Driving down Parmer Lane in Austin, Texas the other day, I passed by a massive 16-wheeler emblazoned with the Goodwill Industries’ logo on its side. On the left, there was a huge picture of a girl who appeared utterly lost, desperation and despair showing in her eyes. But the right side showed the same girl, bright and cheery, sitting behind a desk in an office environment, talking on the phone. Above this image was the caption, “Don’t let your past define your future.” Goodwill is one of the largest non-profit organisations in the US, with revenue over $ 4.4 billion annually. It provides employment to more than four million people, collects donations from tens of millions every year and has been serving relentlessly since 1902. It really is a marvel, which has reformed the lives of probably a hundred million people since inception. Organisations operating on this scale influence not just individuals but entire nations. Goodwill is most certainly like the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and in Pakistan, the Edhi Trust; it is that category of outfit.
It is easy to appreciate the impact of Goodwill when you view it at a macro level: so many millions of lives, so many millions of jobs, so many billions of dollars in donations and incomes earned for the needy. But the macro impact cannot come about without an outstretched hand grasping firmly on to another, one at a time. Indeed, the business of making people’s lives better, the business of improving the human condition is messier than the comforting assurance of large numbers. The micro view, then, is neither sanitised nor comfortable, but it is the view that we must all deal with if we are to create goodwill around us. Quite often, when we are faced with that realization, we turn away. Our biases kick in and we shy away from the ‘mess’ we see before ourselves. In Pakistan, in particular, some of these biases can be quite strong. Let’s face it. We harbour biases of all kinds. The poor souls who engage in the performing arts were for the longest time summarily dismissed as ‘mirasis’ (lowly music performers), and female practitioners of dance as ‘randis’ (prostitutes). If you were involved in any of this, you were up to no good, and if you were ever involved in it, you could never be up to any good. Those who have read Umrao Jan Ada, and are familiar with the self-reflection and self-doubt captured wonderfully in that novel, know what I mean. Society with its strong labels paints you into a corner and you wonder if you will ever be more than that label. If you let the past taint you and that past becomes a determinant of the future, then isn’t the future already lost? What room then, for hope?
On the flip side, if you believe in people and give them a chance, it makes all the difference. I’ve experienced this in my own life. When I came to the US as a student, I was in an entirely new environment. I remember landing in Austin, my flight delayed late into the night, bags lost, not knowing a soul in town and not having a place to stay. It did not matter who I knew back home, or who my friends and family were. At 18, I stood in uncharted territory, completely unknown, with nothing to rely upon other than what I knew, the people I met, the relationships I developed, and the encouragement of strangers who I hoped would become friends.
In 1998, I was attending Grad School at the UT Austin, and engrossed in developing algorithms that eventually formed the basis of what would become my first US start-up. My co-founders and I had somehow wrangled a meeting with Bob Stearns, the Chief Technology Officer of Compaq Computer, at the time the world’s largest PC company. He was based in Houston and was an avid investor. Our first conversation had gone just barely well enough to convince him to come see our software on his next trip to Austin. But he appeared far from sold. I feverishly prepared for the visit. I was a no-name student from a country that had just been in the news for testing nuclear weapons; I had no roots in the US, no residency, no citizenship, no reputation, no one to vouch for me, no banks to attest to my credibility, no property to my name. I had nothing. With that kind of a profile, it would have been easy to dismiss me. Bob was one of the most powerful people in the hottest industry on the planet. Everyone who was anyone knew him. I did not even understand why he would take time out of his day, come down to the UT campus, look for parking, climb up flights of stairs to a tiny apartment, which was probably the size of his coat closet, to see a demo given by a no-name ‘kid’ he had met once or twice in his life. Why?
But, for some reason, he did. He showed up. He sat through the demo. He heard my pitch and I will never forget what he said at the end. “I get it. I’m sorry I didn’t when you explained it to me in Houston, but sometimes you just have to see these things in person. What you have here is a new way to extract and visualise information, and I think it’s interesting.” Then he got up, walked out of the room and stood out on the balcony, gesturing to me to come join him. He put one arm around my shoulder and shook my hand, looked at me and just said, “I’ll get you funded.” That was it.
For me personally, this one moment probably changed my life’s trajectory. I went down a path that perhaps I would not have otherwise taken. And while it is tempting for people who take the entrepreneurial course to want to claim personal credit for what they do, I won’t even try, because I know the truth is far removed from such simplistic explanations. It takes a village, as they say. The fact is that you can trace a lot of positive societal change to moments of trust, belief and empowerment such as my ‘Bob moment’. When heaps of good accumulate down the road, and you reflect upon where it all came from, there is usually a Bob Stearns, a Bill Hewlett, a Jim Clark or a Venrock involved somewhere in the background making a bet, believing in someone, empowering someone. It is important to understand this, because only by being mindful of it in the present can we actively make such moments part of future history. When we can, we should. Because believing in someone does make all the difference.
The writer is an inventor and technology entrepreneur involved with businesses in the US and Pakistan