A Discussion at the 2006 Global Philanthropists Circle Annual Meeting, October 12 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City
| Main Speakers: | Sheryl Sandberg, Member of the Board, Google Foundation/Google.org (Video highlights) Judith Rodin, President, The Rockefeller Foundation (Video highlights) |
| Facilitator: | Robert H. Dunn, President & CEO, The Synergos Institute |
ROBERT H. DUNN: I know that I'm interrupting conversations that are very engaging. And the only thing that I can say to you is that if you will trust me, I promise that you will be pleased that you have broken off your conversations to make space to hear from two of the most extraordinary people who are and who will influence the nature of philanthropy for the remainder of our lifetimes. And we're putting them together for the first time, which is really wonderful. And we bring to you the leader of one of the oldest and most distinguished philanthropic organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation. And Dr. Judith Rodin serves as the president of the foundation. And we are pairing her with one of the leaders of one of the newest distinguished foundations -- and foundation is probably not an adequate descriptor for Google.org. And so it is my pleasure to welcome Sheryl Sandberg and Judith Rodin to the stage.
There's extensive information about them in your notebooks so I'm not going to take a lot of time to make introductions, but you would be astounded if I shared some facts about their lives. Judith, for example, is the author or co-author of 11 books and I'm told has written more than 200 book chapters or articles. But lest you think of her only as a scholar, she, for example, serves on the board of Citigroup -- Citicorp, and has served in that capacity for a number of other corporations.
And Sheryl, who is identified with Google so strongly, and who leads two-thirds of the business there, is an economist and has been involved in debt relief for developing countries, and has worked on leprosy in India. It is possible that there are two more distinguished people anywhere within 100 miles of this location but I'm not sure who they would be.
I originally had thought that I would ask them a lot of questions. We spent a few minutes together in the other room, and they have so much to say that I'm actually just going to turn the microphone over to each of them and let them hold forth. And we are going to reserve some time for questions. So as they're speaking, if something comes to mind that's a point you'd like to pursue with one of them, just make a mental note or a note on a piece of paper and there'll be a chance for you to engage with them. So, Sheryl, you're sitting next to me and I'm going to start with you.
SHERYL SANDBERG: Thank you, Bob. And it's great to be here and see a gathering like this of people all over the world, who are coming not just with their heads, but with their hearts to figure out how do we make the world a better place? I can tell you a little bit to start about how we started thinking about philanthropy at Google.
So when Google was founded, Google was founded with the mission to take the world's information and make it publicly available. And at the time, our founders, young though they were and still are, didn't care at all about making money. That came later. But that happened, too. And about two years ago, right before we went public, Larry and Sergey, our founders, said to the world, "When we go public, we are going to take one percent. One percent of our equity, one percent of our profits, one percent of employee time and give it back to making the world a better place." They originally thought that would be a foundation. They even said to the public as part of our SEC filing in the documents to become a public company, we were going to take this one percent and create a foundation.
And then I joined them and we started to do some real work. And we found a grant we wanted to make. We wanted to give a donation to Nicholas Negroponte, who was building the $100 laptop. We thought that was terrific. More people would get information technology. Well, it turns out that Google can't make that donation from a foundation, because -- although if you were doing an ROI based investment for Google you would never invest in a $100 laptop, right? I mean this is not a business based investment. Hypothetically, if we give money to $100 laptop, more people had computers, it could benefit Google 'cause more people could use Google. So we realized immediately with our first thing we were looking at that a foundation was much too limited for what we wanted.
Then we took a step back and we started thinking about what mattered, what were we trying to do, and what were the principles on which we were going to build our philanthropic work? And we came to a few things. The first is that we wanted to do things that mattered, not that were easy. We understood that we are a company that's based largely in the developed world, we're popular all over the world and if anyone comes to Google I'm happy to show you. In our lobby we have a map, and it's a globe and it's on a flat screen TV and it looks high-techy, exactly what you'd expect at Google. And it spins slowly, and it's real time, and it shows searches around the world. They come up and they're in different colors. Red is English and yellow is Spanish. And what everyone notices right away is the parts of the world that are dark. The parts of the world where there is no search. And search at Google is correlated with electricity, which is correlated with lifespan, which is correlated with low child mortality, which is correlated with literacy.
And so we thought about this and we thought, wow, we exist in all of the developed parts of the world, but it is a fact that most charity goes from the wealthy to the wealthy. People don't realize that. They think they're giving charity -- and they are, and supporting universities, as Judith used to do, is important, and supporting arts are important. If you look at the percentage of where people give, across the world most charity stays within communities. And we do not want our philanthropic work to stay within our own community. We decided to do things that would matter and focus on the world's largest problems. We came to climate change, global health, and global poverty.
The second basic tenet of what we were trying to do is that we wanted to innovate and be willing to be disruptive. Google was a disruptive technology. Google took a lot of information that people thought they had to pay for and gave it away for free. And that was it -- that was the business secret right there. We were willing to disrupt. And there were a lot of people at the time that told us this business model will never work, this is destructing the way information is being transferred. And we said we didn't care, and we're willing to say that again -- we're willing to disrupt by innovating.
The third thing is that we want a scale. Google is an incredibly scalable model. It's a model that has diminishing marginal returns to what we do. It turns out that once you've prowled the world's information serving up the next query when Bob looks up something is relatively cheap. We are looking for things that scale, looking for partners that have great experience to scale. And so with those three basic tenets and our desire to do something big and actually transfer from our community to the communities of the world that needed it best, we formed something called Google.org. And Google.org is a nonentity within an entity that pretends it's an entity, but it's an umbrella we call -- it's an umbrella name for everything we do that's philanthropic.
We hired an amazing man named Larry Brilliant to run it. He reports to a board, there are four of us on the board. And we have every vehicle we could want at our discretion. We can make for-profit investments, we can make investments in nonprofits, we have a foundation where we can make grants. So we've given ourselves all the tools in the toolbox to try to make a difference. I can think of no better place for us to learn from than from Judith Rodin and what they're doing at the Rockefeller Foundation. We have been inspired by them. This is I think a real merging of the minds, and these are definitely -- as one of the newest players on the block, the people we are looking to the most to learn how we can really have an effect.
JUDITH RODIN: Thank you, Sheryl. I will add that it is great to be here. It's wonderful to see people with whom we share the passion, the desires, the inspiration to really go forward and make a difference in the world and change it in some profound and fundamental ways. The Rockefeller Foundation was founded in 1913 and, as you know I am sure, has had a wonderful and inspired history. When John D. Senior founded the Rockefeller Foundation he did so to really improve the lot of humankind. In the earliest years of the foundation, it gave more foreign aid than the US Government. So it was always from its founding a very global foundation looking to impact the world and the far reaches of the world in a really creative and, I think, quite inspired way.
Over the course of its history it's had some extraordinary successes. Bringing the green revolution to Asia, founding the field of public health in America and largely throughout the world, creating the field of molecular biology and supporting the basic scientists who made profound discoveries within that field. So many, many, many successes. But like all organizations and maybe people, as we grow old we tend to get set in our ways. We tend to get a little more tired and a little more structured in how we perform, and sometimes perhaps a little less flexible in our thinking. And so as we approach our centenary in 2013, we decided to take a new look at ourselves as an organization, really stimulated both by our age but also by the recognition of the profound transformation caused by globalization -- really being to this century what the industrial revolution was to the last century. And with globalization there are tremendous opportunities that we all recognize, but globalization has brought extraordinary challenges. Transnational conflicts within country conflicts accelerated as we have not seen for a very long time. Profound growth in inequity, just as the opportunity structure seems to have expanded.
And so these disparities really growing significantly around the world. And because of the press of globalization, because innovation is not tilted towards the poor and vulnerable -- and Google really became a notable exception in deciding to give it away -- but typically innovation has been driven by market forces. And so those who can pay are those who receive the benefits of innovation. And one of the early recognitions as we began to think about how to re-conceive ourselves intellectually, substantively, as well as structurally, was this notion of really trying to tilt science and technology innovation to the poor and vulnerable, thinking also about how to build economic resilience as the inequities grew.
We could not accomplish this with a traditional foundation structure, and so we have been spending the last year rethinking how we organize ourselves, breaking down program silos, really thinking about the world's biggest problems. But then asking ourselves what unique role could we or we with partners and alliances really play in solving some of those pressing problems? And that requires agility and flexibility, it requires a new way of listening to beneficiaries, of being much more responsive to the world out there, rather than believing that all the knowledge and expertise is invented inside. Something that traditional foundations are extremely, extremely likely to believe and act upon.
So just breaking down all those preconceptions internally, opening ourselves to the great ideas out there, looking for really wonderful new thinking kind of strategic partners like Sheryl's colleagues at Google, with whom we have had in the last two months a real love fest as we've just been talking both about the big ideas, but also about the new ways of working. And so we're very excited at the opportunity to do that, the opportunity to find the kinds of partners who really recognize that impact can be measured, transparency is important, and there are many big ideas. The truth of the success is in the execution. And so that kind of rigor, that kind of capacity building, to make sure that there's successful execution and not just the identification of the next big idea is something that we've been working very hard at as well.
DUNN: So I think I am going to pick up on a point or two. And, Judy, you talked a little at the end about measurement, and I think it would be very interesting as you create this new entity, Google.org, to know what you're thinking about how you're going to assess the impact of what you do.
SANDBERG: It's a great question. You know, we're business people at Google, as so many of you are in your daily lives, and we care about measurement. We know that if you measure things you can monitor them, we know if you measure things you can make the right tradeoffs. One thing we've done some pretty deep thinking about at Google and I've done before is that the metrics around philanthropy or the metrics around anything are actually quite complicated and really important to get right. I'm astounded time after time, and I know it's true but it always surprises me at how much people react to what you measure. I have big teams at Google, I have 2,000 people working on my team around the world. And some of the mistakes we've made as we've grown over the last five years were by highlighting a metric. We'd say what really matters is, you know, tier one customer spending in November. And all of a sudden all kinds of other things get subordinated to tier one customer spending in December [SIC]. And that wasn't really what we meant.
And so we've learned and I've learned that finding the right metrics is really important. I think measurement and metrics in philanthropy have three pretty important problems that are worth remembering. And they're true of business too, but they seem to be particularly important for philanthropy. The first is that metrics are hard to define correctly and very easy to manipulate. I started my career working at the World Bank as an economist, and I worked on leprosy in India. So I learned a little bit about health statistics -- probably not nearly as much as the people Judy works with at Rockefeller. But I learned the following.
All of the different health ministries in India where I worked measured -- and this was true around the world -- the measured by disease child mortality. And of course they did, because what could be more important than child mortality caused by malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery? By the time you added up all the kids that had died of dysentery and malaria, TB, etc., most children in the world who had died of these diseases had died an average of two to three times. And the data was correct. They did die of these diseases, but in aggregate the data made no sense. So this problem was solved by someone named Charles Murray, who was working at the WHO, and he designed something called the DALY, the Disability Adjusted Life Year, which measured qualitative reductions, not just mortalities. Therefore, when you added it all together, the child died one time. I use this as an example to illustrate metrics I see all the time in the philanthropic world that individually make sense, but at an aggregate level are not telling the whole picture. And as we think about measurement, that's something we're very cognitive of.
The second thing is that metrics are sometimes easier to use when they're measuring something that is individually controlled and not necessarily the root or the systemic issue. And I'll share with you two examples. One thing that's been true across Africa is that it is much easier to raise money from the developed world for programs which have the feel of feed a child for a day, educate a child for a day. $2 to feed a child for a day is a great way to raise money. Everyone wants to feed a child for a day. The problem is that in a lot of the villages where this happens, and I'm not against these programs -- I'm for these programs -- but no matter how much you feed a child, if they have infectious diarrhea they don't gain weight anyway. And it's harder to raise money for the less individually measured sustainable problem of how do you treat infectious diarrhea, how do you provide clean water, and the education to prevent the kids from getting sick in the first place?
Another example from the United States, I worked for a while at the Children's Defense Fund, and I was assigned to look at teenage pregnancy prevention. And this was in the early 1990's. Teenage pregnancy prevention in this country is a very big deal. The fastest way to not graduate from high school in this country is to get pregnant. The fastest way to never get above a certain income level is to get pregnant. The single biggest determiner of a woman's income through her lifetime is whether or not she has a baby by the time she's 16. So it's a big deal.
And people wanted to do measurable programs, so they went in and they did condoms in the schools, which I believe in and support, programs that were specifically designed to give birth control, things they could measure. Well, it turned out that if you understood the issue, girls in this country don't get pregnant because they can't buy condoms -- they actually can. They get pregnant because their conception of their own future includes a pregnancy. If you asked me when I was 16 why I didn't want to have a child I would've said, because I have to go to college and get a job. If you ask the girls who are getting pregnant in this country why they do want to get pregnant at 16, they have no conception that they might be able to graduate from high school and get a job.
And so what really has to change for teenage pregnancy prevention is an entire generation, an entire social structure perception of their future. It's very hard to measure. And if we only focus on the things we can measure, how do you measure that? So we're willing to look at the sustainable issues, not just the things you can measure.
The last issue we thought about a lot with measurability is the visible victim issue. What economists call the visible victim. The best example from the last two years is the tsunami. The tsunami killed 216,000 people, it is a tragedy that I think all of us cried over night after night. Every six weeks that many people die in this world of unclean water, mostly children; every three-and-a-half weeks that many people die of AIDS. The world gave to the tsunami, and that was fantastic and I applaud that, but how do we get the world to give to the silent victim? The victim that keeps coming, that you can measure but doesn't hit you over the head the way a tsunami does. And as we think about measurement, we think about trying to make more transparent and visible the victims that we have in the world everyday.
RODIN: Those are wonderful comments. I'll take a meta level approach to what Sheryl said and then come back and talk about measurement more specifically. I think the critical thing is to determine in advance what you're trying to achieve. Sometimes there are hard metrics that are associated with that, but sometimes there are not. And you don't twist what you're trying to achieve because you don't have a metric. The important part about thinking about impact and outcomes is it forces you to try to define in advance in a very tight and more rigorous way what your intervention is likely to be. And so I see this kind of evaluation built in at the beginning of the process as a much more important element than built in at the end of the process. If you glom on metrics, then of course everybody just works towards the metrics, as Sheryl said I think quite correctly. Bring into your thinking what you want to achieve, what you want to get out of it. Sometimes it will be measurable in a tight way; sometimes it won't be. But by articulating what the "it" is in advance you increase your capacity for succeeding.
I think that the element of qualitative outcomes, not everything is quantitative, but it sometimes is easier if you force yourself to do it -- to define in a qualitative way what you are looking for. The point that Sheryl made that, again, I'll position in a broad way and come back to because I think it relates to everything that everyone in this room works on and holds dear, is these are deep, complicated problems and they are systemic problems. There is no single, easy fix. And often the thing that's been most frustrating for everyone is that you try to solve one element, you feed the child, you cure -- even curing a single disease, only to come to find that you've only looked at the tip of that iceberg and that real roots of the problem are quite, quite different.
We think about girls' education in Africa, and so many -- huge amounts of dollars, World Bank dollars and others have gone to girls' education, to the wonderful policy work, getting compulsory education in many countries in Africa. And yet you know if you look at the data that the thing that keeps girls out of school is HIV deaths, AIDS deaths in their families, or a poor agricultural season because the girls are kept at home in order to work in the fields. So for us, for example, looking at root causes of issues related to girls' education really drives back to thinking about agriculture, thinking about health, thinking about the kinds of elements that really are the systemic, deep issues that keep people rooted in poverty. So defining the right question is the really important precursor. The metrics may come or not come, but often we're asking the wrong question.
DUNN: So time is short. I'm going to offer you two questions, you can answer one of them. The subject of this discussion is innovation broadly. And I wonder where you look for it, how you know it when you find it, and what you've learned you can do to stimulate more of it? That would be one question -- you can talk about innovation.
The second is, both of you have made references to partnering and partnerships, and I think all of us understand that it's quite useful to engage partners. And I wonder what you've learned from your experiences about how to choose partners and how to make partnerships work well?
RODIN: I think I'll answer first just to say that we revere Google and look forward to this partnership because we see them as an incredible engine of innovation. And we expect to learn from those who are on the ground doing it in such a creative way. So in a way that answers both elements of your questions. We're looking for partners that we can learn from, where there's real synergy, where we can create great leverage, and have enough overlap in this Venn Diagram so that we speak each other's language and can finish each other's sentences, but there is more that we can learn.
The wonderful thing about this space is that it's a world full of learning opportunities. And learning as we go continues to fuel the engine of innovation. One of the things that Sheryl and I were talking about as we were getting to know each other a bit behind the curtain was the notion of trying to create centers of innovation in the developing world. We've all had the experience in looking at the developed world of watching the marvel of Silicon Valley grow sort of willy-nilly, of research triangle grow in a much more programmatic and articulated way as a public-private partnership, and then other engines of innovation developing both in the United States and around the world. They tend to develop, not always, but tend to develop around great universities. So some of the work requires at least having an educated populous or bench strength in terms of basic knowledge, but also venture capital, understanding of entrepreneurship, and a kind of fertile environment in which all of these elements take root and are nurtured and have the opportunity to grow.
We think there's a real opportunity to do that in Africa. It takes enormous transformation in many elements of the continent. We're seeing it happen in other parts of the developing world. I was struck by a recent report that we received that China is building 192 science centers, engines of innovation, this year. And so they, in looking at the American model, are saying, can we do this from the ground up? We think there's some structural ways to do it, but innovation takes time, it takes energy, it takes money to bring innovation to scale. Sheryl talked about scale before, and this is another thing that we can do. We in philanthropy have this tremendous opportunity to pilot. To use our resources not for the most proven thing, but to use our resources for that which isn't yet tested and where others wouldn't venture. And so let's use that for these kinds of innovation and innovative pilots, and then bring in other sectors to take it to scale.
Again, Google has a tremendous advantage here because they are able and have really had the vision and foresight to think that their corporate dollars are being brought to bear in this as well. And so they will have resources to do that and I'm sure will seek other partners because nobody can do it alone.
SANDBERG: So I can answer, we revere the Rockefeller Foundation. [CHUCKLES] We're new at this and we know we're new at this, and we don't pretend we can learn it all on our own. And so we're really looking to them to figure out how to approach some of the things we've talked about here: sustainability, the right approaches, and innovation in philanthropy. I can probably add a little bit by speaking a little bit about innovation at Google, because we're going to take those lessons and try to apply them.
There's a Fortune cover story you may or may not have seen last week called "Chaos at Google", which talks about, among other things, a big mistake I made in the workplace. So please go read it. But what it's actually talking about is it's asking the question the world has been asking Google -- how do you innovate? And one of the questions people have is do you innovate with structure or do you innovate without structure? And the best analogy I heard -- someone who just joined Google last week told me. She said that Jodi Foster was in her college class and Jodi Foster told her this story. That in her first movie, I don't know this well, but, like Taxi Driver with Jack Nicholson or someone like that, she was young, 13 or something, and he said to her, "Learn your lines, memorize your lines, show up for work everyday knowing your lines, and then you can start acting."
And I thought that was a really poignant comment and an important comment. I don't believe people innovate in the absence of any supporter structure. People think, you know, Fortune writes a cover story as "Chaos at Google". It's not really chaos. It's structured chaos potentially, or it's learning your lines which means getting the basics. And I think the basics for the world of innovation are do you have an understanding of the problems you're trying to solve? 'Cause you're not going to solve a problem you don't understand. You're not going to solve teenage pregnancy by distributing condoms in the schools. It might be part of the solution, but it's not entirely. So you have to understand the problem. Do you have the basic skills and tools?
Judy and I were talking about helping create entrepreneurs in Africa. Entrepreneurs need to read. Entrepreneurs need to write. Entrepreneurs need electricity and clean water. There's no question that without those things you're just not going to be a successful entrepreneur. So it's a little bit about providing the basics, providing what are the lines for people, and then letting them innovate.
We talk, if you will, a lot about how we run ourselves in the company. And people like me who run big parts of the company say things like, look, the easy way to run this for me would be to have my team all in San Francisco, where we're based, have you all work nine to five, and you all can do what I tell you to do. That would make my job really easy as a manager. They'd all show up, they'd all leave, I'd tell them what to do. We'd have no innovation. So how do we run the company? My team is global, the whole company has teams that are global, we specify what we call OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, which are just quarterly goals but here's what's different. You're not allowed to hit them all. Because if you hit them all you weren't trying. They're supposed to be true stretchables. And we ask people to stretch -- tell us what's impossible, put it on your goal, do the best you can to hit it. And then we find that people are willing to push themselves further. We're not a company that sets up its metrics and hits them every quarter. And if you find in anything you do that you're hitting every goal you have every quarter, every month, however you measure it, I would say that you're not giving room for innovation by pushing yourself hard enough.
The next thing is that we make it safe to make mistakes -- and this is what I did talk about in that Fortune piece. It's okay to make mistakes at Google. The story I told was a true story where in running our Google grants program, which is one of the philanthropic things, I made a mistake. Something happened with one group that probably got a lot more free advertising from us than they should have, and I didn't notice for a couple of months. So we were kind of giving a not so great nonprofit a couple million dollars in free ads that we kind of didn't need to give. You know, kind of a big deal. So I went to Larry Page, our founder, and I said, "Ah, I messed up -- sorry. Should've been looking, wasn't looking, I'm just moving so quickly." And he looked at me and he said, rather than "Omigod, how could you make this mistake?" he put his arm around me and he said, "Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. You started the Google grants program..." I started it four years ago, no one cared. "You scaled it to the point where we were giving away enough free advertising to nonprofits that we have a problem. Congratulations. Now go get some controls and fix the problem," which I did, it took about a day.
But I want to be the kind of company where people move too quickly that they can make those mistakes. And if I was going to make a mistake at business I'm glad I gave away too much money -- good mistake to make, right? But he made it safe for me and I make it safe for my team. And innovation demands that. Innovation demands applauding people when they get it wrong. Something that everyone says they do, but almost no one actually does. We do. You've tried some of our products that don't work. Go to Google Labs if you ant to see what innovation looks like in the technology space, you'll see hundreds of products we've never launched, that engineers have been staffed to that we put real resources behind. Some of those are going to work, but most of them aren't and we're comfortable with that. And we're going to have to be comfortable with that as we innovate as well in the philanthropic world, and we know that.
DUNN: So now it's your opportunity to make a mistake. [CHUCKLES] Ask an inappropriate question. But take a risk, please. Daniel will wander through the audience with a microphone, and if you can just make your questions short so we get a bunch of them in before our guests need to retire.
Please identify yourself.
BILL DRAYTON: Bill Drayton from Ashoka Youth Venture. The other side of metrics that can only measure certain things is judgment. And so I think we've talked about how to encourage innovation, so how do we in a very fast evolving field structurally encourage judgment? How do we build that in so that it is as important and that we use it equally as the much easier and bureaucratically comfortable quantitative measures that the whole field is being pushed to use by those that are more comfortable with them?
DUNN: So let's just take a couple of questions and then we'll let our guests respond. Other questions? Can you just identify yourself?
DONALD RUBIN: Yeah, I'm Donald Rubin from New York. Rubin Museum of Art and Foundation. I think I'd like to hear you talk about the issue of finding the problem that needs to be fixed before we look at the metrics once we have defined the product. All over the nonprofit world we're looking at -- we're all isolated, we're all doing our own thing. We have, in my judgment and I'd like you to comment on it -- first, define the problem, then do a search of every foundation, every business, everybody's that's working on that thing and seeing if we could coordinate it, if we could work together. You do this piece of it, I will do this piece. And I think that the model that I'm talking about was written in the book The Rockefeller Conscience. When they found and were interested in hookworm and they went out and found everybody in the country working on hookworm, and they found the solution for it. But I think before we get into the metrics of measuring, we've got to get into the metrics of figuring out what the problem is, and who is working on it, and how we can work together on it. Can you comment on that, please?
DUNN: Two more?
PETER KAROFF: Peter Karoff, Synergos board member. My question is when you think about the market economy and its potential to address social dilemmas, what do you worry about?
JOHN STEINER: John Steiner from Boulder, Colorado. As you each go through this innovation, finding new ways of doing philanthropy, who are some of your other thinking partners?
RODIN: A lack of slavish responsiveness to metrics, and I hope we indicated that. Judgment comes from experience, it comes from being willing to try things and failing. You're not doing well if you don't make some mistakes, I agree with that completely. You're not doing the innovative pilot work, you're not trying something that somebody else hasn't tried. So use your own creativity, your own judgment, trust your gut not just your head. You're going to talk about following your passion, and often it's that integration of passion and judgment that I think really does lead you to the problem that you're willing to put time and energy into and where you will have some staying power.
I would say in response to your question that the world has gotten more complicated since the Rockefeller Foundation worked on hookworm. The number of philanthropies in the United States alone is in the thousands. And while I agree completely in the need to do due diligence to make sure that others are -- to know what others are doing as you think of being in a field, and possibly collaborating, I think that sometimes seeing a crowded field may be a reason to stay out. There are a number of really significant problems and you have to ask yourself not what you would like to do, but what you think you can do best. And that's a very tough question to really ask and to answer honestly because there are wonderful things that would make you feel very good, but where you may not have a core strength. Your own personal philanthropic bent, your own knowledge, your own network may not be such. And the answer may not be to find the right collaborators who are already in that space, but to find a problem that you think with the right partners you can address.
One of the things that I found most distressing when I took this job was the enormous amount of money spent by foundations on partnering. Partnerships that were financial partnerships rather than strategic partnerships. So my friend at X foundation called me and said I need an extra million for my pet project. I gave the extra million and then was able to hit that friend up next year for a million for my pet project. I looked at it over the prior ten years at Rockefeller and net-net we would've been better off funding most of it ourselves. So we're looking for strategic partners, partners who really are in place, who want to leverage. And your comment about content and topical partners is right, but you really need the kind of creativity, not only the money that comes from having a strategic partner. It's not about dividing up the space, it's really about what you can accomplish in terms of creating that kind of leverage. I'll let the economist talk about market forces.
SANDBERG: Oh, leaving me the hard one. I'll start with market forces and then come back to the other.
You know, I'm a big believer in market forces. No country's ever developed without the market economy, including China, no country's ever developed without child labor. It doesn't mean we support it, it doesn't mean we believe in it, but a lot of the things that come with the market economy are really important. And some of the things we try to impose on the developing world, had someone impose them on us when we were developed in the 1800's it would've stunted growth particularly.
So on the margins I'm feeling a little more uncomfortable about certain things I don't like and letting countries develop. Because no country has ever lifted out of poverty without economic growth, and no country has ever lifted out of poverty without market based economic growth because the only other economic growth is economic growth that's only at the top, not at the bottom, and that doesn't work. So I think the power of the market is very, very important.
I also think in the developed world, in the wealthy world, the wealthier parts of the developing world, if we want to care, and we should care about pollution, about things that are negative externalities to the market, we need to fund those. If we want to save the world from climate change and we deeply want to save the world from climate change, I care a lot but the wealthy world pays for it -- not the poor in China who need to develop. And I think it's worth thinking about how when we are trying to solve market inefficiencies such as pollution, who bears the brunt of that extra payment or paying for the public good? And I really do believe it should be the world's wealthy, not the world's poor. Some of the things that are done in the name of very good causes, particularly in environment, have the impact of hurting the world's poor and keeping them from developing, and I think that's one of the travesties of our time.
In terms of the other questions of innovation, of measurements, of partnership -- and these are all the right questions -- we think about partnerships a lot at Google and we actually on the company side do very few of them. It's hard if you're running a technology platform the way we are that's global, to integrate with other companies' technology. The business and technology corollary to what Judy talked about would be if you looked at technology companies and you looked at the resources they spend integrating software from other people's companies, they might as well have built it themselves. It's the same exact thing she's saying. I mean, you all run businesses. Anyone every put in an Oracle or a SeBo product? You know, ask yourself how much did you spend for the project and how much did you spend on the consultant who came in to integrate it with what you were doing? You know, it's one-tenth, nine-tenths.
And so, we look for partners on the business side that are strategic and that's certainly what we're doing on the philanthropic side. We are looking for people -- we're probably not going to partner with other technology companies. We think we're pretty good at that. We want to partner with people like Rockefeller, who can teach us about running things that are philanthropic, teach us about having long-term, sustainable impact, so that we can help working with people like that to create whatever is the new field of public health, the new terrain that we all want to help solve to make the world a better place.
DUNN: I think we'll take one more. Can you speak loudly?
ADELE SIMMONS: Yes, I can speak loudly. I am very interested in roles. And I am particularly interested, Judy, in your thoughts. You are someone who benefited from foundation funding research that governments weren't ready to fund. Do you see different roles for the large foundations like Rockefeller and Ford compared to individual funders and donors. I am interested in understanding whether there is a difference in the work the two groups do.
RODIN: Thanks, Adele. I did, I benefited. I attribute my academic administrative leadership career, which was never my aspiration when I ran a huge lab at Yale in basic biological and psychological science, to my experience at the McArthur Foundation. MacArthur at the time, under Adele's leadership, was really trying to see if they could create new fields by creating networks of scholars across a variety of disciplines that would really learn one another's language and not collaborate in a very limited way, as most collaborations across disciplines, especially diverse disciplines, occur. But really learn each other's language and create new fields at the interstices of discipline. And it was both an extraordinary opportunity to lead that network, and many of us who led those networks went onto other really major leadership roles.
Those kinds of opportunities that large foundations have, to have the resources to change fields, is extraordinary. Sometimes that work has less intentionality in terms of the beneficiaries on the ground. MacArthur was unusual, I think, in really having programs that were very focused on local beneficiaries, the Chicago program, and so it operated in a way at that level as an individual, more personal philanthropy at the same time it operated as a large philanthropy.
SIMMONS: Well, we weren't the only ones.
RODIN: No, no, but it's true. And I don't think some of the other large foundations really saw themselves quite in that way.
I will say that the wonderful difference for many of you -- the opportunity that you have, and the element that I think both of us are trying to bring into our own work is the ability to be closer to the ground, to hear from the extraordinary beneficiaries, to really, really believe that you can identify problems, you can work on those problems in a much more hands-on way. That's a great gift. I sometimes feel that I need to restrain myself in this way because sometimes I want to jump into the NGO role rather than just be the grant making entity. We want to really feel the impact. That's the great gift of philanthropy. And so we're going to try to find in our new model not ways that we can interfere with, or interrupt, or replace the current small philanthropists, but where we can have that kind of structure that allows us to be big and act small. And I think that that's a great challenge and a great skill that the larger philanthropies really need to develop, and we look forward to it.
DUNN: Thank you both very much. Sheryl's going to be with us this evening, and hopefully Judith can stay for a few minutes during the break so if there was a question you had wanted to ask, didn't have a chance to do it, you may be able to catch up with her. Thank you both so much for coming.
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