Work is at the core of human dignity.

Talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not.

You can use principles of the free market to drive social change.

My personal style comes from jugaad, a Hindi word meaning doing more with less.

Handouts are not going to end global poverty, but work - real work - just might.

Labor looks different in the 21st century. And so should our job training programs.

The challenges that the homeless face aren't dissimilar to those in developing countries.

Don’t underestimate the ripple effect of what you do. These kinds of actionshave toppled empires.

Bling is passe, and I like my style to reflect just that. Ruthless editing defines true style perfectly.

Using the Internet to secure employment is as vital to a construction worker as it is to a software engineer.

It's really helpful to be physically engaged in something that's completely different from my day-to-day work.

Barbies were banned at our house, along with television other than PBS. As a kid, I found this horribly embarrassing.

In order to thrive in the 21st century, you have to be a savvy citizen of the digital economy or risk being left behind.

I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth.

Most of us working on poverty alleviation simply want to know, 'How much poverty can I reduce for every dollar I donate?'

Traditional charity is still fairly focused on how it makes donors feel as opposed to outcomes for people that need help.

True leadership isn't about having an idea. It's about having an idea and recruiting other people to execute on this vision.

A lot of people are happy to give money to charities but are wary of giving through taxes because they feel it doesn't produce any value.

The problem in a lot of low-income countries is that people take out loans to go and get degrees, which are then irrelevant in the job market.

Dancing is my therapy. I also try to meditate every morning and take several two-hour yoga classes a week at my favorite yoga studio, Urban Flow.

I used to think my job as a CEO meant managing metrics and meeting goals, but I've realised now that's it's about managing my board and employees.

I'd worked at the World Bank briefly as an undergrad and studied poverty levels around the world - particularly those earning less than $1.25 a day.

We have people from places like Oracle, Microsoft, Intuit. Sama plays a huge role in why people leave lucrative careers to join a social enterprise.

The best way to end poverty is to simply give people work, which isn't considered 'sexy' among donors who want to fund a preschool or cure a disease.

The more time I spent in developing countries, and the more time I spent talking to poor people, I realized what they want more than anything is a good job.

Many people don't think that the poor in the developing world can do work on a computer. They won't say it explicitly. But they think it's too sophisticated.

The amount of work that a for-profit has to do to get real money is minimal compared to the amount of work it takes a non-profit to get even a very small grant.

I believe there is no other way to create decent livelihoods for the world's poorest people than to connect them to global markets as producers, and on fair terms.

Migration is the story of my life: my parents and grandparents journeyed across four continents to flee war and find jobs, eventually finding their way to the U.S.

I grew up in Los Angeles, where long drives on packed freeways make everyone a fan of radio and, particularly, of America's national treasure, National Public Radio.

The greatest challenge of the next 50 years, I believe, will be to create dignified work for everyone... not through handouts and charity, but through market forces.

I love adventure. When I'm not working or on the road, you can find me in my favorite spots around the Mission neighborhood of S.F., kitesurfing in the Bay or dancing.

I grew up believing in meritocracy and the American dream. My parents came here from India. They had no connections. My brother and I went to public schools, and both of us succeeded.

At Samasource, a company I founded in 2008, we train people living in poverty from Kenya to California to develop and market 21st century digital skills to adapt to new economic realities.

Every woman that dies or loses her baby on a threadbare cot in the heart of Uganda, while her sisters on the other side of the world enjoy first-class care, is a threat to our collective humanity.

FlipBoard is the 'W Magazine' of the iPad-app world. The sleek interface makes content from your friends' Facebook and Twitter feeds much easier on the eyes by displaying them in a magazine format.

I own a shameless number of ethnic necklaces acquired at local markets in developing countries or inherited from my grandmother. These have seen me through meetings in Davos and visits to refugee camps.

Technology is a tough realm to navigate as a younger woman who is not married. It can be hard to cultivate professional relationships because you have to be conscious of how to engage potential investors.

We know what happens when a woman earns money. She is far more likely than a man to spend her earnings on the health and education of her children and to invest in improving her family's standard of living.

I love dancing and practiced ballet for ten years until I realized I wouldn't make it professionally - then I started taking salsa classes. I learned to dance samba in Rio and Salvador when I lived in Brazil.

Time and again we’ve seen that reducing poverty comes down to economic opportunity-not just connecting the poor to services like banking, but ensuring they can be producers on fair terms in the global economy.

I founded Samasource because I was frustrated by traditional approaches to poverty alleviation. Even those approaches focused on jobs often equip poor people with skills for which there is little market demand.

In terms of environmental impact, Samasource jobs are very green. Our product is human intelligence, and it's transported through the Internet rather than via carbon-intensive trucking, shipping, and warehousing.

Impact sourcing, a new initiative piloted by the Rockefeller Foundation and several key partners, including my company Samasource, promises to connect poor and marginalized people to digital jobs on a massive scale.

I really love travelling to places where I get to learn something new about a new group of people or a new place. Learn some history, contemplate some business ideas, and sort of get off the beaten track a little bit.

Sama means 'equal' in Sanskrit; I chose 'Samasource' because I thought it really reflected a value that I had and that I wanted the company to have, which is that everyone has equal capabilities and deserves an equal chance.

It's much easier for people to compare wages or identify bad employers or discuss bad labor practices in the Internet economy than it was in, say, a factory environment, where that stuff wasn't usually published or available.

My mom was a big feminist, and when I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to have typical girl toys: she did not let me have dolls. Barbies were banned in our household. She read feminist books to me; my mom was a major feminist.

The thing that the Internet does is it allows labor to move freely across borders in the way that capital does but, traditionally, labor cannot. So the Internet frees workers to be based anywhere and work for employers anywhere.

I think the way you build a company for the future has to include social impact; it has to be part of the fabric of your company. I think when you do that, you invariably end up with much better outcomes, even in the short-term.

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