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Here’s your program.
Andrew Warner: Hey everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. By the time you finish watching this program over 150 kids will die because of exposure to dirty water. I have with me an entrepreneurial founder who is doing something about it. Scott Harrison is the founder of charity:water. He was a club promoter in New York City until he found himself wanting more out of life. He volunteered aboard a floating hospital with a group called Mercy Ships. Later he spent time in Africa where he was able to come face to face with the world’s 1.2 billion people who are living in poverty and he committed to doing something about it. My goal for this interview is to find out how he did it and empower you, and me, and everyone watching here to do more. Scott, welcome.
Scott Harrison: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: I have to tell you, I’ve been watching the videos. It’s so powerful what you’ve shown in the videos and the pictures. You really know how to communicate a message.
Scott: Thanks, man. We have a great team that does that.
Andrew: Let’s talk about what you’ve done so far. What are some of the accomplishments?
Scott: You know it’s interesting. It’s actually a decent time to sort of take stock of where we are. We’re coming up on our fourth year anniversary in September. In the last four years we’ve now raised offer $21 million from 100,000. We’ve experienced the generosity of 100,000 donors around the world. We have used that to raise a lot of awareness about the issue. Most importantly, we’ve brought clean drinking water to 1.1 million people in 16 countries around the world. Great start. We’ve solved a thousandth of our problem. We currently have donating people without access to clean water. We’re at the very, very beginning of this journey.
Andrew: You know, it always sounds so inspiring what you’ve accomplished, until you say something like that. I’ve heard you say that in the videos, too. A thousandth of it. Do you think we can actually get to 100% in our lifetimes?
Scott: I would absolutely love that. It’s complex but simple at the same time. We need money and we need capacity. The money bit is what I think we’re focused on right now. We’re really trying to empower individuals to go out there, make the story their own, and raise money for the water crisis. As far as the capacity, as we grow, our ten-year plan is to raise $2 billion for clean water. About 63% growth a year. A pretty scary ramp. With that, we can help 100 million people. We’re hoping to solve 10% of the problem by 2020, just as Charity Water. My last meeting was over at UNICEF, a meeting with their head of water and sanitation, and there are other organizations doing great work at the same time. I think we have to believe it’s possible. If we can help 100 million, if UNICEF can help a couple million, I think it’s definitely moving in the right direction.
Andrew: For people who don’t know what charity:water is, can you introduce them to the idea and to the organization behind it?
Scott: Sure. We’re focused on bringing clean, safe drinking water; basic sanitation; toilets; and hygiene to the world’s billion people currently without it. Essentially the sanitation number is actually 2 billion people without a toilet. However, we’re focusing on water and all the things that come with that. We work in partnership with local and national organizations. We’ve had 22 local partners in 16 countries digging wells, drilling deep boreholes, rainwater-harvesting systems. In India and Bangladesh, we have arsenic issues, biosand filters and arsenic solutions. Whatever is the appropriate technology to bring clean drinking water to the community. Mainly rural communities, but also some urban settings as well. We have a big project in the Kibera slum, which we are proud of. Pretty simple mission — bring clean water to everybody.
Andrew: Somebody here in the audience is saying, “They’re leaving money on the table by using PayPal for monthly fees.” But that’s not true, right? Can you explain that?
Scott: Well, I will actually. That’s a great question. We have an extremely unusual model. When I started this, one of the main reasons that people said that they weren’t giving to charity or certainly giving at their capacity is because they didn’t know how much of their money would go to people in need. We came up with, against all advice, basically, we came up with a model where we said we would always give away 100% of public donations to projects. We would open up a separate bank account, and we would separately fundraise for all staff, all operations, salaries, office costs, even our flights to manage the projects. Because we were so concerned with the integrity of the 100%, we said, “We’ll actually also pay back all credit card fees.” Now, you guys have heard about this, American Express takes 4%. If you were to give us a $10,000 donation, AMEX only gives us $9600. What we committed to do was raise the $400 and send all $10,000 to build water projects. Online we are using PayPal as a backend because we have worked out a deal with them where they are only charging us 1.7%. All of the money that we’ve been raising, we have to go raise money against those transaction fess. I think we recently had a fundraising campaign online and raised $200,000. Two percent of those fees add up. That’s basically why. They wouldn’t give us the same . . . I don’t think we could get the same rate for just taking PayPal straight and using a credit card system. It’s not the first time we’ve heard that question, and we are looking into trying to fix it.
Andrew: Scott, when I hear what you’ve done, it just seems so overwhelming that I imagine, “How do you even get here?” Can we go through your story and find out how you got here, starting with maybe, what was it like to be a club promoter in New York? Then I will get into how you built this organization.
Scott: I guess I would start a little before that. I grew up in a bizarre family situation. When I was four, we moved into a new house. The problem with the new house was that the gas company had installed a furnace that leaked carbon monoxide throughout the house. It was improperly made and there were cracks in it. I was an only child. My dad was working long hors at a new job. I was outside, at school, and playing with my friends. My mother was, basically, fixing up the house. Well, the carbon monoxide almost killed her as it was rushing through the house. She had a prolonged exposure to it. It didn’t kill her, but what it did do was irreparably destroy her immune system and her ability to fight off anything chemical. I grew up with my mother as an invalid. My parents were pretty awesome. They decided not to sue the gas company. They were people of deep Christian faith, non-denominational. I was a perfect church kid until about age 18.
At 18, I rebelled. Pretty cliché, but I grew my hair long, joined a band, moved to New York City, and I wanted to be rich and famous and do all of the things that I was not allowed to do. I spent 10 years doing that. I became pretty successful in nightlife. My partner and I were being sponsored to drink alcohol publicly. Brands would pay us thousands of dollars just to be seen out in public drinking their brand of vodka or beer. We were good at it. It was a pretty soulless endeavor though. I was compensated based on how wasted people got. While it might be a lot of fun to bring a thousand people into a club and charge them $16 a cocktail at the end of the day, I was selling decadence and escapism.
That hit me when I was 28. I was on a beach in South America on a three-week vacation over New Years. I’d gotten my life to the point where I had most of the things I wanted. I was driving a nice car. I had a Rolex, a grand piano, an apartment, a Labrador retriever, and I came face to face with what a scumbag I was. What a sycophant I’d become. I had a faith experience. I was doing lots of cocaine at night. I started reading the New Testament during the day. I came back to my faith in a different way as an adult with a different appreciation. I decided to leave nightlife behind and go serve God and the poor.
Then I started applying to humanitarian organizations, and no one wanted to take me. I was denied by every single organization except for one. So, I said, “Yes.” They happened to be going to Liberia, West Africa, right after the 14-year civil war ended. I joined them as a volunteer photojournalist, so my job would be to take pictures of everything happening on the hospital ship and, hopefully, use the photos to spread awareness and raise money for their work. I did that for two years. It was a transformative, devastating experience. I saw stuff that I didn’t even think existed — eight-pound tumors, leprosy, cleft lips, people who had been burned beyond recognition through the war. I saw doctors who had given up their vacation time to come to operate free. There was really no going back after my third day. I took photos of 7,000 people who had come to see our doctors for about 1,500 surgery slots. I vowed to spend the rest of my life helping.
When I came back to New York, I was 30, after this two-year experience. Of all of the issues I had seen facing the poor, water seemed to be the root cause. It was responsible for 80% of all disease. Water and lack of sanitation were responsible for 80% of all sickness on the planet, and there are a billion people without it. It is a big problem with not enough resources and not enough people trying to solve it. I just started.
Andrew: I want to understand, how did you even get 1,000 people to come out to an event that you put together? The reason that I ask it is there’s something about you that draws people into a cause. I want to maybe see how it played itself out back when you were a promoter. How would you get 1,000 people? How would you build yourself up to be such a successful promoter? Everybody in New York seems to want to be a promoter or call themselves a promoter.
Scott: I think I always had a decent nose for branding a party, for marketing a party.
Andrew: Can you give me a few examples of how you would do that?
Scott: We tried to be creative. New York City nightlife is boring. We would throw these huge pool parties, let’s say, inside a club. It was silly, but we’d bring in lifeguard stands and beach balls. We’d throw costume parties. I think I am easily bored, and because we didn’t want to do the same thing night after night, we tried to bring in musicians or DJs or, again, this feels so stupid talking about parties, but, you know, even the invites for all the parties, they looked pretty good. A lot of others didn’t. I think the branding was really important and came naturally. I like people. I love spending time with people. I love hearing their dreams and trying to . . . I love seeing people come together. Certainly now around a much more redemptive thing than $300 bottles of vodka and cocaine, but, I love watching the connections. I love watching people.
I just came back from, I was in Central Africa last week and in Ethiopia for the two weeks previous. I got to see many wells funded by my friends and make videos for them in those communities. Almost everyone that I sent it to has been crying. It’s a really deep connection knowing that a sacrifice here is impacting the lives of hundreds of people. It’s a real honor to be able to play that liaison.
Andrew: You would tape a video of the well that a friend of yours pays for and you’ll show them the specific well that they were responsible for?
Scott: We plaque all the wells in most countries. It is the standard we’re trying to get all of our partners up to. Anyone who gives or raises $5,000 gets to put their name on it. It’s not for ego. It’s really just to let them know that money actually reached the intended place. To make it tangible. We have 25,000 water partners, so obviously we can’t go to them all. I was able to visit maybe 25. A couple are celebrities, a couple are just friends, and a couple are people who are not wealthy at all. We just had a couple recently decide not to go on their honeymoon but to take all of the money that they were going to spend on the honeymoon and build a well. They got married and that was it. It’s all across the map. Sure, it’s in the wealthy community, but we’ve had seven-year-old kids fund four or five wells.
Andrew: Where are you from originally?
Scott: I was born in Philadelphia, raised in South Jersey, and I’ve been here in New York City for about 17 years.
Andrew: I see. Were you always the kind of person who could draw people to you? Is it natural or did you spend a little bit of time and figure out maybe what it is about you and about your method that brought people to you?
Scott: I never really spent any time thinking about it. I think we’re just trying to tell the story. I think the water story is really compelling. It’s redemptive. It’s tangible. People like solving problems, to be able to solve a problem for one person or for a community. Our group is just trying to make that experience as real as possible. Most people aren’t able to go into remote villages in the Central Africa Republic jungle and meet people. We’re trying to do that on behalf of some of those people. I haven’t really thought about what it is. I think it is just the power of the story.
Andrew: But even before you were able to draw people in. I guess what you’re saying is it was the power of the story about the party that they would have if they joined you, if they came out.
Scott: I don’t think I was uniquely gifted. There were eight or ten other successful promoters as well.
Andrew: So, you had this vision, you knew how you wanted to impact the world, why not just go to work, make money, and send it out to an organization? Why did you decide to create your own organization?
Scott: On a personal level, a lot of it had to do with my faith. I read something that I loved right around the time of leaving New York. It said, “True religion is this, look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep from being polluted by the world.” I lived a very polluted life. I sold pollution for a living. To me that was relationship with God and personal integrity. It was a life spent at the service of others, looking after widows and orphans, in this case looking after widows and orphans without water. On a personal level, it is very much connected and driven by my faith. I think everybody should have clean water to drink. I’ve been given so much. I live in a world where water comes out of a tap, where I have enough money to put food on the table every day. I just came back to New York this weekend after a month of . . . oh my gosh, the little things that I’ve been grateful for. When you are going to the bathroom where there are holes in the ground with flies around, you’re extremely grateful.
Andrew: Okay. What did you imagine you were going to build? I like to see how projects go from ideas to reality and how they change. When you started out, what was the vision?
Scott: It started actually as a bigger vision. It was going to be reinventing charily. That’s why the charity colon. Then it was going to be water first and then potentially a bunch of other initiatives. Education would have been second, and health probably would have been third. So, charity:education, charity:medicine, or charity:health. It got a lot more narrow as we unpacked water, as we learned how big of an issue it really was. We wanted to get to what deeply affected, probably the most, health and education. Being the root cause of 80% of disease and affecting half of the world’s schools.
About 50 million schools in the world did not have access to clean water. It was one of the number one and two reasons that people were dropping out of school across the world, no clean water and no toilets. Girls have to fetch water 3-4 times a day. They start menstruating and stop going to school because there is no toilet. During that time, they fall behind in their studies, etc., etc. It got narrower. Instead of trying to do a bunch of things, yes, let’s try to redefine charity and raise the bar in transparency, brand, and storytelling, but let’s do it through one issue, through clean water.
Andrew: How were you going to reinvent charity? What was the plan?
Scott: I just wanted to make it exciting. Charity’s a drag for many people. It’s boring. It’s bureaucratic. It’s joyless. This is a blast. Knowing that we can give a million people clean water, 5 million, 10 million . . . going and meeting them. Seeing our donors lives transformed. Seeing communities, churches, and synagogues. Seeing this catch on. It’s awesome. I think that is lost through a lot of the sector.
Also, the sector is typically abysmal at marketing and branding. That’s almost a dirty word. It isn’t spending enough money on good cameras, on video editing, on just trying to tell simple compelling stories in a truthful way. I wanted to, we want to have the best website in the world some day. We’re not just comparing ourselves to other nonprofits. I guess I was also really interested in the connection. Making connections between donors, where their money has gone, and the people they have helped. For us, that was this whole Google Earth piece. Training all of our partners in how to use GPS devices and then making that information public so that we know where our projects are and that gives us an opportunity to monitor, evaluate, and find out which ones didn’t work. Find out why they didn’t work and share information across our projects.
Andrew: Okay. Reinventing charity, even if it is just a narrower version, it’s still very big. Sometimes when I take on a big project, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m wondering where you started. How do you start when you have something that big in mind?
Scott: We started with the model. The 100% model was big. That would be different. That would basically put us in a field of maybe five charities in America that were doing that to any scale. Really, the only other groups that have done it are hugely endowed. One is here in New York, called the Robin Hood Foundation. That’s awesome. They are funded by a billionaire. He founded it. He said, “You know what, as long as this organization runs, myself, my fellow board members, and friends will pay for all operating costs.” It’s about $26 million a year now that he gives and raises towards staff and ops. They’re a $100+ million organization.
Nobody had ever done our model before though. Starting from zero with two bank accounts, not knowing where the money is going to come from. Just showing people, of course there is a cost to running an organization, but this idea of transparency I thought would be a bit of a reinvention. Some of the stuff that we’re doing around donor connection. Showing people where their money wound up. You’d be surprised how few organizations know where their projects are. They have ideas. Just the idea of GPS a couple of years ago was brand new. Many of our field partners had never even seen the devices.
Andrew: You have two bank accounts. You now need to go on. Is funding the next thing you do to find a way to fund at least that one bank account that will pay for the operations?
Scott: Sure. Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. How did you convince people to, when you were just a guy who recently had been off coke, who just had an idea, how did you convince people to give?
Scott: It was very hard. Remember, I’d just come off two years in Liberia. I’d been writing and submitting photos. People knew that I had come back changed. People would say that, “Everything is different.” I never touched drugs again. I quit smoking. I quit drinking. Everything changed the moment I walked up the gangway.
Andrew: You’re saying that you just got back, you gave up drinking, and . . . what happened?
Scott: Yeah. It’s interesting. A guy called Craig from our nightlife days wrote the first substantial check, $25,000, to help us incorporate as a charity. I wanted to do everything right from the beginning. Not do it yourself. I found lawyers who had done this for 300 other organizations. I think that was one of the smart moves at the beginning, to surround ourselves with great counsel, people who had done this before, make sure our bylaws, everything was in order with respect to that. For the first six months of trying to get this thing off the ground, it was really me with a laptop that had photos from Africa running around. I went back into clubs. I asked club owners, DJs, nightclub promoters, restaurant owners, people I knew for gifts. It was really, really hard. I’d say tenacity was definitely the theme for that part. It’s much easier now that you have projects, partners, a staff . . .
Andrew: How much were you able to raise from old friends and contacts through the nightlife?
Scott: We started very quickly. I think our first year we raised $1.5 million, the second year we raised $6 million, and the third year we raised $9 million (last year). I guess $1.5 million in the first year.
Andrew: How? How were you able to do so much in the first year?
Scott: We got projects done very quickly. I’d gone out there, found great partners, and we were turning around, raising money, and putting it in the ground and proving it immediately. It was just closing the loop. Then people would give more. It was establishing trust.
Andrew: Can you give me an example of . . . actually, can you tell me about the first project that you guys did?
Scott: Yeah. The first project, day one, was actually my birthday party. My 31st birthday party in a nightclub. Seven hundred people came and they all paid 420. We took 100% of that money, about $15,000 because people gave a little more, to a refugee camp in Uganda. It was a disaster relief situation. There were 31,638 people living in this camp called Bobi, and they had one well. They should have had 100 wells. We wanted to do 100. We were able to do three new wells and fix three broken wells that we hoped would last for months, maybe a year, to stop the people from dying there. And we did. We got six projects, took the pictures, shared those and the GPS with all 700 people who attended the party. It was very powerful to came, to give $20, and in this community of people make impact on a refugee camp.
Andrew: How did GPS factor into it? I understand seeing pictures, but how does GPS information help people get excited?
Scott: It just shows them where their well is. We put all that information up on Google Earth. If you go to CharityWater.org/projects, the projects are at the top and you can see a GPS layer of different projects in different countries. I think it just made it tangible for them.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: If you went there, you would find it there.
Andrew: I see. That does make it a lot more real. What happened next? After that first one, after you were able to show pictures, can you describe how people reacted afterwards?
Scott: They wanted to know what was the next project, what was next for charity:water. I think the second thing we did was take over New York City parks. We built a big exposition, took photos of people in great need of clean water, and we took those photos against big tanks of pond water. We went to the East River and the Hudson River and ponds here in Long Island and New Jersey and showed people what it would look like if they had to drink muddy water and asked them to contribute. That raised a lot of awareness. It was seen by 15,000 people or so in just ten days. Then online, developing a web presence and all the things that we’ve been doing.
Andrew: This is the exhibit where you showed pictures of kids in Africa who were drinking dirty water and a picture of an American kid who looked well off who was also holding up a bottle of dirty water to say, to personalize it?
Scott: That was actually a more recent exposition.
Andrew: Oh, okay. What’d the first one look like then?
Scott: The first one was just photos of communities, water facts, and big, nasty tanks of green water from our sources here.
Andrew: I see. How did that, what happened with that? Were you able to raise more money? Can you describe the impact of it?
Scott: We raised about $20,000. About 15,000 people came out.
Andrew: Let me ask you something, $20,000/15,000 people, still a young organization, not more than a year old.
Scott: We were three months old at that point.
Andrew: Wow. Let me ask you something. I’ve now heard you tell the story of how you got here a few times. I’m sure you must have told it tons of times beyond here. Do you ever feel like, “Well, I’m done telling that story? I’m done selling it?”
Scott: That’s a pretty good question. It doesn’t feel like it is selling it really. It’s just, it’s kind of our story. I think it’s, you know, it’s been really interesting. Over the last six months, we’ve been trying to drive the story. I would love that this soon disconnects from me and becomes more about the story of the 100,000 people who have helped us. We’ve really been doing that as an organization. We’re finding that, you know, the birthday idea was a big one. Now thousands of people around the world have sort of followed our lead, given up their birthdays, and asked for their age in dollars for clean water. They’ve done the most remarkable things. Seven-year-olds raising money, nine-year-olds raising money, we had an 81-year-old raising money. She even wrote a mission statement about why she is doing this. She said, “I’ve lived to be 81, and I’d like to make that possible for more people.” That’s amazing.
There are people walking across America right now for charity:water. That’s a pretty high level of commitment. We don’t have to be an organization about Scott, nightclub promotor, story anymore. It’s about the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people around the world that have cared about the water story and have engaged.
Andrew: You have a social network. That’s part of the plan of creating not just a new charity and not just a great charity site but also a great website. How did you get people involved in that? What worked? What worked to get them engaged?
Scott: I don’t know. I think you’re thinking through things more than we have a little bit. We want to build a good website. Our second hire was our graphic designer, who is my wife as well. Now is my wife. She wanted to make a website that was amazing. She looked around and most charity websites weren’t. She just built it, built the brand from the ground up. I was out there telling the story, trying to find the partners. I was constantly on a plane to Africa, to Asia, identifying water partners, learning as much as I could about the water story, about who was innovating in this sector, what was working, what wasn’t, coming up with some of the technology ideas. We were telling the stories of the impact we were making, and people were responding to them.
Andrew: I was referring to mycharity:water. MyCharityWater.org. That’s more of a community, isn’t it?
Scott: That is. That was born out of this shift where it was our story, the staff, the companies we could engage, the monies we could raise. A shift happened where people started doing the most remarkable things that we never thought of. Skydiving for charity:water. Climbing mountains for charity:water. Sailing across the Atlantic for charity:water. Swimming across the English Channel for charity:water. Walking across America. Eating rice and beans. We had scrap bookers build scrapbooks for charity:water. Every idea under the sun.
MyCharityWater.org was in response to them. To give them a place to go to express themselves, to own it, and also a place where we could track every single dollar to a project because of the 100% model. Because all of our donations live in this closed vacuum, we can show people your dollar went to well number 2634, and here is where it is, here’s the GPS and here’s the photo. That first round of proof is coming up in the next six months, which is very exciting for us.
Andrew: What about ecards?
Scott: It’s done really well, right. Twenty-five hundred people have run campaigns now and raised $2.5 million. The average person is raising more than they think they would. A thousand dollars has constantly been surprising people. The generosity of their friends, their networks, and the willingness to give to this project.
Ecards? Twenty bucks gives one person clean water. We thought, ecards are usually free, why not try to sell them? We built a little ecard system, and that’s raised hundreds of thousands, probably $400,000 or so since we started that. It also gave Vik, our creative designer, a great way to be creative. Now she is also now involving other designers. We’ve asked, “Can we make ecards? Can we submit ecards?”
Andrew: Moses in the audience is asking about partnerships. What kind of partnerships do you guys have?
Scott: Ask him if he means partnerships in the field in regards to the water projects or . . .
Andrew: He means ecommerce sites, other websites, or other organizations that help you get people involved.
Scott: You know, we’ve been friends with the people over at Twitter. They’ve been really helpful. Something called the Twestival happened a couple years ago, and we were lucky to be a recipient of that. We raised a $250,000 in a night. That’s lead to some really good relationships with Twitter. I’ve been out there to speak to their employees.
We have a great relationship with Google. I’ve been out to speak there. YouTube. Constantly exploring Internet partnerships. I wish I had a better partnership with PayPal and they could waive all of our fees, but we’re not there yet. We collaborated with Saks Fifth Avenue, which was great. They sold charity:water bands in 100 of their stores to raise awareness. Engaging their employees, their vendors, and their customers, they raised $700,000. Another partnership with a company called Brighton; they raised almost $800,000 in almost 100 stores. Retail partnerships. Now with a whiskey called the Macallan.
Andrew: I love that.
Scott: Taking their finest and oldest whiskey ever made, I think it is 62 years old, and they are taking it around the world on a tour selling off a dram, so, a small amount, for a well, minimum bid is $5,000. They’ve raised $40,000 in the last month, month and a half, on this world tour.
Andrew: Now that we have a really good connection, I am actually trying to read the books behind you to get a sense of what is influencing you. What books are you reading?
Scott: The ones in front of me are probably . . . I am reading “Switch,” you know that book?
Andrew: I have that audio book now. It’s about how to change organizations and how to change yourself, how to change actions.
Scott: How to change. I’m reading a lot of Lencioni at the moment. He wrote a great book called “Death by Meeting” that we’re going through as an executive team. Just how to make your meetings not suck. I just read, we just as a team did “Rework” by Jason Fried. Really enjoyed parts of that. What else? “Drive,” by Daniel Pink. I think behind me is a bunch of water books.
Andrew: What’d you get out of Jason Fried’s book? He was here on Mixergy talking about the book.
Scott: Yeah. Man, I love the whole, like, “Don’t make it any bigger than it has to be. Do more with less.” I like the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s funny, we just met recently. We both spoke at a conference in Omaha, Nebraska. He actually became a supporter as well. I’m trying to think of my favorite chapters. I have tons of notes. I think some of the stuff we were just like, “Wow, he is so right.” Everybody gets that role. Key hiring is really important. Gary Vaynerchuk was in the office this morning, I actually haven’t read “Crush It” yet, but I’ve heard great things about his book. That’s all at the moment. I have a Peter Drucker book that I am about to tackle and a ton of documents from UNICEF on water sanitation, hygiene, etc.
Andrew: How has being an entrepreneur helped you separate yourself from other charities?
Scott: It made me believe that, you know, we’re truly somewhat anti-bureaucratic in nature. We believe that everything is possible.
Andrew: Skype popped up there?
Scott: Yeah, sorry.
Andrew: Do entrepreneurs execute differently? Do you notice that having seen other charities now?
Scott: Faster. Much faster. I think we just go at a different speed.
Andrew: Do you have an example of that?
Scott: I mean just, you know, the growth. Most charities would probably take a little longer to raise $4 million, to engage 100,000 people, or to build such a website. We’re like, “Let’s get it live. Let’s get it live. Let’s ship,” as Seth Godwin would say. You know, we want to try everything out. I think a lot of it has to do with youth, too. I think some of the other organizations, the older organizations, they are just not structured for quick change. There are layers of process. Some of those processes make a lot of sense. Systems, as well. I think hopefully nobody ever says that of us, that we’re never bureaucratic. I think we’re fighting hard to keep the entrepreneurial spirit.
Andrew: Scott, can I ask you a personal question?
Scott: Yes.
Andrew: You seem a little more distracted today than I have seen you in other videos, what’s going on? Tell me honestly.
Scott: Things are, today’s just been a crazy day. I literally just got back from a month away so the amounts of emails, I have 1,000 emails to deal with. It was a great trip. My head is also in this upcoming September campaign, which I am super excited about, that we have a whole team editing today.
Andrew: What’s the September campaign?
Scott: Every September we do a big live drill from the fields. This year we’re telling the story of the Bi-Aka pygmies in the Central African Republic, which is where I was last week.
Andrew: Does it every feel like a bit of a chore then to come on here, or to come on a place like this, and tell the story again when it’s already visible on the website, when it’s already out on Twitter, when you’ve already said it? Do you ever feel that way?
Scott: Not really. Not really. I mean, I think I enjoy it. It feels like it is still a great way to serve the organization. I don’t know that that will be true in three years. We’re really looking to make heroes out of some of the people who have helped the organization. Heroes out of some of the other staff. However, for now, I’m totally happy to do it. I love it.
Andrew: What about this, you showed a picture of yourself at a conference that you spoke at, I don’t remember which one. You’re holding a Rolex, or you’ve got the Rolex on your arm, you’re making sure that people see it, you’re visibly drinking the drink because you are getting paid to drink it. You’re the center of attention when you’re at a party. Now, you’re the center of attention of something even bigger. I’m talking about some of the frustrations of having to do this and how it’s sometimes tough to be the person who has to come on and talk and you want to expose other people. Does it also feel good in the same way that being the center of a party did?
Scott: That’s a good question. I think I am much more . . . it’s interesting, when I am spending time, I am definitely looking to get away from it. I’m just thinking of how I spend my time when I am not working. It’s alone with the wife. It’s really kind of escaping all of it. It’s just very noisy. I mean, you’re constantly bombarded with ideas. I think what keeps me, you said, distracted, I’m sort of ideating this week around this campaign and there are so many different ways that we could take it and tell the story.
There is a whole team in the next room that the minute I leave I’ll jump back into video editing. There are so many ways that we can take this video, that we can talk about our partner, we can talk about the Bi-Aka, we can talk about the Central Africans, we can talk about the history. There is so much work to be done. A billion people, you know? It feels like we are running out of time. The more I travel, whenever I come back from a trip, I am always a little thrown out of whack. The week trips are much easier. The month trips, you know, I would love to live in Africa. It’s not the best way that I think I can serve the organization, but I love it so much. It’s a little hard for me sometimes to come back and get up to speed again. A different part of the brain takes over. I didn’t say that very clearly, but . . .
Andrew: No, I think you did. All right, well, fair enough. I’ll let you get back into work. How about one final question, anyone out there saying, “I want to have an impact. How do I do it?” What advice do you have for them?
Scott: You know, I think the one thing is to give up one birthday. I’m blown away by the response people get when they go out there and say, “You know what, I really have everything that I want, that I really need. I don’t need another tie. I don’t need another handbag or another pair of shoes. There are a billion people without water, and here is just a way that I can engage my friends, my family, my network, in this issue.” If 100 people did that and started campaigns, this could be worth $100,000, just based on what’s already happened in the 11 months of mycharity:water.
I’d say, sure, maybe watch some of the videos, learn more about the water crisis, or learn what some other people have done. Browse some pages. Give up the next birthday. Or do something really creative that nobody has ever thought of before. Skydiving, I would never think to try to be sponsored to jump out of a perfectly good plane. I’m an adventure seeker, but not crazy. A guy raised $15,000 by being sponsored. I love that kind of creativity. I love that a 9-year-old girl ate rice and beans for dinner ever night in solidarity with people who didn’t have enough food, and she got a well out of it. She got people to sponsor her for doing that. I encourage people to check out MyChairtyWater.org or check out some of the videos and the story and consider giving us your next birthday.
Andrew: All right. Well, thank you for doing the interview. Giang, thank you for putting this interview together. I know she met you at Big Omaha where she also got to meet Jason Fried. Thanks an awful lot, Giang.
Scott: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: You bet. Bye.
Scott: Bye.
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