packets into usable plastic while creating dignified jobs for India's waste pickers. This isn't your typical "follow your passion" story. It's a masterclass...

How to Help a Few Billion People kicks off with host Mark Horoszowski explaining why most entrepreneurial advice pushes founders onto a “grow-at-all-costs” conveyor belt, and what it looks like to build world-positive companies instead: choosing financing that preserves mission, managing negative externalities, and prioritizing employee wellbeing without abandoning growth. We talk alternatives to...