The interview with Jeff Skoll, the first company president of e-Bay, in the url below is interesting because it describes how he responded to suddenly finding himself a billionaire:
“When he left eBay in 2001, there was only one direction for a reluctant billionaire like him to head in. "I had started to think about philanthropy, which I'd never really thought about before, because I never had any money," he says. "I was living off room-mates' leftovers and then all of a sudden I had all this money."”
Two projects, in particular, now occupy his time—the first is the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School at Oxford University:
“The relationship with a business school has allowed Skoll to provide formal MBA education to people who might not ordinarily have been able to experience it. … It's a one-year MBA and there are five scholarships for these social entrepreneurs that come into the programme. It's worked out very well."”
The second, and more interesting, I think, is Participant Media:
“Changing the world through business is one of Skoll's two main activities. The other is his film company, Participant Media, which aims to change the world through movies. Founded in 2004, Participant aims to produce "quality entertainment about meaningful issues".”
Participant Media “is now a serious player, producing 17 films in the past four years” and has produced movies such as Good Night and Good Luck (with George Clooney) and the documentaries, An Inconvenient Truth (http://www.climatecrisis.net/) and Food, Inc (http://www.foodincmovie.com/). The important thing, as Skoll says, is making a difference:
“The trick is finding something that is really dealing with an important issue. There's a creative part, there's the commercial part and there's the social part. And making sure all of that is working.”
His role is to make sure it all works—sounds very cool to me.
Take care
David
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
The timid titan
Lunch with the FT: Jeff Skoll made his fortune with eBay. Now he uses it to change the world through business - and to make movies that make a difference. Stefan Stern enjoys a fittingly modest meal with a reluctant billionaire Stern, Stefan
2280 words
13 June 2009
London Ed1
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