by Jean Case
Like many Big Bets, Breedlove’s originated in an effort to solve a personal problem—her hair was falling out, and she could find no products on the market to address her condition. At the time, scalp disease and subsequent baldness were common for black women, largely due to harsh chemicals used for washing. Rather than accept her plight, she set out to experiment with her own homemade concoctions, aided by advice from her barber brothers. She adopted a regimen of daily scalp washing with a hair solution she had created. With her daily use of her new formula, her hair grew back, and she began to look at ways her unique formula could help other women.
When Breedlove married journalist Charles Joseph Walker, becoming known as Madam C.J. Walker, she took her “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower” product and “Walker System” and began going door to door, teaching women about hair treatment and the use of her product. Along with her husband, she set out across the country to build new markets for her growing hair-care business. In the process, her effort became so much more than selling a product. By training and recruiting large numbers of young black women across the country as a sales force—a remarkable feat early in the twentieth century—she empowered and generated income for women who themselves had few opportunities. She created the Madam C.J. Walker Hair Culturists Union, with dues of twenty-five cents per month, to provide business and educational opportunities, as well as life insurance and other benefits. She encouraged this network of young entrepreneurs to practice philanthropy in their communities, and at her annual convention that brought them together, she provided special recognition for those who’d been most generous in their communities back home. “I am not satisfied in making money for myself,” she said. “I endeavor to provide employment to hundreds of women of my race.”
Madam Walker only lived to the age of fifty-one, and in the final decade of her life she became a popular motivational speaker, millionaire, and philanthropist. “I had to make my own living and my own opportunity,” she told her audiences. “But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.” Madam Walker did more than create a product. She would say that her Big Bet was the opportunity she created for others.
“I got my start by giving myself a start.”
—MADAM C.J. WALKER
Sometimes starting where you are means already having a core of knowledge and experience, as Barbara Van Dahlen did. But sometimes, in this era of disruption, Big Bets can come from people who arrived at their inventions without preconceived notions or any experience at all.
In the late 1990s, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, recent graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, struck out for San Francisco, where so many young professionals were flocking to at the time. But soon enough, the high cost of living had them struggling to pay the rent. They knew they needed to find a way to get some extra income—and fast. At about the same time, they heard grumblings that a big design conference coming to the city had bought out nearly all the nearby hotel rooms, leaving many attendees without a place to stay. What if, they asked themselves, we rent out some space in our apartment? They created a simple website with pictures of their loft and the three air mattresses they had purchased to “rent out.” Renters were promised a home-cooked breakfast as part of the deal. It didn’t take long to get the first booking—a recent graduate from Arizona State University desperate for an affordable place to stay. (Brian and Joe charged eighty dollars per mattress.) Soon two other conference attendees confirmed their reservations. Airbnb was born.
The small success of their venture motivated Brian and Joe to turn the idea into something more permanent. They boldly began to solicit investors, most of whom thought the idea of staying in the home of a stranger was crazy. Their timing wasn’t so great either. The looming financial crisis was dampening investors’ appetite for backing untested ideas.
To keep their endeavor afloat, Brian and Joe devised a clever twist on the breakfast part of the plan. Trying to get a foothold in Denver, which was hosting the 2008 Democratic National Convention, they had the idea to market signature cereal boxes as a way to create buzz and extra revenue around the convention, which they later duplicated at the Republican Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain cereals became a hit, providing $30,000 of much-needed income.
In January 2009, Airbnb was accepted into the competitive Y Combinator accelerator program for start-ups, which came with a $20,000 investment from Y Combinator’s cofounder Paul Graham. Graham hadn’t been too impressed with the idea of someone paying to sleep on an air mattress on a stranger’s floor. But as the two young entrepreneurs prepared to leave their first interview with him, Joe gave Graham a box of Obama O’s. “Wow,” said Graham. “You guys are like cockroaches. You just won’t die. If you can convince people to pay forty dollars for a box of cereal, you can probably convince them to pay to sleep on each other’s air mattresses.” The cereal sealed the deal.
Airbnb didn’t hire a big team, or spend big money on marketing and advertising. In effect, Brian and Joe asked: What is the least amount of time or effort we can spend on an experiment to determine if this idea will fly? They learned to stay nimble and to identify opportunities to keep afloat until they were established.
“One of my biggest strengths was precisely how little I knew.”
—BRIAN CHESKY
The growth process wasn’t without problems. When you introduce a new concept, some people are bound to resist. There was intense lobbying from the hotel industry. Some communities and apartment buildings blocked owners from renting their spaces with Airbnb, and people worried about strangers trashing their homes. But the idea caught on because it touched on something travelers were looking for. It wasn’t just a matter of price. It was the sense of belonging somewhere, of staying in a place that felt more welcoming than a sterile hotel room. It also provided homeowners grappling with high property taxes and empty nests an easy way of earning income. Today the company operates in more than 80,000 cities and 191 countries. Over half a million people stay in one of Airbnb’s more than 3 million listings every day.
• • •
So, you see, anyone can make a Big Bet, and getting started often begins with a simple question: “Why not me?” Imagine being a college student. (Maybe you are one and don’t have to imagine.) Your daily life is filled with classes and activities, family and friends. What would compel you to also take on a project such as ending hunger on college campuses? That’s what UCLA students Rachel Sumekh and Bryan Pezeshki did. Their national nonprofit organization, Swipe Out Hunger, began in 2010 as a grassroots initiative after Bryan noticed a call for food donations and asked some friends, “Who wants to help?” When Rachel responded, she was disturbed to find that she was the only one. The following Saturday, she and Bryan spent five hours moving donated food across the campus for distribution to students who couldn’t afford to eat.
The problem they set out to tackle wasn’t a new one, but it certainly went unacknowledged for years. While we don’t think of students on college campuses going hungry, my own experience is a personal testament to this. Although I was a recipient of financial aid during my college years, the aid did not cover a meal plan. With the meager amount of money I had earned mostly going to books and other extra costs not covered by financial aid, I often had to skip meals because I simply didn’t have the funds. I was fortunate because close family friends who lived nearby invited me to dinner routinely and often sent me back to my dorm with leftovers for lunch the next day. (I grow a bit teary as I reflect on this—how lucky I was to have so many in my life whose generosity and loving care were transformative in big ways and small.)
Today an estimated one in seven college students nationwide is considered so “food insecure” they’ve visited a food bank; in some states, that number rises to one in four. Which is where Swipe Out Hunger comes in. Rachel and Bryan’s effort started with a sign, to-go boxes, and some encouragement to fellow students to collect extra fo
od. But it wasn’t long before they came up against dining hall management, which felt threatened by what they considered competition. One dining manager even smashed Rachel’s boxes and shouted, “Get this program the hell off my campus.”
It was clear that Swipe Out Hunger needed another way forward, which was when Rachel and Bryan set their sights on the college meal plan. At many schools, it’s easy enough for those parents who can afford it to load money onto what’s a bit like an ATM card for food each September, which students can swipe each time they enjoy an on-campus meal. It’s not uncommon to end up with money left on the card at the end of the year, and most schools don’t allow that balance to roll over to the following year.
Unused meal plan credits can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars at bigger universities. What if, Rachel wondered, students could “swipe” to donate unused meal credits to students in need? It was a brilliant idea—and so simple—and should have been widely embraced. But faced with the loss of so much revenue, UCLA didn’t make it easy. As Rachel later said: “We felt like kids breaking the rules.” The founders persisted, however, and by 2012 Swipe Out Hunger had achieved such acclaim that their efforts were recognized by the White House, who named the student leaders Champions for Change. President Barack Obama himself congratulated the fifteen students who came from California to receive the honor.
After graduation, the students went their separate ways, Rachel into social work. But before long, the Swipe Out Hunger team, which had always been staffed by volunteers, decided it needed a full-time head to run the growing nonprofit. Rachel suggested it should be her. “You’re too nice to be a leader,” a male acquaintance told her. But Rachel didn’t take the comment to heart. Today, under Rachel’s lead, the program has expanded to thirty campuses across the country, built along a franchise model that enables student leaders to feel a strong sense of ownership. The program has delivered more than 1.3 million meals to students in need, and now includes food pantries, including one at UCLA, where a student can walk in and grab what is needed, with no stigma attached. In June 2017, the governor of California signed into law legislation to incentivize universities across the state to adopt the program, approving a $7.5 million budget to move toward “hunger-free campuses.”
Students often send Rachel notes expressing gratitude. One young woman said she wouldn’t have enrolled in college had the program not been available, since like so many students, she received financial aid but did not have a way to pay for food. Rachel likes to say that the cost of a meal is small, but the cost to society of someone dropping out of school or not enrolling is enormous. “College students have a lot of insecurities,” she reminds people. “Food shouldn’t be one of them.”
Much like Rachel Sumekh, Shazi Visram, the daughter of Pakistani and Tanzanian immigrants, got her idea for a healthy baby food brand when she was an MBA student at Columbia University. She wasn’t a mother then, but she was moved by the story of a classmate, a working mother of two, who complained about her lack of baby food options; she didn’t have time for homemade baby food, but wished she could find something with healthy ingredients. Shazi, who admits to having boundless confidence, instilled by her parents, decided to tackle the problem. She studied the market and polled her friends who were parents, and was amazed to find that the baby food market had remained stalled for decades, even as the population was growing increasingly interested in organic foods with healthful ingredients. She decided that was going to be her Big Bet.
Finding investors was the hardest part—she was still in school. But with an initial investment from her mother of $20,000, she went on to raise half a million dollars, enough to launch her food company, Happy Family, in 2006. There were some starts and stops along the way. Initially, her product was frozen, but she found that people didn’t shop for baby food in the frozen food section of the supermarket. So she changed course in 2009, with pouches that could be stored on shelves in the baby food sections. The product rapidly took off from there.
This is, of course, the short version of Shazi’s story. Behind the scenes, there were years of research, testing, and searching for investors. She didn’t have deep pockets or family connections, so seeking investors was a big part of her job in the early years. In the beginning, she had to sell the idea to mostly male investors—not exactly the prime audience for a mom-friendly product. Eventually, though, she found response from a new class of impact investors—a phenomenon we’ll discuss later in this book. These investors were not only attracted to the clear success of Shazi’s company, but to the opportunity to do something good for the health of children. In 2013, Shazi sold her company to Danone, a Paris-based multinational company committed to products that promote health. Her early investors realized a 30x return. She remains CEO, but has also become an investor in other companies looking to do good. Her broader mission is to do everything she can to promote the health and well-being of babies and young children. The urgency increased after she became a mother. When Shazi’s son was diagnosed with autism, her life’s work and personal life converged. Today her mission is expanding to the health of the whole family, with products for older children and pregnant women. Her perspective is simple: she is only interested in projects that will help change the world for the better. And although Happy Family is very profitable, she would also say, “Babies before profits.”
• • •
Starting right where you are can be the mantra for every visionary. And it always reminds me of a lesson I took away from Jen, an athletic trainer I worked with one summer to push my physical boundaries. Jen is young and remarkably fit. She’s won many triathlons and she inspired me (and perhaps intimidated me too) the summer we trained together. I’d boxed and trained for my black belt in Tae Kwon Do, but I had never run a race or run distances in a mountain setting. But that summer I was staying at a farm in the mountains of Virginia surrounded by very hilly, winding country roads. By the end of the summer, I wanted to be able to run the three miles of roads—hills and all. For most runners, three miles is no big deal, but I had never run a race or even up and down hills.
Jen’s first piece of advice was: “Break it down into chunks.” She told me, “Only look at the next three feet in front of you, because if you look a mile down the road, you’ll say, ‘I’m never going to make it.’ But you can always make it three more feet.” And she was right. Eventually three more feet extended to the next mailbox, and then to the bend in the road—each distance just a little farther than before. By the end of the summer, I had gone from running in spurts of just a few minutes to running the full three miles of hills.
There’s wisdom in the “chunk it” approach for Big Bets too. Like everything else in life, big achievements often start with small steps; take enough small steps, and you can do powerful things. So I invite you to think about how to break “impossible” things into chunks.
And there is another lesson Jen taught me that applies to any Be Fearless effort: One day, well into the training, I was really having a hard time. I’d noticed that some days I felt like I could fly, and other days every step was a struggle. “That’s how it is for me even after my triathlon wins,” Jen said. “Some days are hard, some days are easy. But you just keep going.” I took that as a challenge for life more broadly: some days are just harder than others to stay on task, to dig deep to find inner reserves, and to keep moving toward your goal. The key is to remind yourself that tomorrow will likely be easier.
I’ve often thought about how Big Bets that change the world can start as Big Bets in one’s personal life. Watching my mother struggle to provide for our family, I understood at a young age how challenging that could be. Some days I would only see my mom for the hour between when I came home from school and when she left for the night shift. So I made a Big Bet early in life to create enough financial security for myself that I could have some flexibility in my career once I started a family. With all decisions guided by this central idea, it wasn’t so hard to ask for a raise,
because I was on a mission.
I also committed at an early age to using my time and talents to empower others, as being a kid on full scholarship at a private school opened my eyes to the differences in opportunities life can present. I originally imagined working as a lawyer in the public sector. But, interestingly, the winding road of life led me instead to a private sector career in technology, where I had the privilege of helping to empower millions of people through the digital revolution and the Internet. This, in turn, gave me the resources to build a foundation that today invests in people and ideas that can change the world. I’m not sure I would have risked leaving the public sector for the private if I hadn’t had the inner conviction that I would stay focused on my big goal of helping others, no matter what.
Do you have a Big Bet or a big idea that’s been burning inside you? What would it look like for you to start right where you are and take your own Big Bet forward? Each of the stories in this chapter demonstrates that launching a Big Bet doesn’t require a large budget, proven expertise, or the underpinning of a large company or organization. What it does require is the ability to assess what you have now that you can leverage in your current situation to advance your idea. Start there.
TWO
BE AUDACIOUS
I was too young to remember the day President John F. Kennedy announced that America was going to the moon, but I do recall growing up in a world where the idea of a moonshot existed—as well as Kennedy’s memorable words that we were doing these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” While the term “moonshot” is now used to describe any big, bold effort, I wonder if we grasp just how bold President Kennedy’s Big Bet was in 1961.
