AI transcript
Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. Today’s episode is a special conversation with Lorraine
Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective, a firm she founded in 2004 to drive
social impact through investments across a broad range of areas such as education, immigration,
and the environment. Lorraine Powell Jobs is interviewed by A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz,
and their discussion covers everything from Lorraine’s childhood in mountainous rural New
Jersey and how it shaped her to what the Emerson Collective is driven by and does and why it’s a
collective for that matter. For more about Lorraine Powell Jobs’ work, see www.emersoncollective.com.
This conversation originally took place at our most recent summit event in November 2018.
Welcome, everybody. I’m Ben. This is Lorraine. Coming in, I was just talking to Lorraine.
I was saying it’s really hard to introduce her because she’s not like our other co-investors
like at all in a good way, but she’s got a much more complex thing that she does and background.
So I could read the read. I could say, well, she’s a media mogul. She’s a tech investor.
She’s an education reformer and so forth. But you won’t even know really who she is if I just did
it like that. And none of them would be really honest. I don’t think anybody would call me a
media mogul except you. Or what you are a media mogul, technically. I’m so excited to be here,
to be having this conversation because there is nobody else like this. And so you’re in for a treat.
Why don’t we start at the beginning back in West Milford, New Jersey, where you grew up.
You didn’t have the whole Silver Spoon. No, we were solidly middle-class family.
Yeah. And what was that town like? West Milford, New Jersey is about 20 miles west of the George
Washington Bridge and then another 10 miles north. If people don’t know New Jersey, there is a
mountainous part of New Jersey. And in fact, one can go skiing and one can ice skate. And so we
did all of those things. We were just in the beginning of the mountainous parts. And so now
as an adult looking back, it’s lovely. It’s wooded. It’s wild. I grew up with three brothers who were
very wild. So we had sort of this connection to nature in the natural world that we would all
hope for our children. However, growing up there was also gritty. And it had a lot of
Jersey in it. Yeah, Jersey. Like, what is Jersey? It really did. It was kind of hard to scrap all.
People had big hearts, but also big edges. And so you learn really quickly, as a child,
where the boundaries are and which boundaries one shouldn’t cross. We were all of us
put to work really early, which was great. So we developed an extraordinary work ethic.
As kids, you know, they were in the end, my mom remarried, and then we had a mix of blended
family. My dad died when I was three in a playing crash. And so we ended up with six kids,
like the Brady Bunch, three girls and three boys. But in order to have controlled chaos,
we all had chores. And we had very set times for eating and sleeping. And I shared a room my whole
life. And I shared a bathroom. There were six of us that shared one bathroom. And if you can imagine
what it was like getting to school on time, it was a mess. That was sort of my childhood. I was
always trying to eke out a little bit of privacy. And so now I can empathize with those in social
media who would like to regain their privacy. Get out of my bathroom, Facebook. It’s a joke.
It’s a joke, people. Anyway, I think a lot of what shaped me from that experience in West
Melbourne, New Jersey, and then, you know, our big trip each year was going down the shore. We’d
rent a little house and drive down there and get terribly sunburned. We were probably five blocks
back from the ocean, but it was our favorite time. And then we’d drive back up in our station wagon
back up to Northern New Jersey. That sort of circumscribed our life. Chores. And then one
vacation and get sunburned. But we were steeped in core values of real dedication and a sense that
there was always a way out. And that was through education. And that was communicated early on to
me. And luckily, I loved books and I love school. And I think I sought out teachers and tried to
ingratiate myself and just, you know, find a little place where I could excel and where I could feel
that there was a reward for the work that also gave me joy, which was, you know, doing school.
Right. It wasn’t just a chore. It was work with the benefit. That’s right. That’s a great inspiration.
And you went to University of Penn which is like a super prestigious school.
I did. I did. Yeah. I was the first person in my high school to go to an Ivy League school.
West Milford Township is massive and stretched all the way up to New York State. Probably 20%
of our graduating class went on to any further schooling. Certainly not all four years. A lot
of them went on to trade school. Yeah. I was reading something that you said that I thought was
very interesting. So when you were a kid, I guess you donated like $20 to the Southern Poverty
Leadership Law Center. Yeah. And they would send you letters. And the thing that you were very focused
on was who got the opportunity and who didn’t. Yes. Because I was focused on it because they
were focused on it. Yeah. SPLC had a huge impact in my young life because I read about them in,
I think, the reader’s digest. I think that’s where I read about them. There was a profile on
Morris D’s. So I saved up some newspaper money and I sent them for me, which was a lot of money
at the time, $20. I think I was either in late middle school or high school. Yeah. I don’t know
if you remember. I don’t know if you remember when you’re a kid getting mail with such an exciting
thing. That’s the only place that ever sent me any mail, that in one of my grandmas. So they would
send me mail reliably, probably every quarter. Of course, it was a beautiful form letter, but it
always told a story of justice meeting injustice and opened my eyes to things that were going on
in the world in the early 70s that I otherwise wasn’t privy to. So I really hung on there everywhere.
I remember saving all the letters from Morris D’s in actually one of my most wonderful moments,
and it only just happened a couple of years ago at Emerson Collective. We do all of our
philanthropic giving anonymously, but we had been funding SPLC and we decided that we wanted to do
some teaching tolerance curriculum in partnership with them. And so one of our team members was
actually talking to Morris D’s who still works there. And so I said to her, “Can I get on the phone
with Morris D’s?” I got to tell him that he was the one. He planted that seed in me that individual
people could pay attention and engage and maybe do something about injustices that seem intractable
or far away or impenetrable. Oh, that’s a great story. And coming from your Big Bruce Springsteen
fan, and it’s really interesting that in his work, even though he’s Bruce Springsteen,
it’s still all about New Jersey. And do you feel that way about your work, where that
a lot of the inspiration is still from that time? A lot of inspiration. Yes, although I don’t find
that the work is necessary all about New Jersey, but a lot of how I see the world and how I think
about basic fairness comes from New Jersey. I think people actually want to know what’s going on.
And they have clearly held opinions. This is what I recall and work hard, but also are open
to hearing from other people because New Jersey was certainly a melting pot in the first wave
of immigrants from Europe. And so they had to accommodate. It’s not a glamorous place to be
from. And so people were distracted by glamour or coolness in any way. Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen
still echo through my head. It’s one of the soundtracks of my life, I think. So he pops up
when I do not expect him to pop up when I’m observing a situation. But to your point,
a lot of the work that I do references something that I learned a little over 20 years ago from
College Track. And I think it’s true to say that all of the work that we do at Emerson Collective
now is informed and certainly influenced and shaped by what was learned at College Track.
And so maybe College Track is my New Jersey. Yeah, interesting. And so tell us about
College Track and how what you learned, what you tried to do, and then what you learned,
and then how you moved it to be the entire Emerson Collective. Sure. It’s sort of a beautifully
long and winding story because it all took place probably starting about 22 years ago.
After graduate school, I was running a natural foods company. And per chance, I met the California
Teacher of the Year. She was teaching at a local high school. And I had not ever visited a high
school in California because I had moved just for graduate school. She asked me if I could come and
talk to her students, that all of her students in this one class were from East Palo Alto. And this
was at Carlemont High School, which is where all of the East Palo Alto students stood out. And that’s
when East Palo Alto was super dangerous, right? That’s right around the time of the murder capital.
Yeah, right around that time. I jumped at the opportunity because when I was at Stanford,
I found it really odd to have the juxtaposition of Palo Alto and East Palo Alto because I had moved
to Palo Alto from New York City, where all the demographics are right on top of each other. And
so you can have one block of rich and one block of poor, and people really mix. And it felt really
awful and awkward to have one-on-one dividing this socioeconomic group from this socioeconomic
group. So I said to her, “Yes, I’d love to. I’d love to come and talk to them.” She told me they
were seniors. It was September of their senior year, and they were all going to college. So I
said, “Well, what do you want me to say?” And she said, “Just tell them about what college is like,
and what it’s like to go to graduate school, and what it’s like to start your company.” So I said,
“Easy, okay.” So I went and I started talking to them about college and just wondering if they were
excited and where they had visited and who they knew. And I could tell I was starting to get some
blank dates, and I thought, “I’m losing my audience.” So I said, “Okay, guys, help me out here. How many
of you have visited a college? Maybe a few. How many of you know somebody that’s in college? Maybe
one or two. There were 35 students in this class.” And I said, “Okay, how many of you have already
taken your SATs?” And it was no one. And I said, “Okay, how many of you are going to take your SATs?
It’s already September, so you must be studying.” No one. And then I said, “Do you guys know that you
have to take your SATs and you have to do these standardized tests in order to go to college?”
And they said, “Well, we heard about it.” And the teacher said, “You know, we were going to talk
about this.” I thought, “Well, this is a bizarre lack of information to give to college-bound
seniors.” So I said, “Guys, how many of you have visited with the college counselor to talk this
through?” No one. As a result of Prop 13, California started cutting all nonessential portions of their
education system, which included arts and drama and PE and college counselors in addition to science
labs and higher mathematics. And it is amazing on that Proposition 13 was like in the late 70s.
Yeah. Exactly. And we were living with that legacy today. So I told the students I would come back
every Friday afternoon, and I would be their college counselor. And so I did that for the next
eight weeks. And what I discovered was of all the students, the 35 students, only two students
had actually taken the courses that they needed to take in order to apply to a four-year college.
So 33 students had missed a year of English or math passed Algebra I, or no one had taken a
lab site. No one ever told them what classes they needed to take. They were all graduating,
so they all had sufficient credits, but they didn’t have the credits that lined up
to apply to a four-year college. So for them, we got them to apply to a two-year college,
but it was such colossal waste, and it was just such an awareness that I had immediately that
this is actually a solvable problem. This is lack of access to the kind of information and guidance
that can be provided for all of these students. So I met with subsequently juniors and sophomores
and freshmen, and then I talked to parents at back to school night, and I just did this
as a volunteer because I thought this is something I can do. I can address this problem. I know this
stuff. But then there were layers of issues that I started to become aware of with a friend of mine,
Carlos Watson. We started visiting in the community. Yeah, exactly. He now runs Aussie. Just in the
communities, the families and understanding what happens actually when you’re first in your family.
What happens when you’re first in your family to graduate high school? What does that mean for
the information that you get from your family? What happens when you’re first to want to go to
college to apply and to thrive and to complete college? What happens when you’re first in your
family if you’re a college grad? Sometimes they resent you when you’re first. Many things. But
also to have that aspiration. You’re a leader in your family and you’re a problem solver in your
family. That’s a wonderful thing, but it also means you get sucked back into all problems because
you’re a good problem solver. And sometimes if you’re a child of immigrants and you’re the translator
for the family, the family relies on you for that. So there are all sorts of really interesting
issues that were just in this one community. And that’s when I decided to start
College Track to do a more holistic support for students and families so that we could
seriously prepare students for college and make sure that they persisted and completed college
and work with their families to solve problems within the family so that the individual didn’t
have to be the problem solver. And so that’s how we started College Track and we started it with
25 high school freshmen at Kalman High School and I would go to the lunch times and I’d find the
ring leaders because I had a sense that everyone has to come with a friend because that would be
a reinforcing mechanism. And some people came with whole groups of friends and that was even better
because they would hold each other accountable. So we built out a cohort and so they were responsible
for and to each other as well as to the adult. So we started in East Palo Alto this year.
We have grown. We have 3,000 high school students. We have 1,000 college students and we have 550
college grads. Wow, that’s amazing. I’m listening to you and it’s so different than normally in
Silicon Valley. People go to a fancy dinner. Somebody gives a presentation. They put some
money on it. Here you are. You go and you go. I want to go teach this class and then from there
build it all the way out into College Track. It seems like your philosophy. I think that’s
probably how entrepreneurs work, right? You see a problem and you actually think this is something
that I can bring some energy and some problem solving and some smarts and maybe a little bit
of innovation to this problem, to this issue. Really, really amazing. So then take us from that to
Emerson Collective, which is like the world like now you’ve really expanded your horizons.
And we’ll maybe start with the name because the name is so unusual. Emerson, which I know from
reading about it is Ralph Waldo Emerson and then tell me about that and then also about
Collective because like there’s no other like VCs we work with called Collective.
In Brooklyn, there’s the cheese board collective. That’s funny. So I’ll tell you what we’re not.
We’re not the cheese board collective. We are not a group governance organization,
which actually makes it much better. We’re more of a collective of leaders and innovators
across different sectors. And we see the connectedness of every issue. So just in the simple
college track story, we talked about educational inequities and access and the need for enhanced
and robust curriculum, but also good immigration laws and fair immigration practices so that that
actually could be a foundation instead of because that’s essential to the education agenda.
Of course, of course. And so many of our first generation college bound students
are recent immigrants to America. And certainly in California, many of our recent immigrants
are undocumented. And so understanding what it means to be undocumented as a child growing
up in the United States, you cannot access any state or federal funding for your education.
And so you might be the valedictorian of your high school and you can’t get state or federal
funding. And in fact, there are only a handful of states that would allow you to pay in state
tuition. But for undocumented families, even in state tuition at $17,000 a year, when you can
get generally no scholarships, no loans to fund it, that’s out of reach too. So that’s another
issue that we learned about firsthand environmental toxicity in low income neighborhoods. So the
access to clean air, water and soil and access to food and access to financial services and
banking services, all of these things you learn about in one community. And they’re all connected
because these are all systems and experiences that touch the individual’s life. And so you pull one
thread, the whole fabric follows. We were pulling one thread and we made it a really tough thread
around this educational support in our own way. But we understood we can’t just solve
the education issue without looking at the holistic issues of what actually are the,
what are all the touch points to an individual’s life? And how do we make sure if we can help
remove obstacles in all of these different systems or even better redesign these systems
so that an individual can just have access to the opportunity that they’re qualified for,
that will be the whole work. So that’s why it’s a collective because we actually collectively wrap
around problems and understand that complex problems require complex problem solving and
complex solutions. Yeah, really complex. So it’s interesting, Arnie Duncan had a quote where he
said, “Well, you know, Lorraine said to me, you’re trying to solve these really intractable
problems, so why don’t you let me help?” And he said, “You know, I think she was attracted to the
degree of difficulty.” It was like the harder it was, like that’s what she wanted to do. Is that
true? Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s so exciting and invigorating to think about devoting my life
to solving the problems of our day. You know, these are intractable problems. They’re not
problems that no one has worked on before, quite the opposite. These are problems that people have
worked on. And now they pass the baton to us. We have the great privilege of trying to make a dent
in them and trying to maybe redesign the system a little more elegantly and make things a little
more fair and more just. And we’ll work on them for 20, 30 years. And then someone else is going
to come up and we get to pass the baton to them. So that’s how we think about it. And it’s joyful
work. If you can, at one point, be part of that inflection point in another person’s life. If
you can, for one person, know that for you, that person has opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t
have had, it’s the most intoxicating feeling. And you want to do it again and again and again.
So you do it, you try to change the world, but you do it for the individual.
So the intractable-ness of the world doesn’t bother you at all. Yes. That’s how I can think about
it. And that’s how I can actually, and I think for all of us, we understand where we’re trying to go
and then we backwards map it. So most everything we’re working on, we have a 10-year time horizon.
Some things we have a 10-year and then we’ll renew it for another 10 years. For Arnie, he’s hoping
to put a dent in gun violence and specifically in the number of homicides that are gun-related
deaths in Chicago in 14 specific neighborhoods. And he wants to see impact within the next few years.
Yeah. When you go after education, immigration, gun violence, environmental issues, you end up with a
pretty unusual kind of diverse team. So you’ve got Mark Echo, Arnie Duncan, Steve McDermott,
my old friend Steve McDermott. Did you put all those? I can’t even imagine all those three in a
meeting. That just seems so wild. How does that work? How do you? Every Monday, including today,
we have all staff meetings. And because we have five different offices around the country, so we
have on the screen, like Hollywood Squares, generally a three-by-three matrix with different
teams populating in the nine squares. And we have different teams report out. Sometimes we have
guests who come and speak who are either in the philanthropic portfolio or the for-profit portfolio
or who are policy advocates or policy writers or just brilliant people that happen to be passing
through one of our cities that we bring to the table to listen to and learn from. And then we have
follow-up. So it’s sort of like every single Monday, we set the stage and we know where we are,
we give a report back and look forward and then we keep going. And then you want everybody out
in the field? Then you want everybody out in the field. Yeah. If people sat in an office more than
five, six days in a row, that would be bad. And that’s because all the knowledge is out in the field?
Yeah, exactly. And so when we decided to bring a big idea forward in education, for example,
with the ExQ Institute, Ruslan Alley, who was running our education practice at the time,
came out of the Obama administration. She was the assistant secretary of education. She ran
the office of civil rights. I love that we have these extraordinary people who have a body of work
and a network and there’s something big that they want to accomplish that maybe they didn’t get to
do in government or in business or in the social sector. And so we say, okay, come, do you think
we can do this in 10 years? And what does it look like? What kind of team do you need? And so we
build out like that. So we’ve built our organization from these individuals who come in this extraordinary
way. And then the newer hires, the more junior people hear about the fact that they might get
to work with some of these amazing people. And so it’s become kind of this really nice
giant magnet for talent in that way. I was telling you about Ruslan and ExQ. So we both
had worked in the Ed sector for over a decade and we both had a sense of the brokenness of the
design of the system and the fact that students who come to school needing the most receive the least
in all educational resources. And you just have to wrap your head around that. Students who come in
who are already behind in hearing just the number of words, let alone the quality of words
at home actually are behind in kindergarten and they rarely catch up. And the students who are
slow to learn to read by the end of the third grade, every school in this country shifts from
learning to read to reading to learn. So then when you enter the fourth grade, if you’re not a really
good reader in the third grade, all of your learning comes from reading text. And so you’re
further and further behind. And whoever came up with the idea that humans learn best by sitting
still for six to eight hours. Especially little kids. Yeah, especially little kids. That’s not how
synapses are formed. We came with all of this frustration about how we’re just ruining the
humans and the massive potential that’s in every single person’s skull. You know, the brains that
we carry around can solve any problem, any person. The talent and the IQ that is randomly distributed
does not meet up with opportunity. Opportunity is siloed. So we decided, well, we want to flip the
system. We want to flip the system from measuring learning in the high school. So we’re both also
fixated on the high school as a fulcrum for what happens after high school and what happens before
high school. So K8 shifts when high school shifts and obviously access to higher ed and career
also is influenced by what happens in high school. So if you change high school, you can actually
change the whole system. But you get a high school degree by sitting through 120 hours of a list of
subjects, mathematics and English and some history and some science. And the reason for that is because
in 1906. 1906. I’m sorry. Right. Good thing there’s been no technological change since 1906.
1906. And if you walked into high school in 1906, you’d feel, if you time traveled to 2018, you’d
feel very much at home. It’s still the same. Still the same life. Awesome. In 1906, they decided that
what they wanted to do was systematize. Great for Rip Van Winkle. Yeah, that’s right. That would be a
good movie. What they wanted to do was bring the learnings of industrial revolution and productivity
into the school setting. It was actually a really good idea that we would standardize schools because
schools at that point had only been generally for young men and they wanted to have universal access
to high school. And they also wanted to standardize the lessons across the country. So this was smart
and this was innovative for its time in 1906. Unfortunately, that system that got set up
is still the system today. That’s still how you get your high school diploma. Not to mention
the fact that you actually don’t need a proxy for learning. You don’t need for time to be the
standard. You actually need content mastery to be the standard and time should be the variable.
And we can do that. We actually know how to measure what you know about anything at any time
in any classroom. We also know a lot more about neuroscience now and we know how the brain develops
when it’s actually engaged in a task and we also know that you don’t learn things in silos, isolated
silos. You don’t learn math and then leave math and then start to learning this and leave it. It’s
actually much more robust and sticky when things are integrated and connected. And so we decided
that we wanted to change high schools in America and we started it a few years ago and we started
it with a competition across America and we wanted to put students in the center. And so we
crisscross the United States. I think we’re on our fifth trip across the United States and we visit
communities and we hold student roundtables and we hold civic leader and business leader and parents
and teacher roundtables and we sit and we talk to people and we listen to them. So then by the time
we issued this challenge for communities across America to redesign high schools in their own
community that mapped on to the workforce demands in their communities, that repurposed assets in
their communities, we had already talked to thousands and thousands of people. And they were
able to pick this up and there were no who you always hear about all they do and there are so many
inhibitors in terms of changing how things are done and you know between the you know structure and
the unions and this and then that but people were able to pick it up and redesign these high schools.
We weren’t sure. We weren’t sure. We definitely were stepping into unknown territory. We weren’t
sure how many people would actually take this up. We had designed the we used a design thinking
set of modules. We had 13 modules that every team had to go through. We made these kits with posters
and workbooks and cards that you could use and you had to have on your team students, parents,
business leaders, designers of any sort and even in small communities. In the end,
it was a seven month process to go through this whole thing. So communities really had to dig in.
We had 700 full applications for brand new high schools in all 50 states over 10,000 people participated
for what we’re going to be 10 schools that we funded and built. Oh wow. Yeah. It was amazing.
And after the competition, so we awarded our 10 and then after our competition, we followed
about 140 that we’re continuing on and building their own even though they didn’t win. Oh wow.
And since then, we’ve awarded another nine the XQ Super School moniker because their models
are so inspiring and breakthrough. And so they’re part of this cohort of super schools and we bring
them together. And so now 17 of the 19 are open. The other two will open next August. And of course,
along the way, we’re learning all sorts of wonderful things and they’re teaching each other and they
have professional learning communities. And of course, they have to break from the Carnegie
unit, which is time as a proxy for learning. So they all have to have competency based learnings.
We have a standardized learner outcome. And so all of the students in all of the schools can tell
you the XQ learner outcomes are about being a synthesizer and a collaborator and a creative
problem solver. They happen to know that for them 65% of the jobs that they will hold haven’t been
created yet. And so they understand they have to be agile nimble thinkers. They have to be creative
problem solvers. They have to understand critical thinking skills. And these are schools that are
not skimming. These are schools that exist in communities and they’re open enrollment public
schools. Yeah, so with the kids who actually need to help. But they actually bring the answers.
They bring the answers and the teachers are heroically scrambling to catch up and design
new curriculum. And it’s really exciting journey to be on. Because you have Arne Duncan on the team.
How do you think about taking that those models and changing policy and, you know, kind of
We do think that. So in many of the sectors where we work, policy is the tip of the spear. So certainly
for immigration reform policies at the tip of the spear and there’s work that we can do, each of us
can do to be welcoming to immigrants. And there are individual policies that municipalities can
instill around drivers licenses and not using local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws.
On the other hand, with education, it’s very, very layered. And so we do have a policy team
that is mapping out specific state and federal policies that we advocate for. So part of the
beauty of being an LLC or a series of LLCs is that we can be policy writers, policy advocates,
right? We can do whatever you want. We can be investors and we do do all those things. We use
every possible tool that we missed out on some tax breaks. That’s right. That’s right. So if you
don’t care about tax preference, there’s a whole heck of a lot that you can do. A lot more flexibility.
You get ultimate flexibility. That’s really great. Yeah. When we were really digging in on the work
about six years ago, I was contemplating what structure we should have. And most people start a
foundation so that they migrate, pretext either any dollars or stock into that generally, whatever
asset they’re going to be using, and then use that foundation construct. They use kind of the
5% payout to do the work that they’re going to do. Well, first of all, I felt that if I really
care about impact, if I actually really care about solving problems and I don’t care about
increasing wealth, then I would be foolish to close off any avenues by which change happens.
And a lot of change happens in brilliant for-profit companies. So I wouldn’t want to close that off.
And a lot of change happens at the policy level. And so we wouldn’t want to close that off.
So then so I thought, well, why doesn’t everybody do this? I don’t understand money.
But if people have taken the giving pledge and they plan to give away all their money,
why does they even care about a tax break? I still actually don’t understand it because
I’m hoping we go through as much of the wealth as we possibly can. I mean, that’s the purpose of it.
And we’re living in times of urgency and extreme crisis. I don’t understand what the 95% of the
corpus is waiting around for because it’s not going to get worse than we’re in right now.
So I hope people put more work, more money to work.
Let’s talk a little bit about profit because you invest in tech companies.
And there are a lot of tech companies here who I’m sure, and a lot of them ask me,
how do I get money from Amherst and Collective? What are you looking for on the for-profit side?
Almost all of our investments are mission aligned. We have an environmental practice.
So within the environmental practice, there’s a robust portfolio. We have an ed tech portfolio
that’s obviously aligned with our education practice. We have cancer companies that we’ve
invested in because we invest in oncology research and some policy there as well.
We started in immigration incubator. There isn’t a lot of technology that’s migrated into the
immigration sector. So we’d love to encourage that, but we would love to invest in people who
are bringing differentiated thinking or new thinking to old problems in this way.
And so there’s a lot of wonderful opportunity for entrepreneurs to marry their passion and
their purpose with their company. Those are the entrepreneurs that we get super excited by.
So one last question, and you’ve kind of answered this, but there’s another answer that I’m looking
for. So how do you know when you’re succeeding? On the micro level, I definitely get it and you’re
changing lives. But on these big agendas that you have, how do you know when you’re kind of on the
track and getting there? Yeah, we collect data on everything that we do so we can understand
if we’re trending in the right direction. In education around XQ, I’ll just use that as an
example because I’ve been talking about that. In addition to the schools, we now have the
district of Tulsa and the state of Rhode Island, which want to have kind of a complete redesign
of all of their high schools. So in Rhode Island, they have 45 high schools. So you can do experiments
in Rhode Island or at least use it as a laboratory for other states. So all 45 of their high schools,
they want to become XQ super schools. So we’re working with them on a statewide competition
in that way. So that’s moving in the right direction. In Chicago, there’s very good data on
both fatal and non-fatal gun violence. And so we have really good metrics there. But we also see
success in smaller ways, in anecdotal ways, which I think are very powerful as well,
where people come back to us and they tell us no one has ever talked to us before. No one’s
ever taken a shot on me. No one’s actually ever listened to me and then given me the chance
to try a big hairy idea. And so that to me is also success. And that’s moving things forward.
I think there are also other more subtle ways. We didn’t even talk about, you know, how do you make
sure that you’re part of the cultural narrative and how do you make sure that some of our most
imperiled and important institutions, like the media, like high quality journalism, are supported
and sustained. But seeing how many people are going into those disciplines is actually another
measurement of success. Seeing where IQ is migrating is really important measure of success.
We see that in the ed sector. We’re seeing that in other sectors as well.
That’s great. Well, thank you so well. We all appreciate you being you and fixing the world.
So everybody, please join me in thanking Maureen. Thank you so much.
Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective, a firm she founded in 2004 to drive
social impact through investments across a broad range of areas such as education, immigration,
and the environment. Lorraine Powell Jobs is interviewed by A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz,
and their discussion covers everything from Lorraine’s childhood in mountainous rural New
Jersey and how it shaped her to what the Emerson Collective is driven by and does and why it’s a
collective for that matter. For more about Lorraine Powell Jobs’ work, see www.emersoncollective.com.
This conversation originally took place at our most recent summit event in November 2018.
Welcome, everybody. I’m Ben. This is Lorraine. Coming in, I was just talking to Lorraine.
I was saying it’s really hard to introduce her because she’s not like our other co-investors
like at all in a good way, but she’s got a much more complex thing that she does and background.
So I could read the read. I could say, well, she’s a media mogul. She’s a tech investor.
She’s an education reformer and so forth. But you won’t even know really who she is if I just did
it like that. And none of them would be really honest. I don’t think anybody would call me a
media mogul except you. Or what you are a media mogul, technically. I’m so excited to be here,
to be having this conversation because there is nobody else like this. And so you’re in for a treat.
Why don’t we start at the beginning back in West Milford, New Jersey, where you grew up.
You didn’t have the whole Silver Spoon. No, we were solidly middle-class family.
Yeah. And what was that town like? West Milford, New Jersey is about 20 miles west of the George
Washington Bridge and then another 10 miles north. If people don’t know New Jersey, there is a
mountainous part of New Jersey. And in fact, one can go skiing and one can ice skate. And so we
did all of those things. We were just in the beginning of the mountainous parts. And so now
as an adult looking back, it’s lovely. It’s wooded. It’s wild. I grew up with three brothers who were
very wild. So we had sort of this connection to nature in the natural world that we would all
hope for our children. However, growing up there was also gritty. And it had a lot of
Jersey in it. Yeah, Jersey. Like, what is Jersey? It really did. It was kind of hard to scrap all.
People had big hearts, but also big edges. And so you learn really quickly, as a child,
where the boundaries are and which boundaries one shouldn’t cross. We were all of us
put to work really early, which was great. So we developed an extraordinary work ethic.
As kids, you know, they were in the end, my mom remarried, and then we had a mix of blended
family. My dad died when I was three in a playing crash. And so we ended up with six kids,
like the Brady Bunch, three girls and three boys. But in order to have controlled chaos,
we all had chores. And we had very set times for eating and sleeping. And I shared a room my whole
life. And I shared a bathroom. There were six of us that shared one bathroom. And if you can imagine
what it was like getting to school on time, it was a mess. That was sort of my childhood. I was
always trying to eke out a little bit of privacy. And so now I can empathize with those in social
media who would like to regain their privacy. Get out of my bathroom, Facebook. It’s a joke.
It’s a joke, people. Anyway, I think a lot of what shaped me from that experience in West
Melbourne, New Jersey, and then, you know, our big trip each year was going down the shore. We’d
rent a little house and drive down there and get terribly sunburned. We were probably five blocks
back from the ocean, but it was our favorite time. And then we’d drive back up in our station wagon
back up to Northern New Jersey. That sort of circumscribed our life. Chores. And then one
vacation and get sunburned. But we were steeped in core values of real dedication and a sense that
there was always a way out. And that was through education. And that was communicated early on to
me. And luckily, I loved books and I love school. And I think I sought out teachers and tried to
ingratiate myself and just, you know, find a little place where I could excel and where I could feel
that there was a reward for the work that also gave me joy, which was, you know, doing school.
Right. It wasn’t just a chore. It was work with the benefit. That’s right. That’s a great inspiration.
And you went to University of Penn which is like a super prestigious school.
I did. I did. Yeah. I was the first person in my high school to go to an Ivy League school.
West Milford Township is massive and stretched all the way up to New York State. Probably 20%
of our graduating class went on to any further schooling. Certainly not all four years. A lot
of them went on to trade school. Yeah. I was reading something that you said that I thought was
very interesting. So when you were a kid, I guess you donated like $20 to the Southern Poverty
Leadership Law Center. Yeah. And they would send you letters. And the thing that you were very focused
on was who got the opportunity and who didn’t. Yes. Because I was focused on it because they
were focused on it. Yeah. SPLC had a huge impact in my young life because I read about them in,
I think, the reader’s digest. I think that’s where I read about them. There was a profile on
Morris D’s. So I saved up some newspaper money and I sent them for me, which was a lot of money
at the time, $20. I think I was either in late middle school or high school. Yeah. I don’t know
if you remember. I don’t know if you remember when you’re a kid getting mail with such an exciting
thing. That’s the only place that ever sent me any mail, that in one of my grandmas. So they would
send me mail reliably, probably every quarter. Of course, it was a beautiful form letter, but it
always told a story of justice meeting injustice and opened my eyes to things that were going on
in the world in the early 70s that I otherwise wasn’t privy to. So I really hung on there everywhere.
I remember saving all the letters from Morris D’s in actually one of my most wonderful moments,
and it only just happened a couple of years ago at Emerson Collective. We do all of our
philanthropic giving anonymously, but we had been funding SPLC and we decided that we wanted to do
some teaching tolerance curriculum in partnership with them. And so one of our team members was
actually talking to Morris D’s who still works there. And so I said to her, “Can I get on the phone
with Morris D’s?” I got to tell him that he was the one. He planted that seed in me that individual
people could pay attention and engage and maybe do something about injustices that seem intractable
or far away or impenetrable. Oh, that’s a great story. And coming from your Big Bruce Springsteen
fan, and it’s really interesting that in his work, even though he’s Bruce Springsteen,
it’s still all about New Jersey. And do you feel that way about your work, where that
a lot of the inspiration is still from that time? A lot of inspiration. Yes, although I don’t find
that the work is necessary all about New Jersey, but a lot of how I see the world and how I think
about basic fairness comes from New Jersey. I think people actually want to know what’s going on.
And they have clearly held opinions. This is what I recall and work hard, but also are open
to hearing from other people because New Jersey was certainly a melting pot in the first wave
of immigrants from Europe. And so they had to accommodate. It’s not a glamorous place to be
from. And so people were distracted by glamour or coolness in any way. Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen
still echo through my head. It’s one of the soundtracks of my life, I think. So he pops up
when I do not expect him to pop up when I’m observing a situation. But to your point,
a lot of the work that I do references something that I learned a little over 20 years ago from
College Track. And I think it’s true to say that all of the work that we do at Emerson Collective
now is informed and certainly influenced and shaped by what was learned at College Track.
And so maybe College Track is my New Jersey. Yeah, interesting. And so tell us about
College Track and how what you learned, what you tried to do, and then what you learned,
and then how you moved it to be the entire Emerson Collective. Sure. It’s sort of a beautifully
long and winding story because it all took place probably starting about 22 years ago.
After graduate school, I was running a natural foods company. And per chance, I met the California
Teacher of the Year. She was teaching at a local high school. And I had not ever visited a high
school in California because I had moved just for graduate school. She asked me if I could come and
talk to her students, that all of her students in this one class were from East Palo Alto. And this
was at Carlemont High School, which is where all of the East Palo Alto students stood out. And that’s
when East Palo Alto was super dangerous, right? That’s right around the time of the murder capital.
Yeah, right around that time. I jumped at the opportunity because when I was at Stanford,
I found it really odd to have the juxtaposition of Palo Alto and East Palo Alto because I had moved
to Palo Alto from New York City, where all the demographics are right on top of each other. And
so you can have one block of rich and one block of poor, and people really mix. And it felt really
awful and awkward to have one-on-one dividing this socioeconomic group from this socioeconomic
group. So I said to her, “Yes, I’d love to. I’d love to come and talk to them.” She told me they
were seniors. It was September of their senior year, and they were all going to college. So I
said, “Well, what do you want me to say?” And she said, “Just tell them about what college is like,
and what it’s like to go to graduate school, and what it’s like to start your company.” So I said,
“Easy, okay.” So I went and I started talking to them about college and just wondering if they were
excited and where they had visited and who they knew. And I could tell I was starting to get some
blank dates, and I thought, “I’m losing my audience.” So I said, “Okay, guys, help me out here. How many
of you have visited a college? Maybe a few. How many of you know somebody that’s in college? Maybe
one or two. There were 35 students in this class.” And I said, “Okay, how many of you have already
taken your SATs?” And it was no one. And I said, “Okay, how many of you are going to take your SATs?
It’s already September, so you must be studying.” No one. And then I said, “Do you guys know that you
have to take your SATs and you have to do these standardized tests in order to go to college?”
And they said, “Well, we heard about it.” And the teacher said, “You know, we were going to talk
about this.” I thought, “Well, this is a bizarre lack of information to give to college-bound
seniors.” So I said, “Guys, how many of you have visited with the college counselor to talk this
through?” No one. As a result of Prop 13, California started cutting all nonessential portions of their
education system, which included arts and drama and PE and college counselors in addition to science
labs and higher mathematics. And it is amazing on that Proposition 13 was like in the late 70s.
Yeah. Exactly. And we were living with that legacy today. So I told the students I would come back
every Friday afternoon, and I would be their college counselor. And so I did that for the next
eight weeks. And what I discovered was of all the students, the 35 students, only two students
had actually taken the courses that they needed to take in order to apply to a four-year college.
So 33 students had missed a year of English or math passed Algebra I, or no one had taken a
lab site. No one ever told them what classes they needed to take. They were all graduating,
so they all had sufficient credits, but they didn’t have the credits that lined up
to apply to a four-year college. So for them, we got them to apply to a two-year college,
but it was such colossal waste, and it was just such an awareness that I had immediately that
this is actually a solvable problem. This is lack of access to the kind of information and guidance
that can be provided for all of these students. So I met with subsequently juniors and sophomores
and freshmen, and then I talked to parents at back to school night, and I just did this
as a volunteer because I thought this is something I can do. I can address this problem. I know this
stuff. But then there were layers of issues that I started to become aware of with a friend of mine,
Carlos Watson. We started visiting in the community. Yeah, exactly. He now runs Aussie. Just in the
communities, the families and understanding what happens actually when you’re first in your family.
What happens when you’re first in your family to graduate high school? What does that mean for
the information that you get from your family? What happens when you’re first to want to go to
college to apply and to thrive and to complete college? What happens when you’re first in your
family if you’re a college grad? Sometimes they resent you when you’re first. Many things. But
also to have that aspiration. You’re a leader in your family and you’re a problem solver in your
family. That’s a wonderful thing, but it also means you get sucked back into all problems because
you’re a good problem solver. And sometimes if you’re a child of immigrants and you’re the translator
for the family, the family relies on you for that. So there are all sorts of really interesting
issues that were just in this one community. And that’s when I decided to start
College Track to do a more holistic support for students and families so that we could
seriously prepare students for college and make sure that they persisted and completed college
and work with their families to solve problems within the family so that the individual didn’t
have to be the problem solver. And so that’s how we started College Track and we started it with
25 high school freshmen at Kalman High School and I would go to the lunch times and I’d find the
ring leaders because I had a sense that everyone has to come with a friend because that would be
a reinforcing mechanism. And some people came with whole groups of friends and that was even better
because they would hold each other accountable. So we built out a cohort and so they were responsible
for and to each other as well as to the adult. So we started in East Palo Alto this year.
We have grown. We have 3,000 high school students. We have 1,000 college students and we have 550
college grads. Wow, that’s amazing. I’m listening to you and it’s so different than normally in
Silicon Valley. People go to a fancy dinner. Somebody gives a presentation. They put some
money on it. Here you are. You go and you go. I want to go teach this class and then from there
build it all the way out into College Track. It seems like your philosophy. I think that’s
probably how entrepreneurs work, right? You see a problem and you actually think this is something
that I can bring some energy and some problem solving and some smarts and maybe a little bit
of innovation to this problem, to this issue. Really, really amazing. So then take us from that to
Emerson Collective, which is like the world like now you’ve really expanded your horizons.
And we’ll maybe start with the name because the name is so unusual. Emerson, which I know from
reading about it is Ralph Waldo Emerson and then tell me about that and then also about
Collective because like there’s no other like VCs we work with called Collective.
In Brooklyn, there’s the cheese board collective. That’s funny. So I’ll tell you what we’re not.
We’re not the cheese board collective. We are not a group governance organization,
which actually makes it much better. We’re more of a collective of leaders and innovators
across different sectors. And we see the connectedness of every issue. So just in the simple
college track story, we talked about educational inequities and access and the need for enhanced
and robust curriculum, but also good immigration laws and fair immigration practices so that that
actually could be a foundation instead of because that’s essential to the education agenda.
Of course, of course. And so many of our first generation college bound students
are recent immigrants to America. And certainly in California, many of our recent immigrants
are undocumented. And so understanding what it means to be undocumented as a child growing
up in the United States, you cannot access any state or federal funding for your education.
And so you might be the valedictorian of your high school and you can’t get state or federal
funding. And in fact, there are only a handful of states that would allow you to pay in state
tuition. But for undocumented families, even in state tuition at $17,000 a year, when you can
get generally no scholarships, no loans to fund it, that’s out of reach too. So that’s another
issue that we learned about firsthand environmental toxicity in low income neighborhoods. So the
access to clean air, water and soil and access to food and access to financial services and
banking services, all of these things you learn about in one community. And they’re all connected
because these are all systems and experiences that touch the individual’s life. And so you pull one
thread, the whole fabric follows. We were pulling one thread and we made it a really tough thread
around this educational support in our own way. But we understood we can’t just solve
the education issue without looking at the holistic issues of what actually are the,
what are all the touch points to an individual’s life? And how do we make sure if we can help
remove obstacles in all of these different systems or even better redesign these systems
so that an individual can just have access to the opportunity that they’re qualified for,
that will be the whole work. So that’s why it’s a collective because we actually collectively wrap
around problems and understand that complex problems require complex problem solving and
complex solutions. Yeah, really complex. So it’s interesting, Arnie Duncan had a quote where he
said, “Well, you know, Lorraine said to me, you’re trying to solve these really intractable
problems, so why don’t you let me help?” And he said, “You know, I think she was attracted to the
degree of difficulty.” It was like the harder it was, like that’s what she wanted to do. Is that
true? Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s so exciting and invigorating to think about devoting my life
to solving the problems of our day. You know, these are intractable problems. They’re not
problems that no one has worked on before, quite the opposite. These are problems that people have
worked on. And now they pass the baton to us. We have the great privilege of trying to make a dent
in them and trying to maybe redesign the system a little more elegantly and make things a little
more fair and more just. And we’ll work on them for 20, 30 years. And then someone else is going
to come up and we get to pass the baton to them. So that’s how we think about it. And it’s joyful
work. If you can, at one point, be part of that inflection point in another person’s life. If
you can, for one person, know that for you, that person has opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t
have had, it’s the most intoxicating feeling. And you want to do it again and again and again.
So you do it, you try to change the world, but you do it for the individual.
So the intractable-ness of the world doesn’t bother you at all. Yes. That’s how I can think about
it. And that’s how I can actually, and I think for all of us, we understand where we’re trying to go
and then we backwards map it. So most everything we’re working on, we have a 10-year time horizon.
Some things we have a 10-year and then we’ll renew it for another 10 years. For Arnie, he’s hoping
to put a dent in gun violence and specifically in the number of homicides that are gun-related
deaths in Chicago in 14 specific neighborhoods. And he wants to see impact within the next few years.
Yeah. When you go after education, immigration, gun violence, environmental issues, you end up with a
pretty unusual kind of diverse team. So you’ve got Mark Echo, Arnie Duncan, Steve McDermott,
my old friend Steve McDermott. Did you put all those? I can’t even imagine all those three in a
meeting. That just seems so wild. How does that work? How do you? Every Monday, including today,
we have all staff meetings. And because we have five different offices around the country, so we
have on the screen, like Hollywood Squares, generally a three-by-three matrix with different
teams populating in the nine squares. And we have different teams report out. Sometimes we have
guests who come and speak who are either in the philanthropic portfolio or the for-profit portfolio
or who are policy advocates or policy writers or just brilliant people that happen to be passing
through one of our cities that we bring to the table to listen to and learn from. And then we have
follow-up. So it’s sort of like every single Monday, we set the stage and we know where we are,
we give a report back and look forward and then we keep going. And then you want everybody out
in the field? Then you want everybody out in the field. Yeah. If people sat in an office more than
five, six days in a row, that would be bad. And that’s because all the knowledge is out in the field?
Yeah, exactly. And so when we decided to bring a big idea forward in education, for example,
with the ExQ Institute, Ruslan Alley, who was running our education practice at the time,
came out of the Obama administration. She was the assistant secretary of education. She ran
the office of civil rights. I love that we have these extraordinary people who have a body of work
and a network and there’s something big that they want to accomplish that maybe they didn’t get to
do in government or in business or in the social sector. And so we say, okay, come, do you think
we can do this in 10 years? And what does it look like? What kind of team do you need? And so we
build out like that. So we’ve built our organization from these individuals who come in this extraordinary
way. And then the newer hires, the more junior people hear about the fact that they might get
to work with some of these amazing people. And so it’s become kind of this really nice
giant magnet for talent in that way. I was telling you about Ruslan and ExQ. So we both
had worked in the Ed sector for over a decade and we both had a sense of the brokenness of the
design of the system and the fact that students who come to school needing the most receive the least
in all educational resources. And you just have to wrap your head around that. Students who come in
who are already behind in hearing just the number of words, let alone the quality of words
at home actually are behind in kindergarten and they rarely catch up. And the students who are
slow to learn to read by the end of the third grade, every school in this country shifts from
learning to read to reading to learn. So then when you enter the fourth grade, if you’re not a really
good reader in the third grade, all of your learning comes from reading text. And so you’re
further and further behind. And whoever came up with the idea that humans learn best by sitting
still for six to eight hours. Especially little kids. Yeah, especially little kids. That’s not how
synapses are formed. We came with all of this frustration about how we’re just ruining the
humans and the massive potential that’s in every single person’s skull. You know, the brains that
we carry around can solve any problem, any person. The talent and the IQ that is randomly distributed
does not meet up with opportunity. Opportunity is siloed. So we decided, well, we want to flip the
system. We want to flip the system from measuring learning in the high school. So we’re both also
fixated on the high school as a fulcrum for what happens after high school and what happens before
high school. So K8 shifts when high school shifts and obviously access to higher ed and career
also is influenced by what happens in high school. So if you change high school, you can actually
change the whole system. But you get a high school degree by sitting through 120 hours of a list of
subjects, mathematics and English and some history and some science. And the reason for that is because
in 1906. 1906. I’m sorry. Right. Good thing there’s been no technological change since 1906.
1906. And if you walked into high school in 1906, you’d feel, if you time traveled to 2018, you’d
feel very much at home. It’s still the same. Still the same life. Awesome. In 1906, they decided that
what they wanted to do was systematize. Great for Rip Van Winkle. Yeah, that’s right. That would be a
good movie. What they wanted to do was bring the learnings of industrial revolution and productivity
into the school setting. It was actually a really good idea that we would standardize schools because
schools at that point had only been generally for young men and they wanted to have universal access
to high school. And they also wanted to standardize the lessons across the country. So this was smart
and this was innovative for its time in 1906. Unfortunately, that system that got set up
is still the system today. That’s still how you get your high school diploma. Not to mention
the fact that you actually don’t need a proxy for learning. You don’t need for time to be the
standard. You actually need content mastery to be the standard and time should be the variable.
And we can do that. We actually know how to measure what you know about anything at any time
in any classroom. We also know a lot more about neuroscience now and we know how the brain develops
when it’s actually engaged in a task and we also know that you don’t learn things in silos, isolated
silos. You don’t learn math and then leave math and then start to learning this and leave it. It’s
actually much more robust and sticky when things are integrated and connected. And so we decided
that we wanted to change high schools in America and we started it a few years ago and we started
it with a competition across America and we wanted to put students in the center. And so we
crisscross the United States. I think we’re on our fifth trip across the United States and we visit
communities and we hold student roundtables and we hold civic leader and business leader and parents
and teacher roundtables and we sit and we talk to people and we listen to them. So then by the time
we issued this challenge for communities across America to redesign high schools in their own
community that mapped on to the workforce demands in their communities, that repurposed assets in
their communities, we had already talked to thousands and thousands of people. And they were
able to pick this up and there were no who you always hear about all they do and there are so many
inhibitors in terms of changing how things are done and you know between the you know structure and
the unions and this and then that but people were able to pick it up and redesign these high schools.
We weren’t sure. We weren’t sure. We definitely were stepping into unknown territory. We weren’t
sure how many people would actually take this up. We had designed the we used a design thinking
set of modules. We had 13 modules that every team had to go through. We made these kits with posters
and workbooks and cards that you could use and you had to have on your team students, parents,
business leaders, designers of any sort and even in small communities. In the end,
it was a seven month process to go through this whole thing. So communities really had to dig in.
We had 700 full applications for brand new high schools in all 50 states over 10,000 people participated
for what we’re going to be 10 schools that we funded and built. Oh wow. Yeah. It was amazing.
And after the competition, so we awarded our 10 and then after our competition, we followed
about 140 that we’re continuing on and building their own even though they didn’t win. Oh wow.
And since then, we’ve awarded another nine the XQ Super School moniker because their models
are so inspiring and breakthrough. And so they’re part of this cohort of super schools and we bring
them together. And so now 17 of the 19 are open. The other two will open next August. And of course,
along the way, we’re learning all sorts of wonderful things and they’re teaching each other and they
have professional learning communities. And of course, they have to break from the Carnegie
unit, which is time as a proxy for learning. So they all have to have competency based learnings.
We have a standardized learner outcome. And so all of the students in all of the schools can tell
you the XQ learner outcomes are about being a synthesizer and a collaborator and a creative
problem solver. They happen to know that for them 65% of the jobs that they will hold haven’t been
created yet. And so they understand they have to be agile nimble thinkers. They have to be creative
problem solvers. They have to understand critical thinking skills. And these are schools that are
not skimming. These are schools that exist in communities and they’re open enrollment public
schools. Yeah, so with the kids who actually need to help. But they actually bring the answers.
They bring the answers and the teachers are heroically scrambling to catch up and design
new curriculum. And it’s really exciting journey to be on. Because you have Arne Duncan on the team.
How do you think about taking that those models and changing policy and, you know, kind of
We do think that. So in many of the sectors where we work, policy is the tip of the spear. So certainly
for immigration reform policies at the tip of the spear and there’s work that we can do, each of us
can do to be welcoming to immigrants. And there are individual policies that municipalities can
instill around drivers licenses and not using local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws.
On the other hand, with education, it’s very, very layered. And so we do have a policy team
that is mapping out specific state and federal policies that we advocate for. So part of the
beauty of being an LLC or a series of LLCs is that we can be policy writers, policy advocates,
right? We can do whatever you want. We can be investors and we do do all those things. We use
every possible tool that we missed out on some tax breaks. That’s right. That’s right. So if you
don’t care about tax preference, there’s a whole heck of a lot that you can do. A lot more flexibility.
You get ultimate flexibility. That’s really great. Yeah. When we were really digging in on the work
about six years ago, I was contemplating what structure we should have. And most people start a
foundation so that they migrate, pretext either any dollars or stock into that generally, whatever
asset they’re going to be using, and then use that foundation construct. They use kind of the
5% payout to do the work that they’re going to do. Well, first of all, I felt that if I really
care about impact, if I actually really care about solving problems and I don’t care about
increasing wealth, then I would be foolish to close off any avenues by which change happens.
And a lot of change happens in brilliant for-profit companies. So I wouldn’t want to close that off.
And a lot of change happens at the policy level. And so we wouldn’t want to close that off.
So then so I thought, well, why doesn’t everybody do this? I don’t understand money.
But if people have taken the giving pledge and they plan to give away all their money,
why does they even care about a tax break? I still actually don’t understand it because
I’m hoping we go through as much of the wealth as we possibly can. I mean, that’s the purpose of it.
And we’re living in times of urgency and extreme crisis. I don’t understand what the 95% of the
corpus is waiting around for because it’s not going to get worse than we’re in right now.
So I hope people put more work, more money to work.
Let’s talk a little bit about profit because you invest in tech companies.
And there are a lot of tech companies here who I’m sure, and a lot of them ask me,
how do I get money from Amherst and Collective? What are you looking for on the for-profit side?
Almost all of our investments are mission aligned. We have an environmental practice.
So within the environmental practice, there’s a robust portfolio. We have an ed tech portfolio
that’s obviously aligned with our education practice. We have cancer companies that we’ve
invested in because we invest in oncology research and some policy there as well.
We started in immigration incubator. There isn’t a lot of technology that’s migrated into the
immigration sector. So we’d love to encourage that, but we would love to invest in people who
are bringing differentiated thinking or new thinking to old problems in this way.
And so there’s a lot of wonderful opportunity for entrepreneurs to marry their passion and
their purpose with their company. Those are the entrepreneurs that we get super excited by.
So one last question, and you’ve kind of answered this, but there’s another answer that I’m looking
for. So how do you know when you’re succeeding? On the micro level, I definitely get it and you’re
changing lives. But on these big agendas that you have, how do you know when you’re kind of on the
track and getting there? Yeah, we collect data on everything that we do so we can understand
if we’re trending in the right direction. In education around XQ, I’ll just use that as an
example because I’ve been talking about that. In addition to the schools, we now have the
district of Tulsa and the state of Rhode Island, which want to have kind of a complete redesign
of all of their high schools. So in Rhode Island, they have 45 high schools. So you can do experiments
in Rhode Island or at least use it as a laboratory for other states. So all 45 of their high schools,
they want to become XQ super schools. So we’re working with them on a statewide competition
in that way. So that’s moving in the right direction. In Chicago, there’s very good data on
both fatal and non-fatal gun violence. And so we have really good metrics there. But we also see
success in smaller ways, in anecdotal ways, which I think are very powerful as well,
where people come back to us and they tell us no one has ever talked to us before. No one’s
ever taken a shot on me. No one’s actually ever listened to me and then given me the chance
to try a big hairy idea. And so that to me is also success. And that’s moving things forward.
I think there are also other more subtle ways. We didn’t even talk about, you know, how do you make
sure that you’re part of the cultural narrative and how do you make sure that some of our most
imperiled and important institutions, like the media, like high quality journalism, are supported
and sustained. But seeing how many people are going into those disciplines is actually another
measurement of success. Seeing where IQ is migrating is really important measure of success.
We see that in the ed sector. We’re seeing that in other sectors as well.
That’s great. Well, thank you so well. We all appreciate you being you and fixing the world.
So everybody, please join me in thanking Maureen. Thank you so much.
with Laurene Powell Jobs (@LaurenePowell) and Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz)
Laurene Powell Jobs is, among many other things, founder and President of the Emerson Collective — the social impact firm she founded to drive change and reform through philanthropy, investing, and policy solutions. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Ben Horowitz interviews Powell Jobs on everything from what made her who she was, growing up in the working class rural hills of New Jersey, to how the Emerson Collective does what it does (and why it’s a collective, for that matter). What motivates the investments the Emerson Collective makes—and what do they all share in common, across such a broad range of areas, from education to immigration to media?
This conversation originally took place at our annual innovation a16z Summit in November 2018 — which features a16z speakers and invited experts from various organizations discussing innovation at companies small and large.
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