How to Do Good AND Make Money | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh

Intro

00:00Hi, I'm Po Shanlow. I'm a mathematician, but more I'm a social entrepreneur. And what that means is I'm interested in trying to solve some real problems for real people. And that's my main driving force for what I do. But in order to do that, you need to have money.

00:13So, we use the method of entrepreneurship to have enough money to try to solve social causes. It's not quite a nonprofit. We don't want to only do things that will cost us money and require donations for every single person we help because if we lose value on every person we help, we then are [music] completely dependent on philanthropy.

00:33Instead, the question is how to create an engine so that we can make money on each person we [music] help so that we can make more help. Don't start by thinking of something super grand like I'm going to make a new foundation AI model. You can start much much simpler.

00:46It's a different a totally different mindset. Of course, there are things that you're passionate about because you're watching this from a social perspective. Great. That means that you see that there are people who need help. What are they paying for to help?

00:58Give them that help.

Make 2+2=5

01:20So, I've run three different ventures for about 10 years. I came to really appreciate social entrepreneurship as figuring out how to create value in the world, solving other people's problems in a way where everybody who's involved all gets some gain in the entire system.

01:38It's important that we also keep some of the value. If you need money for every person you help, we then are completely dependent on philanthropy. You need to ask for more and more and more money. And my eventual observation was for social entrepreneurship, if what you're doing really does on average make the world a better place, then you're actually creating value out of nothing.

01:57That's true. That's actually possible. Sometimes the whole is bigger than the sum of their parts. 2 plus 2 equals 5. Sometimes that's a good thing. So I go and find the situations where 2 plus 2 equals 5. I try to make sure that everyone who's involved in the whole thing, employees, partners, customers, you name it.

02:15Everyone needs to get a net gain of value. A customer can get a net gain of value even if they pay you because they feel like they paid you for something and they got more than what they paid out of it. Okay? So once I figure out this whole system, then on the net we actually even gain money per person we help.

02:26Well, actually so far that's just normal entrepreneurship. What makes it social is that I happen to have control of the company. If the control of the company is in the hands of people who just want money, you have to just make sure you make a lot of money.

02:43But with what we did, we managed to reach profitability early enough that I actually still have control of the company. So the kinds of decisions that we make are not purely designed to just maximize profit. The whole point I guess of entrepreneurship is to scale stuff.

02:56That allows us to have a very very rich experience. At that stage it cannot just be that I do everything myself. So then I started to think, what are ways to do this? There are people who try to do this through technology, maybe recording videos of themselves and then letting everyone see those videos.

03:07But I guess because I'm a network theorist, I like to think of ways that I can use my abilities to construct a network or to cause a network to come together and then the network itself has value. Always looking for where is 2 plus 2 equals to 5.

03:26I want to find all of these. And one such place is when you bring people together. A very simple example of why is because you could imagine that there's a person over here who has too much of one thing and not enough of a second thing. Then you could imagine there's another person who has not enough of the first thing and too much of the second thing.

03:44They're opposite. So if you can find these two people, if you introduce them to each other, they will thank you because they will just go switch, right? The one that has too much of one will give to the one who's not enough and the other way around.

03:56In fact, they might even pay for it and they're thankful to you. You've created value. 2 plus two is now five. That's the value of a network in the simplest way for one link. Or it can get even more complicated situations where with all of these different people between all of them their needs and their wants balance where everyone gets a net gain.

04:13You can create a lot of value by creating a network instead. That's how I invented the live product. The live product is where you have win-win situation. In fact, the experience we deliver is two high schoolers who are kind and really really clever, really good at math.

04:25We incentivize them to teach by hiring professional actors who supervise them and give them real-time feedback while they live stream math lessons to 11, 12 and 13 year olds. This exchange is very beneficial for the older kid because there are a lot of people in the world who are very good at math for whom uh learning communication skills would be good for them, right?

04:44It helps them in their entire life. Okay, so they want to join. We find professional actors who are looking for part-time paid remote work jobs. We give them a great deal. They then guarantee the class is good. We also put two teaching assistants in every classroom.

04:56The teaching assistants actually are usually not from the US for the only reason being that our classes are US evenings and I had a hard time hiring people who wanted to work their main work every day in the night. But then I realized that in Malaysia and in the Philippines it's perfect daylight hours when ours is evenings.

05:14Okay, we can make another win-win situation. And then as as a net result, we make all of these classes which can teach the middle school kids. And the classes that we make end up being really fun. It's like they're taught by people who are a little bit older.

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We Invented a Better Model

06:37So, I have this XP is the big organizing company for all of them. It's actually a for-profit company. And so, underneath it, we can have all kinds of different things. We do have an XP.com website. We actually also have that Novid app and we also have the live classes and actually the live happens to make enough money that it also pays for XP at this point.

06:55Novid we also pay for through the live. So these these two things which are like the do good stuff we actually just paying for ourselves. People are curious how in the world does this support all of these different social ventures. Well, that's designed to be approximately $23 per hour for each student who's taking the class.

07:13We set that by looking at the entire market and seeing what are people willing to pay for extracurricular math classes. Honestly, we could probably have charged way more. Like we could probably have bumped that price way higher to 30, 40 or so because what we have teaching, the people who have teaching are extraordinary.

07:31And out of these out of these high school students that have taught these classes, 30 of them ended up going to MIT. Six of them ended up going to Harvard. I don't think that is necessarily what makes you strong. But I I mention this because many people who go for the tutoring ads, they will say, "Oh, get tutored by a Harvard person."

07:48You know, the price is going to go nuts. So, what I'm explaining is the kind of service that we're delivering should be very expensive. Then why in the world do we only charge 23? It's because we we can. It's because we have another breakthrough.

08:00We made a 30 person class more fun than a oneperson class. Not just more fun, more effective. This is where when you're trying to make a breakthrough, you do need to have innovation in a startup. Startups cannot usually just go and say, "We will do what everyone else is doing."

08:18No, no, no. There has to be some innovation. Before us, everyone thought if you do an online math class, math is boring. You cannot have more than five kids in the room because no one's going to pay attention. Five kids, you stare at them. Like with the Zoom call, if there are five kids and one teacher, you can see everyone.

08:32And if they're not paying attention, you say, "Jimmy, what do you think?" That is how everyone thought online math class has to be because they assumed it's boring. They also assumed that the way that the math class worked was that you tell the kids what to do and you walk them through the steps.

08:44We fundamentally changed both of these philosophies. The first is our math class is not trying to teach you how to do a standard method. Our math class is trying to teach you how to generate your own idea if you've never seen something before.

09:00So, we constantly ask the students, "Here's a problem that you've never seen before, anything like it. What do you think you should do?" We've actually observed that if there are only five kids, brainstorming is hard. They just very quietly sit and stare at each other because no one has any ideas.

09:12You need enough people. Okay, I've just proven why five is worse than more. But the second thing is I've actually seen examples of online interactions where more is better. Live streams. If there are only five people watching the live stream, it feels dead.

09:29And that's because of the chat. So what I discovered was that in a live stream format, which is what all the kids are used to today, they like to be in something where the chat is flowing with lots of nice, fun, happy, and productive contributions.

09:45That happens when you have 30. If you have five, you don't have that. If you have 30, you do have that. If you do 30 though, you have to be careful. There could be nonsense. With Zoom, the problem is if anyone put a bad message, it was there forever.

09:58There was no way to delete a bad message. So I was analyzing this and realizing aha because those bad messages stay forever. That's why the teachers shut off the kids chatting or they told the kids only say the answer because they were afraid the kid will say some bad something.

10:11So I said then I need to build a little piece of software to put moderation. So on our system we actually use a different chat system by which the students can suggest things and then we actually go and we filter out every bad message and we only let the good messages through.

10:27Good could include the wrong answer. That's fine. Uh like being bold and trying to suggest the wrong answer is fine. But saying that was dumb. Nope. That gets cut out. So once we built this system then it became more like the online live stream vibe.

10:40Suddenly 30 kids is better than five kids. Now 30 times $23 an hour is good. You see the point is that there's a unit economics. The way I think about money is I think about the unit economics which means every unit of product that we deliver, how much did it cost to create and how much do we earn from doing it?

11:00If you were selling at $23 an hour and you have five people inside paying you, you will only make $115 an hour and you have to share that among all the different people who are doing this thing. We can take 23 * 30. 23 * 30 is much bigger. That's $690 an hour.

11:17That's close to $700 an hour. So our situation is that our unit economics have $700 an hour going in approximately. And then we have to spend some money going out. The net is that we probably only spend like half of that. The net result is we end up getting profit margins over 50%.

11:30And that's how we can go and support all of the other things that we do. You have to take into account the fact that we have to train the high school students and that's actually very expensive because the high school students leave after two years.

11:42Oh my gosh, this is a terrible business method. I don't want to say model because business model is a word. But this business method most other people would never want to do because your teaching staff has to renew every year. This is ridiculous.

11:55Like there's a huge amount of effort that we spend teaching our high schoolers how to teach. The reason we want to do that is because I'm a social entrepreneur and we see that as a very valuable output that we're creating a network of kind and clever and very well spoken high schoolers who grow up and will change the world.

12:08We don't get money back from that. But that's a good we're providing for society. We will do it just because we think it's a good thing to do. But this is why I also know as an entrepreneur I don't expect any venturebacked startup to try to fight with us on this.

12:21It will be too painful for them. It's like a lot of pain to keep working with all these high schoolers unless you intrinsically think there's a value in spewing these wonderful people out into the world because they're not going to make any more money for you.

12:35You know, you train them up to do great things and then you don't get any of the money, but we're willing to do it. Okay? Right? But so the net result is we end up getting profit margins over 50%. And that's how we can go and support all of the other things that we do.

12:47Like all the other things that we do are funded by this the fact that we have an excess on this one thing. Why do we have an access on this one thing? It's because we invented a better model.

Learning From What Didn't Work to Build What Does

13:05When I started, I thought, oh, every company that gets to lots and lots of users makes money. That's what I thought at the beginning. That's actually wrong. I mean, even the XP.com website at its height, we would get half a million people coming through every month.

13:17We never made any money off of it. Ultimately, it's useful to always be thinking, are there ways that you can go through and get all the way to success? And it's also good to understand whether, oh wait, those people are coming through, but they're only coming through and spending 15 seconds.

13:28We didn't see a good way to convert into revenue. We actually ran out of money. So you see the original XP.com we were funded initially by some investors and at that point we thought maybe we could make this into like make an absolute ton of money in the usual Silicon Valley way.

13:48Then we realized we're not going to be able to grow that fast and we also found out that what we were doing was of interest to philanthropy because we were doing good work for people. So I thought okay well philanthropy is even better because that's not with equity attached then you don't lose control of the company.

14:06Let's try doing that for a while. And in fact, we actually did get a big amount of philanthropy. And I got very excited because I thought, okay, we can do this with philanthropy now. And then at some point, the philanthropy got not interested in funding anymore.

14:12That's how I learned nonprofit is dangerous because if you ever stop getting funding, you're out. So unfortunately, I couldn't get new funding on the philanthropy side. But the reason we were able to do that is because we accidentally found a way to make some money with a totally different product.

14:32What's happening here is that there's an xp.com free website to learn math. We started that in 2014. In 2018 December, a Chinese company, a Chinese startup company found me and said, "Can you make some video recordings of your math class? People will buy it."

14:44I said, "Are you serious? You can't sell recorded math classes." I just didn't think it would work, but they thought it would work. So, I said, "Okay, fine. I'll try it." I was on the way to Bangladesh anyway. I was trying to go and do some other social impact stuff there.

15:01And so I stopped in Shanghai for 3 days, filmed something, and then they actually started making money. Small amount, but enough so that we didn't need to raise any more investments. This is actually how I know there's another way to make a company is through bootstrapping.

15:06Because even though the original XP.com didn't go anywhere, these other things that we built, we didn't use the original investor money. We actually used bootstrapped money earned from these math classes sold in China. So I want to emphasize it is okay to make money.

15:26Actually, I learned this from a philanthropist. It was a life-changing conversation I had with a philanthropist because I was asking him for money. By that time, we actually also get donations for the kinds of work that we did, which was more on the nonprofit route.

15:38And then when I was talking to that philanthropist, he said, "Well, since you have a way of making money, just make money and then use the money to do good." And what he commented was if you make the money, then you can spend it. What a concept.

15:50Actually, once I learned that that was happening, that's when I said, "Okay, how do we make better and better and better versions?" Always using what we've already earned to make the next one. So, we were very, very, very, very tight on money, very disciplined.

16:02If we earn money, we can use the money we've earned and try to make more money and try to make more out of it and more out of it and more out of it. because we had all of that going on. What happened in January 2020, we had to let go of a lot of our team because the original thing that we were doing was not making money growth and it was also not what the philanthropist was interested in anymore.

16:27That then just wouldn't work. Unfortunately, that one had to fold down. So, that was that was painful because these are people that I enjoyed working with and unfortunately that had to end. If my 2014 self was watching this about to start XP, what I would tell that person is make sure that whatever you come up with has a way of actually making money that you can see.

16:46Don't start with something that just gets big and then figure out how to make money later. Figure out how to make money first. But I think the bigger lesson is just can you reach profitability without losing control of your company. That's probably the bigger point because the the main thing is if you have lost control of your company and then you start doing this stuff like giving away free stuff, you're going to have to deal with some investors asking you why exactly are you doing that?

17:10Even if it makes long-term financial sense, it could be that doing that you'll make even more sales later, but maybe the investor is short-sighted. You never know. So, the control becomes important.

How to Get Paid to Do Good

17:27So, the important thing is we have a thing that can make money. The live classes, interestingly enough, under them there's two kinds of live classes. One kind of live classes are the ones where the students pay for the classes. So that one we make money from and we also have the classes going for free to rural kids and we are about to open some classes going for free to Africa too.

17:43We use some of our money to give away the free classes. But there's also a lot of donations which come in which like what we're doing. The way that works is that there's a separate 501c3 American language for nonprofit registered charity. So there's a separate nonprofit entity.

17:57They are our fiscal sponsor. So what that means is when someone wants to donate to the causes that we're doing, they actually donate to that charity. Now that charity then buys then contracts us to do the work. For example, we're giving away free classes.

18:08Donations go into the nonprofit. The nonprofit then pays us and then we deliver the free classes. The easiest way to understand this flow is there are often situations where people will donate laptops to schools. The way that always works is that the money donates to a nonprofit entity.

18:28The nonprofit entity then buys laptops from Apple or from Google. Apple and Google are for-profit entities, but they just happen to make really good laptops that are well suited for this particular market. And it happens to be that the nonprofit made the decision the best vendor to source for these laptops is Apple or Google or whatever.

18:47So our situation is that we just make the best from a cost perspective and a quality perspective advanced math lessons and then the nonprofit entity chooses us to deliver those services. It is actually possible to get philanthropic dollars for work that you're doing if what you're doing is you're delivering it to groups that would otherwise not have bought it for some reason.

19:06Because we have that discipline to make a product that people will actually buy and also keeping the price point low. Interestingly enough, then it's easier to make a case for the nonprofit that this is the best way to spend those dollars. If a nonprofit was buying laptops for a school, they wouldn't want to buy overpriced bad laptops.

19:24Now, what was the most compelling to the the people who were donating for charity? It was that the thing works. Uh, now here's an important detail. When we started, a lot of people thought the things we were doing were way too ambitious. What?

19:36You're going to get a bunch of high school students who are good at math, and you're going to teach them how to be funny? And you're telling me that there will be people who will take these classes and there are so many things that are hard to do in that space.

19:48At the beginning, people were like, it's not going to work. How how are you going to build this thing? It's a dream. Okay, that's the value of being a social entrepreneur. We make money. So, we used the fact that we made money actually on a different product to pay for to bootstrap the creation of the first two classes taught by two students each.

20:04We made money. Once we made money, we made more money. Then we made more money. Then we made enough money that we had extra money. With the extra money, I started going to low-income neighborhoods to see with my own eyes, wow, there are all these kids in these regions where they actually want to learn math.

20:17They really do want to learn math. And now we know how to find them. After we spent a lot of our money doing it, we're able to go and build out the whole rural side. At this point, we're teaching over a hundred of these underprivileged kids.

20:28And they're having a great time. Once we got the first class of Montana kids, those kids are awesome. Like those kids are just really interested in learning. They wouldn't have had the opportunity otherwise. They're very engaged. They have very high potential as well.

20:39Now that we're already doing it, it's very easy to go and explain to other philanthropists, see it works. We got this. For the philanthropists, I found the biggest thing that helped was to be able to show it already works on some small scale.

21:00Actually, these days, if I was doing it again, I wouldn't take a single investor. In fact, the whole thing I'm doing right now doesn't use the investors. The only reason we have investors is because I'm giving them back for what they supported me a long time ago.

21:12If I didn't do that, we would have zero investors and we would still be able to do everything we did. And my first thought is if you're trying to make something where you're getting investor backing, think very carefully, is that really the right thing to do?

21:24Right? Maybe the answer is no. Unless you have investors who for some reason are themselves very interested in social things. So if you can see what I'm saying now, it becomes a question of can you find the right investor. It probably won't be a venture capital fund.

21:36A venture capital fund is a bunch of people who are responsible for taking care of other people's money become bigger. But an individual investor who's already made it in life and wants to see some good stuff happen in the world. They might give to you out of this idea that yeah, some of it's also because it's for good.

21:54think that those high schoolers who graduate out of our network, I expect some of them to get very very wealthy because of the skill sets they have and they'll be very wealthy people who care about people, they might actually be happy to do this kind of an investment.

22:06That's actually why I'm building this network.

Try Everything But Quit

22:16If I had thought it would be hard, I don't know if I'd have dared to try. So, I'm actually very happy that I thought it would be easy and it turned out to not be easy. But I also don't like giving up. I've never seriously considered quitting.

22:21I think the reason I wouldn't ever quit is because I'm lucky enough that I'm cash flow positive. I want to emphasize the earlier you can get revenue and get cash flow positive, the better because then the only thing that might happen is you go slower.

22:40If you're cash flow negative, you can just run out of money. You can become cash flow negative by hiring more people. What I mean by cash flow positive is you have a unit in your business which that unit entirely can generate enough money to power itself so to speak right you your company needs to have a piece where if you lost everything except that piece you would be profitable then with that you can grow bigger and bigger and bigger and then I don't ever need to give up it just means I slow down if I need to down to that core and then rebuild again if

23:14you're a social entrepreneur and you chose you care about certain things if you have the power to not give up because you have a profitable core. Then you would say, "Why in the world do I give up? I should just go and find a way to make this work."

23:19A lot of people give up because they don't like failing. I don't like succeeding too fast. This is actually how I operate. I'll give an example of something that's totally different, but it's very easy to explain. I was at one point organizing a conference and so I was in charge of the conference committee.

23:39We were going to invite speakers. I had some people working with me. So, we were going to have nine speakers. So I told the people who were working with me, I said, "Make a list of 90 people. I want that when you reach out to speakers, I want that your statistical success rate ended up being 10%."

23:52If your success rate was too high, like 80%. That means you asked for people who are not famous enough. You see, you aim too low. So if your success rate is 1%, you aim too high. 10% is good. It just takes you 10 times as long. And this at first the people were what?

24:12You know, 10 times 10% success. Honestly, the things I work on are like 1% success or 0.1% success. I don't want to attack something unless I think it's really unlikely. What that means is if I get it, it's going to be huge. Okay? So, I actually expect that I try something, it doesn't work.

24:25I did this video interview with you guys the first time, the the EO one that got to 3 million views or whatever, more than 3 million now. I had done a lot more a lot more video interviews with a lot more people, but I didn't mind that some of the ones I did maybe only 1,000 views.

24:39is because I expect it to be hard, right? And then finally, we got one. This is successful. But I don't look to always be getting this. Then I look to get even harder. So then I want to go and try things that are even harder and even harder and even harder.

24:51Like the thing I'm trying to do now, which is to get explosion of science and technology across rural America. That's hard. No one's ever done that before. But I actually think we'll be able to pull it off. When I first started thinking of this, that was one whole year ago.

25:03I didn't have anything at that time. I was just like, let me try. I think there might be something here. So, I think the important thing is to feel like you want to see that what you tried was too hard because that's how you know you're trying hard enough things.

25:17If the things you try work too fast, you're not going to make a breakthrough. You're aiming too low. Feel like I cheated myself if it was successful too early. It's like, yeah, of course it won't work, but I'm going to try. And you just try try try.

25:29One works and bam, now it's big. That's a new story. Then you can make another big jump from there.

The Best Time to Be a Social Entrepreneur

25:45I think that in the age of AI, social entrepreneurship is even more important because there will be some very very successful companies and in the old days a very successful company would translate into wealth for normal people. When a company became very successful, it had to hire lots of people and so all the people under it would gain some money out of it.

26:04In the age of AI, a very successful, economically successful company might be able to do it with very few people because it can use AI for the rest. So then what you'd end up seeing is you'd end up seeing that capitalistic that company did well.

26:16Uh the investors did well, the owners did well, but it didn't trickle down too much to the rest of the people. You see, because capital doesn't have a soul. Capital is just money and the money makes more money. Investors often are controlling other people's capital.

26:29They're just making money into more money into more money. So these days, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to teach the entrepreneurial skills to people who really do care about the world and hopefully help more of these people maybe be able to create their own ventures where they still maintain control.

26:47I think that this particular time in history is one of the best times for young people to get involved in business and I hope social entrepreneurship because these days if you have some idea you can actually use AI. You used to need to get a lot of money invested in in order to get moving.

27:04You used to have to hire a software engineer or maybe not just one, a whole team of software engineers. Just this morning, I was using uh Anthropics Claude in order to do a whole bunch of software engineering. It's really good. You can use AI to help you write slogans.

27:16You can use AI to help you with marketing. Pretty soon, there will be AI agents which can help you do communications. So, it turns out that today you might not need to get much investment in order to get something off the ground. So the real question then becomes can you come up with something that people would actually pay for.

27:34Could you become profitable without losing control of your venture? I think the answer is yes. So the idea is don't think first about how you make a big complicated thing where you need to spend a lot of money first. Many people hear about the glorious startups in Silicon Valley.

27:47Those are glorious but there are actually very mundane ways to do things too where you don't start by having something huge. Then you can maintain control of your company. Some people wonder if I'm altruistic because I seem to want to make this world a better place.

28:05Actually, I'm just really selfish. It turns out that what makes me happy is making other people happy. That's what I do for fun. Now, this is a funny thing. I actually do really enjoy doing something and seeing a whole room of it like smiling faces.

28:18It's [music] just fun. That's why I like teaching. That's why I like performing. That's why I like giving talks. So, actually, I'm just a really selfish guy. But you see why why I said this is because I think that the more people in the world that there are who discover just how much fun it is to make other people's lives really bright, that's going to make a great world.

28:35I do happen to think that you'll feel really good when you go and make someone else happy. So I would like to introduce that to you. I'd like to show you that this is this is a thing and then you might decide that you like to do this, too. So I'm one of these guys who's not going to go there and say you must change.

28:48No, I'll tell you. I think I think you might like it. If you don't change, well, it's it's your life. I'm not going to get into your way, but I want to make sure that all of these people that we can show this to, we give them a chance, so to speak.

29:00[music] Maybe after seeing these things, you're thinking, hm, I want to try this, too. So, a realistic thing to do right away is to think, are there things that people are paying for that I can do better than what they're paying for? Start thinking, [music] can I make a much better version of that?

29:17or rather, can I make something that really answers their pain point? And how much would it cost me to make that? Don't start by thinking of something super grand like I'm going to make a new foundation AI model. Yes, sure, if you do that, you'll be also a billionaire.

29:30Very good. [music] But you can start much much simpler. There are lots of products in the world that people are paying for. It's a different a totally different mindset. And of course, there are things that you're passionate about because you're watching this from a social perspective.

29:42Great. That means that you see that there are people who need help. What are they paying for to help give them that help? Interestingly, you might find out that it doesn't cost you a huge amount amount of money to create. And if it does, keep shopping around.

29:54You don't have to do the first idea that comes to your mind, but once you find something that you can generate some cash, that will give you more freedom. Then you get this little core that makes some money. Then you start to make the core bigger and bigger.

30:05If there's one thing to take away and to remember, I think there's a huge value in people who really care about doing something bigger than themselves. Find those people. Our network is not meant to be exclusive. We are not the only ones who know how to find us.

30:18As you go through the world, you can tell by looking at people's eyes whether some people really, really do care about these things. Become friends with them. The fact that you also are this kind of person will mean that someday, someday, you guys might work together or they might introduce you to someone else and this will give you more and more and more and more ideas.

30:35The [music] network is perhaps the most important part of your net worth these days.