Raj Kumar - The Business of Changing the World: How Billionaires, Tech Disrupters, and Social Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Aid Industry

For Dr. A. H. Somjee, my uncle born fifty years before me to the day, who opened my eyes to global development and still does.

For my father Mohan Kumar, who supported some nontraditional career choices and made it possible for me to launch Devex.

For aid workers and development professionals everywhere. And for kids living in extreme povertymay theirs be the last generation.

AS A KID IN INDIA, long before I began covering the global aid industry, I saw a lot of poverty. I remember one childhood experience when I was seven and my sister, Sona, was nine. We were on the beach in Kanyakumari, the windblown southern tip of the country. Two girls about our age were spying us from a distance. This was not unusual. American kids with an Indian father and a Jewish American mother, we had light skin that in those days made us a marvel in many parts of the country. This time those two young girls conferred and then, smiling broadly, suddenly ran up to us. From the way they were dressed, it was obvious to us even then that they were extremely poor.

The older one pulled something from beneath a tattered sari fold: it was an orange. A gift. For these sisters, girls who may not have had a proper meal that day or even that week, this orange was clearly a prized possession. Something moved them to want to cross a divide, to share what little they had with two advantaged children with clean clothes and shoes and full bellies. Once they deposited it in our hands, they merrily skipped off.

This made an impression on usan experience from 1982 thats still fresh for Sona and mebut it took until adulthood to understand why. We had seen so much destitution when we would visit Indiamothers pressing their naked babies against car windows in traffic to beg for money, thousands of people defecating along the train tracksbut this was different.

Here was a moment in time, frozen like a transparent image so we could look through it from both sides and see what our own lives could have been like had we been born to different circumstances. It was a chance to see the humanity in all people, no matter their hardships, and a gut-wrenching realization that no one should be forced to live in such severe poverty.

It was August 1999, I was twenty-three years old, and I didnt know what to do with my life. So I did what other privileged young people do in those circumstancesI went to graduate school.

Its not that I needed a career. I already had one and was doing well at it. Starting as a volunteer in the White House press office while I was still an undergraduate student at Georgetown Universitys School of Foreign Service, I had bounced around working on campaigns ultimately landing as political director at a consulting firm in Manhattan. Penn Schoen & Berland was a Democratic powerhouse with clients such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. But I was restless.

With some Georgetown friends, I helped to start a financial media dot-com called SmartPortfolio. We ended up selling it to TheStreet.com, a much larger competitor. Nonetheless, I knew deep down that sharing stock tips with investors and campaign advice with wealthy candidates, while intellectually challenging and interesting, wasnt what I really wanted to do with my life.

I left the dot-com and political campaigning, hoping a masters degree in public policy from Harvards Kennedy School would help me find my way to a career that had something to do with making things better for poor people in poor countries. What would that be? I had no idea.

Right from the start, that question consumed me. My wife, Maria Teresa Kumar, whom I met standing in line to register for classes on the very first day, reminds me that I would walk around with a yellow legal pad for jotting down ideas. I took a course taught by Brian Atwood, who had just left the Clinton administration, where he headed the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and began to get a slightly clearer picture of the fuzzy foreign aid and charity landscape. I would pester my best friend and roommate, Kami Dar, who was working at a major USAID contractor, with questions about how the aid industry really worked.

It turns out not understanding the aid industry was an advantage. I asked people doing global development work a lot of basic questions and was surprised by things that seemed natural to them.

For one thing, I learned that those working in the aid industry didnt see themselves as working in an industry at all. They were dedicated to a specific issue, such as health or education, or they worked inside the bubble of a particular institutionfor example, UNICEF or Catholic Relief Services. They were doing important work but were disconnected from what was happening outside their own orbits.

For another, I found that there was no independent media outlet for aid industry professionals, as there was for professionals in law or finance or education or politics. Nor was there an easy way to get connected to the industryto know who was doing what, to research employers or find funding opportunities, to feel a part of a community of mission-driven professionals. When I asked about finding a job in global development, the university career center pointed me to a slim newsprint publication, and classmates suggested I go to Washington and attend cocktail parties to network.

I was just a newcomer, but suddenly it became clear to me: here was one of the worlds most consequential industries, stuck in the dark ages.

By 2000, Kami and Isoon joined by Jason McNaboe and Alan Robbins, two lifelong friends, with support from Brian Atwood as the chairman of our advisory boardhad hit upon the outlines of an idea. We would try to knit together this global industry by building an online community.

Almost immediately our online startup, Devex, took up all my time, as fledgling companies do. When I should have been doing homework, I was emailing with potential investors and punching up our business plan. With the lure of internet-era stock options, I somehow was able to convince two professionals in their fifties, both experienced managers of thousands of employees, to take over as our CEO and COO, respectively. I can still remember one of them feigning composure when he visited our office and realized it was my apartment. Not surprisingly, the arrangement didnt work out.

I now faced a decision: stick with school or plunge into the business. I told Joe Nye, who was then dean of the Kennedy School and already famous for having coined the term soft power, all about Devex, and hesurprisingly to meurged me to drop out and pursue it. Hadnt I come to the school for the very purpose of finding my own way into a global development career? Harvard wasnt going anywhere, and I would be welcome back at any time. As I told my shocked parents, who was I to question the wisdom of the dean?

From the start, we considered Devex a business with a social mission. We tried to say social enterprise, but no one had any idea what we meant in those days. Thats a big reason why nearly all the investors I met, and literally every single venture capital firm I spoke to, gave us a flat no. If it werent for friends and family, we would never have gotten off the ground.

We moved Devex operations to Washington, DC, the epicenter of the aid industry and home to USAID, the World Bank, and some of the biggest international nonprofits in the world. With little money to spare, four of us were sleeping in a two-bedroom apartment, and four more joined us during the day to work there. We were true believers who expected immediate success, but it actually took quite a while to get traction. It would be several more years before we had an office that wasnt my apartment.