"If you want to do good, make money."
Po-Shen Loh, a social entrepreneur and Carnegie Mellon math professor who coached the US Math Olympiad team for a decade, learned this from a philanthropist he’d approached for a donation. The answer: don’t ask for money, make it, then use it to do good.
He’d already seen the trap: if you lose money on every person you help, you stay dependent on philanthropy forever. Impact without sustainability doesn’t last.
So for 10 years, he’s been building situations where, in his words, "2+2=5," in which everyone involved comes out ahead. And he finally made one that checks all the boxes: LIVE, a venture operating on margins over 50% where the profit funds the mission.
We asked him to explain how it works.
00:00 Intro
01:15 Make 2+2=5
06:32 We Invented a Better Model
13:01 Learning From What Didn’t Work to Build What Does
17:23 How to Get Paid to Do Good
22:12 Try Everything But Quit
25:41 The Best Time to Be a Social Entrepreneur
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