“Technology”, “innovation”, “disruption”. These words are thrown around Silicon Valley so often that I believe we have forgotten what they really mean. I certainly had when our plane landed in Mexico City last June. If you had asked me then what the benefits of an anaerobic biodigestor were, I would have listed the technical specs, mentioned how it saves money, reduces methane emissions and promotes healthier farming practices. I was right, but I still missed the point. I was so hung up on the device itself that I failed to realized the secondary and tertiary effects on its users.

On one of our final days in Puebla, the Mexico City team drove down to the field office for the day. They had all sorts of important business to attend to, which made it all the more curious why Alex (Sistema’s cofounder) walked into the office with a pack of markers and a stack of paper. After greeting the team, Alex gathered everyone together and passed out the supplies explaining that we would be drawing what Sistema meant to us on the pieces of paper and then presenting them. If you had asked me to guess when I stepped off the plane what people would write on their pieces of paper, I would have guessed savings, or sustainability, or environmental protection…I couldn’t have been more wrong. I looked around the room and I saw “love”, “family”, “community”, “food”. THIS was Sistema’s real impact, and this is what real disruption looks like, families being able to cook all day and invite their neighbors over without having to worry about how much propane costs, or the health risks of burning wood inside. It was something families were proud of, that they could show off to their friends. It meant that their families could worry about money a little bit less. THAT is disruptive innovation.

I learned more this summer than I can necessarily put into words, and more than I even really am aware of yet. This Fall we were faced with the scary term “vocational discernment”. The most daunting thing about it was, how were we to translate this experience into the tech-obsessed world of the Silicon Valley. Should we join a non-profit? Go work in the developing world? Start our own social enterprise? I don’t have answers to all these questions yet, but I did learn important lessons about what I do and do not want out of my career.

First, I learned that for-profit vs non-profit vs social enterprise is not the most important factor for me. Non-profits do not have a monopoly on meaningful, socially impactful work. The structure of the organization is less important that what they actual goals of the organization and how they pursue those goals. If a organization is challenging large systemic problems like health or financial technology, there will often be ways to make a profit and an impact. This leads into my second insights, that I crave audacious challenges.

Second, I learned that I want to be working within organizations that are taking moon-shots; where the goal is something truly ambitious and which returns to first principles. Marginal improvements are important, but they are not for me. I found Sistema Biobolsa electrifying because there was no guidebook for what they were attempting to do. No rules had been established and there was very little competition because very few people were crazy enough to try. This can terrify some because of the uncertainty, and while there is certainly risk, there is also incredible possibilities if it works. At its core, this is a realization that I want from my career is less about rising up the ranks of a company, but rather having a feeling of giddy excitement about the work I do. I have been fortunate enough to find this at both Sistema Biobolsa and Kiva where even after long days, coworkers still want to talk about the organization, and where they see it going. This is not exclusive to start-ups and non-profits, its a very specific corporate culture.

Third, I have learned the areas I want to focus in my career: financial technology and healthcare. The democratization of capital that’s happening with crowdfunding, mobile money, and peer to peer lending is creating opportunities for people who were previously financial excluded and its happening around the world. Breakthroughs in disease identification and prevention have the potential to revolutionize healthcare world wide and allow people to lead more humane and dignified lives. There are any number of areas to commit effort to, but for me, these are the two that look to have the greatest power to alleviate poverty world wide.

To be honest, I don’t know where I’ll be in a year, much less 10 years, but I do know that this fellowship will dramatically change how I get there. Lessons I learned from the importance of personal stories, to the snowballing effects of social conscious innovation, to the need to stay curious and adapt in ambiguous circumstances, will, without a doubt shape how I approach my career, as well as the world. I learned a tremendous amount about myself and my place in the world. Above all, I learned that the problems of the poor and marginalized are not simply something to drive us to donate a few sympathy dollars every year, but urgent and pressing issues that must be address with all the ingenuity and radical entrepreneurialism that has made the Silicon Valley famous. I am continually grateful for the opportunity this fellowship provided and am excited for what is to come.

During the final days of our time in Mexico, the entire Sistema Biobolsa team gathered in the Puebla field office. While there were very pragmatic reasons for everyone coming together, such as meeting with lawyers and investors, it became a great opportunity to appreciate why we were all there in the first place. Alex (Sistema’s cofounder) brought with him several sheets of white paper and a pack of markers, and in the context of a professional office it seemed strange to me. He then instructed everyone to take a sheet of paper and spend the next few minutes drawing and writing what Sistema Biobolsa meant to them. As the office began drawing, Elizabeth and I talked about the assignment. I was thoroughly convinced that everyone would come back with a paper representing the economic, environmental, or health impacts of biodigestors. Sistema was an agricultural technology company, right? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead there were words like “comida”, “amor”, “familia”, or “communidad”. Everything I had been witnessing over the last two months was finally coming together.

While in Mexico, I began reading a book called “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek. In the book, Sinek talks about what makes some companies and organizations great, while others who seem to have the same product and organizational structure continue to fail. His point can be summed up in his saying that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. As Sistema Biobolsa employees took turns sharing what the company meant to them, I understood why this was true.

I went to Mexico fascinated with what Sistema Biobolsa was doing. Moreover, I went to Mexico as an Economics student, fascinated with quantitative aspects of the business. However, it wasn’t long before I realized that no one in the country saw it that way. We talked to proud mothers who eagerly showed us the blue flame their biogas stoves produced, and told us how they could now cook all day long and not run out of gas. Community is vital to life in rural Mexico and their communities are built around big meals. Few things seemed to bring families more joy than serving food to the entire neighborhood. We would also talk to farmers who were proud of how little their farms smelled, and how they no longer needed to use chemical fertilizer. To an economist, the switch from chemical to organic fertilizer represents a strategic business decision and a shift in preferences, but it was far more profound than that. One man sat us down and explained how he knew chemical fertilizer was polluting the food he would then feed to his family and his neighbors. He explained that it was a parents responsibility to create a better life for their children, and to him this meant feeding them healthy, organic food. As an economist, I also entered the country assuming that price would be the leading factor when it came to fertilizer choice, and once again I was wrong. The farmers we met valued quality over cost savings as they prided themselves on having tall, vital corn stalks, and healthy livestock. They had little interest in my overly simplistic cost-benefit analysis.

The sheer emotion in the room as Sistema employees explained what the organization meant to them was the final nail in the coffin for my ill-informed and preconceived notions of what Sistema Biobolsa was all about. That day was the culmination of a profound lesson that had been overtly apparent over the last seven weeks: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. For this reason, there will never be a successful social entreprise that does not have, at it’s core, someone who believes in and cares about the organization’s mission absolutely. Sistema Biobolsa does not just sell bio digesters; they sell the opportunity to have a more happy, humane and healthy life for rural farmers. This realization led me to two take-aways: one about my vocation, and the other about social businesses as a whole.

Firstly, I realized that parachute interventions don’t work, no matter how clever the people who design them are. It took Alex and Camillo years of living and working along side rural farmers to fully understand how to build a product that would have an order of magnitude impact on their lives. Some call this approach nativism and it’s importance can be seen all over the technology sector. There are plenty of companies employing brilliant people to develop ingenious technological advancements, but unless they designed with a deep attention to the needs of their intended users, it is not likely to have any sort of impact at all. No organization can truly impact BoP markets without being in tune with their needs and how their particular intervention can benefit their users in ways that transcend economics.

Secondly, I realized something important about my own vocation. I learned that I can never truly do my best work at an organization, unless I firmly believe in their mission. This is not to say I realized I have to work for social businesses for the rest of my life, but rather that I am committed to working for organizations that don’t just know what they do or how they do it, but why they do it. Here in Silicon Valley it has become such a viral trend that even TV shows have started mocking the fact that it seems as though every company is claiming to be making the world a better place (HBO’s Silicon Valley encapsulating this perfectly with the line “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do”). These shallow corporate mission statements are not what I’m talking about. The organizations I want to work for are those who don’t need to write down their mission statement because it resonates from everything that they do. I have experienced this at Sistema and at the Miller Center and I hope to fortunate enough to continue to find it throughout my career.

Having just returned from a weekend spent exploring Mexico City, what struck me the most (other than the tremendous hailstorm) was the slowness of life in San Martin. Stepping off the bus was akin to entering a new country. This is no fault of the people, it is simply the nature of what economists call a ‘dual economy’. I had seen it before in Shanghai; a brand new Maserati racing a rickshaw down a back alley. Life is fundamentally different once you leave Mexico’s major cities. These differences show why doing business in the developing world can be so difficult.

Entrepreneurs exist everywhere. In Mexico City you can see it in the street hustle; the guy who buys big packs of gum and cigarettes and sells them individually at a mark up. In rural Mexico things are simply more complicated. Corner store after corner store sells the same processed junk food and coca-cola products and almost every farmers grows corn. Within the same economy, within the same country, there are two vastly different modes of living. The trouble with rural markets is that they are simply too unpredictable. In three short weeks we have experienced this unpredictability ourselves. Our water was shut off for a week because enough people in town hadn’t paid their water bill. Now we were fortunate to have the resources to buy bottled water and wait it out, but there are many more without the reserves to wait out these surprises. For many, surprises (or externalities as they are called in the business world) like these can be devastating. For those living in rural or remote areas, there are rarely many options or resources to hedge against these surprises. If there is a bad harvest one year, you can’t simply walk down the street and fill out an application to work at a supermarket or fast-food restaurant. This is something that is hard to fully grasp until you are faced with it first hand.

In Economics, it is easy to get misled by the elegant simplicity of models and theories and believe that the world follows these laws. However, stepping out of the classroom and into a developing country forces you to come to terms with the parts of the world we like to sweep under the bell curve. These are not necessarily cases where theories of markets fail, but rather places where people serve markets rather than markets serving people. For example, cheap food is great, it means that fewer people around the world will go hungry, yet that isn’t the whole story. It ignores the farmers who’s income was just cut in half by falling corn prices, and the grand irony is that his family may now go hungry, while the rest of the world has unprecedented access to affordable food. Dual economies, like China and Mexico, make this dichotomy painfully apparent; wages rise in the cities, while the rural communities are stuck watching the price of corn fall and the price of everything else rise.

How then do we stitch together these two pieces of Mexico’s economy? I don’t know, no one is really sure. Those who enter developing nations with pre-fabricated plans to solve all of the nation’s problems, are usually met with a few unpleasant surprises. Pre-fabricated solutions can work well in business in the developing world. We see this with franchises, or Steve Job’s ‘if you build it, they will buy it’ theory on consumer demand. But when you are dealing with rural communities where basic things like food, water, shelter and energy are not always guaranteed, it is hard to create a one size fits all plan. Instead you first have to understand the circumstances under which people live day-to-day, and what assumptions you can make about access to transportation, or land, or resources. Only after that can you begin to develop a plan. And this is exactly what we are doing. After over 70 interviews we are starting to get a picture for what life in rural Mexico is like, what challenges there are, but also what resources and opportunities there are. Randy Pausch said it best when he said that brick walls aren’t there to keep us out, they are there to keep out those who don’t want it badly enough. This is the job of social entrepreneurs, to climb the walls which everyone else believe to be too high. We may not succeed, but even then we will, at the very least, have a better understanding for the lives of those who’s reality is quite different from our own and that is quite a big step towards creating markets that serve people rather than people who serve markets.

Jobs require an interview; vocations require a journey. My journey to social entrepreneurship has been one of conflict between my interests in social justice and entrepreneurship. Until very recently I rationalized that these two passions to be mutually exclusive and that pursuing one would mean compromising the other. I felt that there must be a way that these two might intersect, and I saw glimpses of it at Homeboy industries and Kiva, but I had no language as to what this merger was or how it could be institutionalized.

I come from a long line of unreasonable people. I was born Beaverton, OR, only a couple blocks from the Nike world headquarters, and raised by parents who were both unreasonable in their own right. My Father worked at Intel during a massive series of layoffs in the 80’s. The majority of his office was fired and he, along with the few remaining employees were told that they way they had been doing things wasn’t working and the company had to be reinvented. My mother defied more than a few stereotypes and gender norms by being one of the few woman studying immunology in the early days of stem cell research. They raised me to believe that status quos aren’t set in stone and that what matters most in ones life is what one does for others. You can imagine my hesitation to pursue a career in business.

I entered Santa Clara with dreams of being a neuroscientist. I wanted to understand the brain in order to help others. But my first year made it very clear to me that I was not cut out for the hard sciences. After three quarters of feeling as though I was putting in twice the effort for half the results, I knew a change had to be made. I had found that I was fascinated by business and economics, but I was hesitant to make it my major. I did not wish to have a career dedicated soley to making money. I felt there must be a way to do business that was about more than profit maximization; I soon found start-ups that believed the same.

Looking back, I realized I had seen inclusive business done successfully twice before I even arrived at Santa Clara but I didn’t have a language for what they were doing. The first was Kiva.org. Thanks to a Kiva gift card, I was introduced to the micro-finance site. I watched Jessica Jackley’s Ted talk and connected immediately to her struggle. Even though I was in high school, I found myself craving a kind of service that went beyond blind charity. Later the next year I saw this in action.

The summer of my Sophomore year of high school I went on a service trip to East LA to visit Homeboy Industries. Homeboy was electric with hope and an infectious sense of compassion. They were a business, there was no doubt about that, but they valued people more than profit. I knew Homeboy was on to something but I lacked the language for what that was.

Jump forward to the summer after my Freshman year. I found myself working at a Start-up Chocolate company in Portland along side a founder who couldn’t be less interested in profit. “It’s about the experience” she would say as we stood in Whole Foods aisle handing out samples to customers. That summer I was introduced to entrepreneurship and a different kind of business. I was hooked. Despite my initial fear of the business world, I had stumbled on these bands of revolutionaries working very hard to change the way things are done. It’s no wonder that the next summer I did the same. I discovered a granola start-up (the food niche wasn’t intentional) who started their business for an unusual reason. The two childhood friends started a company called San Franola after one of the founder’s father found himself on the brink of some major health issues. Staring down the barrel of the American trinity of diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol, the founder’s father radically reinvented his diet. A part of this was to reverse one of his favorite snacks, granola, into a true tool for better health. The two friends weren’t opposed to making a profit but what they wanted even more was to change the way Americans approach snack food. I had surrounded myself with unreasonable entrepreneurs before I even heard the term social entrepreneurship.

I always had a very different view of economics than some of my more conservative classmates. I refused to accept that capitalism must be a system of winners and losers. This was informed by the week and a half I spent in El Salvador during high school. I had seen the damage that untempered greed had done to that country and for most of the people I met people, not profit was the most important thing in life. Later, when I began reading about Mohammad Yunus, I connected with his vision for a world without poverty, and I truly believe it is possible.

Now with this perfect storm of unreasonable mentors and a compassionate philosophy of economics, it seems odd that my choice to take a course in social entrepreneurship was fairly random. While searching for an elective to round out my schedule, I picked up the class nearly at random. I knew after the first day that this class would shape me. It was as if I had finally found the phrase I had been searching for all those years. Not only that, but there was a whole pantheon of unreasonable men and woman who not only believed what I believed, but has acted on it. Professor Koch’s course introduced me to brilliant visionaries, and also to the GSBI which had existed right under my nose all these years.

For me, this fellowship is the culmination of a several year long vocational journey. This fellowship is the intersection of unreasonableness, entrepreneurship, and social justice.