Q: You said that progress for social enterprises need not be measured with a long time horizon but instead weekly or monthly. Can you explain this further?

AS: In very, very early stages, if you look at most non-profit and for-profit incubators, people talk about breaking down your problem into small chunks and making sure to know what you want to achieve this week, this month, etcetera.

I think this notion that non-profits take a long time and change will take forever—while I don’t want to be dismissive about this notion that change is hard and things take time—progress need not wait that long. The progress can be daily or weekly, and you can break down your problem into smaller pieces and show progress to your donors and the community.

Another way to say that is: we need daily impatience and long-term patience. You wake up every day with patient impatience to move the needle, but you know that it’s a long-term game, and you build your muscles for a marathon and not a sprint while carrying that energy. I think that balance is very important.

Q: Mentorship and networking also play a pivotal role in nurturing the social entrepreneurs in your programmes. How do you select your mentors and what key qualities do you believe mentors bring to early-stage social ventures?

AS: Individually, we look for mentors that bring one unique skill so it’s almost like a team... They all need to bring one skill that some portfolio of entrepreneurs will benefit [from]. For example, somebody may be very, very good at helping non-profit entrepreneurs understand fundraising, but the other leader may be mentally very good at strategy. A third person may be very good in governance and financial systems processes. The fourth may be very good in understanding how to find your government partnerships.

The collective skills of the portfolio matter, which means that a non-profit should be able to find somebody who can help in fundraising, somebody who can help in strategy, somebody who can help in government partnerships.

Q: If you have all these mentors with different skills, how then do you prioritise which mentor goes to which social venture? Of course, one social venture would want help from a lot of people, right?

AS: What we do is, based on the stage of the non-profit and the work that they do, we choose the best mentor to be their primary mentor and then choose their secondary mentors from the portfolio.

For example, if I’m entirely working in AI for data for rural poor, I need a mentor who’s either very good in technology or very good in distribution of that technology... Manu Chopra, who is a Time100 most influential honouree, is building an AI app called Karya. His mentor is a person who was the Apple India CEO—so, very relevant to his work, and hence, assigned to him as a primary mentor.

Q: Let’s talk about the social enterprises themselves. How do you measure the success and impact of the startups that go through your incubator and accelerator programmes?

AS: Once they go through our incubator, we look at three metrics. One, how much progress they have made against the goals they had in the beginning of the programme to the end. That’s their own progress.

We also look for market indicators of their success, which means that: are they able to raise money from other donors, not just The/Nudge? Usually, we have seen that, in our incubator, people are able to raise close to about eight times within one year of graduating from our programme. That’s a good indicator of the capital leverage that our organisations are able to create for themselves thanks to the incubator.

We also look for the overall mortality rate: how many non-profits have shut down and how many of them have grown the capital? ...So we do look at our failure rate, and we want a failure rate to be not too low, which means we are not taking risks, and not too high, which means we don’t have a pulse of who is likely to scale.

We want roughly about 10, 15 or 20 per cent of our organisations to be very high risk—and if they shut down, that’s okay. And we want 20 per cent of our organisations to find a disproportionate scale, and 60 per cent would be in the middling zone, where they are figuring things out along the way.

Q: You mentioned failure rates. What happens when a social enterprise fails, even with your help?

AS: So sometimes we realise that, in the selection processes, you have false positives, like you selected the wrong entrepreneur, and sometimes you have false negatives, like you did not select what could have been a great entrepreneur. False negatives are okay. False positives are the ones that sometimes become a failure for internal reasons.

Sometimes the failure is because of external reasons, which means the product wasn’t ready or the market wasn’t right, or something like Covid happened, or a disaster happened, or they were over-dependent on a government player and the government changed. And we think that’s okay. If we bring very, very edgy ideas, sometimes they might be more risky than others, and they fail, and that’s okay.

One of the things we do, however, is we make sure that there is a learning diary from these failures that informs The/Nudge of how to select or support next time. In many cases, these failure diaries are also shared with other entrepreneurs, especially when the reasons are external: if, for example, somebody was super reliant on one government in one state, and the government changed and they didn’t know what to do after that. That is the risk that we capture in our learnings that we share with others.

Q: How about happier outcomes—can you share a memorable success story from past participants? What impact has the venture had in their respective fields now?

AS: One of the very fascinating stories is of this lady called Samina Bano. She herself suffered from polio, and grew up with a lot of inequity and inequality around her. She comes from a religious minority, in a very patriarchal demographic region, as a female, so she had gender, disability and religious minority inequities [to overcome]. Despite that, she studied in the top business school in India, the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, did a few years of corporate career, and then came to us and started a non-profit called RightWalk Foundation.

When she came to us, she was looking at education outcomes in the largest state in India, Uttar Pradesh. Their population is about 250 million; the state’s population is almost as big as a few Japans. So she started working there, and initially, her idea was to get governments to include poor kids through the Right to Education Act in all government schools and private schools. Government schools take them, but private schools also have to allocate a certain number of seats to kids from underprivileged backgrounds. She started with that, and it was a very tall undertaking for her to lobby with the government.

Despite the challenges, I’m very happy to say that, over the last five years since she’s been a part of our incubator and accelerator, she obviously cracked that problem in that state. Now I know that 800,000 kids are going to lower-income private schools because of the RTE policy reforms and getting high-quality education thanks to the technology platform that she built, where the state can see every single school. Amongst their 31,000 schools, [they can see] which school has students coming from an underprivileged background on a single dashboard, almost like a compliance dashboard.

And because they were able to pinpoint certain districts and blocks where kids were not coming, they started monitoring that, and the enrolments went from almost zero when she joined, to millions of kids getting into these schools [now].

Q: Having shifted from the corporate sector to social entrepreneurship, what are the leadership lessons you’ve picked up that are specific to scaling impact-driven organisations?

AS: I think one of the things that I’ve realised over time is that a lot of people in the non-profit sector bring a lot of heart, but a lot of them also bring a lot of brains, a lot of intellect of a different kind. They have a very, very good, nuanced understanding of the needs of the communities, a very nuanced understanding of what is required for meaningful change that will also outlast the short-term risks of communities, climate and governments.

And I think the listening is one thing that, as you go higher up in the corporate sector, it becomes less and less and harder and harder. But I have seen that, in the non-profit space, it’s actually very common practice for leaders to spend time on the ground and understand the needs of the communities very well. I think that’s a lesson that I have picked up after coming to the sector, which I think the past me would have benefited from... Listening is very different in this space because you’re working across many layers but it is touching the lives of people, and if you don’t understand, you can’t really make an impact.

I think the second thing is more of what I’ve carried on: which is ambition should not drop to the complexity of the problem. It should stay at the ambition or the possibility of change that you see. One way to say that is: we should continue to aspire for solutions at a population scale and not be bogged down by saying, “Isn’t one life change good enough? Is it not important?” Obviously, one life is awesome, 100 is 100 times more awesome, and a million is a million times more awesome.

I feel like what we are able to bring to the ecosystem is a certain level of, we call it, unwavering optimism that large-scale change is possible and we should hold our ambition to the scale of the problem. One of the organisations that I really love calls it ‘irrepressible founders’... and I quite like that. Irrepressibility is a trait that I’ve learned to appreciate.

This article is part of Business of Good, the series that explores how global leaders use their wealth and influence to drive change through philanthropy and positive action.

Updated 22 October 2024: The number of students in RightWalk Foundation’s programme was originally reported as 6 million. This has been updated to 800,000. The number of schools was originally reported as 35,000 to 40,000. This has been updated to 31,000.

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