hankyoreh

By Lee Won-jae, Head of The Hankyoreh Economic Research Institute

In 1998, Stanford University Ph.D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page gave up their studies and left graduate school, founding an Internet search company instead. They had left a world renowned university for an unknown world with an unsure future, at a time when there was still a lot of noisy uncertainty of what the future of the Internet would look like. Thus was Google born. Brin and Page have now joined the ranks of the world’s richest men individuals.

In 1948, a Catholic nun named Teresa gave up her work as a teacher at a school in Calcutta and left the religious order to which she had pledged her life, donning the white sari worn by India’s poorest women. After finishing a three-month course in nursing, she headed straight for Calcutta’s slums and began helping people. She was not held back by the attractiveness of life at a mission school, where she could have gotten credit for doing just enough good in the world while enjoying a comfortable life. Nor was she held back by any fear of having to live with India’s "untouchables" in extreme poverty.

She worked deeper into the lower echelons of society, setting up the Home for Dying Destitutes, orphanages, and a home for people suffering from Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. And so was Mother Teresa born. Eventually, she won the Nobel Peace Prize and the designation of "saint."

Recently, I met some people who want to maintain the values of Mother Teresa while building a company like Google. They want to build a "social venture company" and make money at the same time. I met them at the "Global Social Venture Competition" held at the University of California at Berkeley.

Four Korean university students calling themselves the ACT team are preparing to start their own similar company. The idea is to take electronic equipment discarded by other companies and let poor artists use it as material, then make a business out of selling their work. Between them, they have majored in subjects like business, politics, and design. They debated for hours about what it means for the environment to reuse old electronic equipment, what it means socially to help poor artists, and how much they will be able to earn as a company.

There were others like them. Young people from across the globe were dreaming of a meeting between Google and Mother Teresa. There were participants who intend to help the disadvantaged in society by providing them with more information, through things like software that converts doctors’ prescriptions into pictures for those who cannot read. There were participants who want to give inexpensive lamps to people in rural India that have no electricity. Some said they are going to make public school lunches environmentally friendly. Everyone was dreaming of achieving social value while making a profit.

People dream two types of dreams. One is the Google dream, the dream of spending your passion on your work and then getting rich with plenty of compensation. The other is the Mother Teresa dream, the dream of living an upright existence and helping one’s neighbors, and earning recognition for that kind of life. Usually you have to give up one in order to live out the other. But more and more, one sees people who want to invest their lives in building companies that help them achieve both.

Is it not fun to think about Google having the noble values of Mother Teresa and Mother Teresa being as fast and efficient as Google? Would that not be a job worth dreaming about - if you could help people in need like Mother Teresa and help the national economy as well as feed your own family while making money like Google? In these times, when vision and experimentation are disappearing, those who have begun to dream new dreams are a precious social asset. I’m cheering for the "social venture entrepreneurs."

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]