Life of Significance - Kim Tan

This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity

Sanyin Siang: You can live a life of significance. The choice is yours. This is the Duke University Life of Significance series, and we're exploring what matters, how we matter, and more inclusive views of who matters. Through this series, we hope to share stories that will inspire you, tickle your imagination, and provide ideas for creating a life that matters.

I'm Sanyin Siang, and I'm the executive director of Duke University's Center on Leadership and Ethics. Greg Jones is my co-host today. Greg is the president of Belmont University, and prior to that he was the Dean of Duke University Divinity School. And if you were to ask me who some of my heroes are, Greg would also be high up on the list—he doesn’t stop believing in you, even when you may not always believe in yourself.

Our guest today is Greg’s dear friend Kim Tan. Kim is an impact investor and entrepreneur who helps generate imaginative solutions for social issues and challenges we face today, including poverty. He is a brilliant scientist and one of the humblest people I’ve ever encountered.

Greg Jones: You've been a scientist, a chemist who got a Ph.D. in chemistry, and then you started a company. Over the last two decades, you’ve decided that writing checks as a philanthropist wasn’t going to address the big issues of the day, especially poverty. You’ve got projects all over the world. What led you to those projects, and what does a life of significance mean to you?

Kim Tan: I realized about 20 years ago that generosity is insufficient, and that the real goal of giving should be justice. I think generosity as donors usually just makes the donor feel good, whereas justice implicates the donor. And justice means that we have to make larger changes, and those changes have to be more sacrificial (in terms of how we want to address inequality and social injustice). 

So, I became disillusioned with my own philanthropy and my own generosity, and realized that when you have money, the easiest thing to do is just write a check to charity and think you’ve done your bit. But, actually, what people really need in the developing world are people who can come alongside them to help them build and scale businesses to address several issues at once: job creation, independence to care for families, and address social needs.

Once we began looking at these big social challenges and asking ourselves—as businesspeople who are supposed to be creative—can we design sustainable businesses that are scalable? That can be profitable? But that also address social needs and challenges? 

In a sense, it doesn’t matter what the social challenge is. That’s how we look at investments now. So, it could be employing prisoners in a telephone call center and paying them—upskilling them—and then we employ them when they’re released from prison. It could be rescuing survivors of the sex industry and upskilling them with different jobs—and then creating job opportunities for them. We have several hundred employed in the Philippines who are survivors, and several hundred in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Or we could be looking at poverty in rural parts of the world where it’s so difficult to create real, sustainable jobs for people who, for generations, have been subsistence farming. How do you help these people out of poverty? You need new models—creating organic farming, permaculture farming, and you scale it.

Or we could be looking at the challenge of low-cost education. How do you provide low-cost education in slums in Asia and Africa? Well, the answer is technology. It's by using tablets, getting all your lesson plans on the tablets, and parents pay five dollars per month per child. You pay teachers and pay your suppliers using mobile money and therefore reduce the cost. Then you’re able to create a business at scale for five dollars per child per month. We now have five and a half thousand schools with that model, with a million primary school kids. When schools shut down post-COVID, it was a challenging time—we had to pivot to an online model—but as soon as the schools reopened, thankfully, seven hundred thousand kids turned up.

So, this model of generosity is designing enterprise-based solutions to different challenges in our society. They’re sustainable, scalable, and commercially viable.

To circle back to the beginning of my answer—I got disillusioned when I was on holiday in South Africa. I went to the slums and decided that I needed to pivot out of biotech venture capital fund management and use that experience to now run what we call social impact funds. Twenty years ago, we called them social venture capitals, and my first investment was to buy 40,000 acres of badly degraded farmland, reverse the degradation, build about 75 kilometers of elephant-proof reserve fencing, and then return big-game animals to that reserve after 150 years. And then build a five-star hotel or a lodge, using an eco-tourism model to bring restoration to the land to get conservation projects going and employ AIDS orphans. The idea would then be that the AIDS orphans would grow and develop into their full potential with skills to contribute to the local economy’s largest venture.

Using an enterprise and investment model, we were able to address big-question issues, like loss of habitat and biodiversity, climate change and so on. This model looks at a whole range of challenges and uses business to address them on a sustainable basis.

Sanyin Siang: Kim, your passion is inspiring, and I think if I were redoing your introduction, I would add two more monikers. One is that you’re a futurist in terms of the co-creation element. Two, I would say you’re a social steward. You’re stewarding people with an underlying set of beliefs that we’re interdependent, and that the challenges we’re facing are interdependent, and therefore you have an ecosystem mindset.

And then to bring it down to a very human level, it sounds like you have a belief in the inherent worth and value of every individual—sex workers, prisoners, AIDS orphans. Can we dive into that a bit more?

Kim Tan: As a Christian, I believe, fundamentally, that man’s been created in the image of God and therefore has intrinsic value. The young kids we’re schooling have the same potential as you and me; they just don’t have the same opportunities. Part of what we’re wanting to do is give them the opportunities. They have the same ability, the same talent.

I grew up poor and my parents were immigrants from China who came to Malaysia at the age of 18 with nothing. They built a small business. We grew up in a tin shack and we had a well in our backyard for water. And I know many, many people who have that kind of background, and they have the same potential, same ability as me, but, unlike me, they haven’t been given the opportunities. I’ve just been blessed by being given the opportunities.

Sanyin Siang: That origin story also underscored the idea that we sometimes live in a very individualistic society where we sometimes take on this myth that we’re self-made and forget about the investment others have made in our lives. 

Can you tell us about a few of the heroes in your life who have seen possibilities in you?

Kim Tan: I think, if we all look back, we were all inspired at some stage by a teacher. Initially, I wanted to be a historian. I had a wonderful history teacher. I thought I’d go do history and be a lawyer. But I had a wonderful science teacher who showed me the world of science and—suddenly—I was hooked. So, I think our teachers are so important, and this is why the education piece of social impact is so important. 

Outside of teachers, one person who has inspired me is Nelson Mandela. The ability of this man to forgive all the people who hurt him—his country incarcerated him for 20-something years. I mean, without him South Africa would have blown up; there would have been a civil war. What an incredible responsibility he had to lead that nation. 

In an area of science my hero is Sir Fred Sanger, double Nobel Prize laureate. He gave us the foundation for the whole biotech industry, but he’s the humblest, most gracious man you’ll ever meet. I remember as a young Ph.D. student presenting a minor paper at a forum at Cambridge, and I was told Sir Fred was in the audience. It absolutely terrified me, but he was so gracious.

The people I love and respect the most are those who have shown humility.

Greg Jones: In the social impact stories you told earlier—which are so inspiring—you didn’t talk a lot about the outcomes, and they’re even more inspiring. The recidivism rate in the call center compared to Singapore’s national recidivism rate; the opportunities for former sex workers; the outcomes of the education program in Uganda, 30% above the national average—could you talk about those outcomes? Part of what’s inspiring about you is that you’re concerned about outcomes, not just intentions, and you use metrics to assess whether or not we’re accomplishing what we’re hoping to accomplish.

Kim Tan: We love measuring these kinds of things wherever we can. In terms of education, the outcome is measured by the national exam given in each country. And in Uganda, three years running, we’ve had a 100% pass rate from our slum schools compared to the government’s 45% national average. So, we’re certainly outperforming. 

With recidivism, we're down at about 2% or 3%. But that’s only just four years’ worth of data, so give us more time. That compare with about 60% in the UK and the US within two years. About 60% of our sex workers will reoffend. 

But we try to understand that these people are broken. And part of what the creative genius of business can do is mend these broken lives, rebuild brokenness, rebuild broken relationships with families. This looks like: paying incarcerated people a minimum wage in prison. They come away with money in their pockets, so they’re able to send money home to their families who have maybe disowned them and are ashamed of them. But once you start sending money home, your family starts to revisit, and restoration of the family slowly occurs. 

Then, when they’re released, we rehire them. And it's an environment where they then don't have to go back to their old friends and they might have a good relationship with their family now. They’re working in an environment where they know they’re being loved and accepted. Why? Because the CEO is an ex-con, the CFO is an ex-con, the head of training is an ex-con, and nobody needs to hide their backgrounds. They’re accepted; they belong, and we all need a sense of belonging. 

We try to create environments of belonging that will see people flourish, and leadership is important in creating this. Leaders who can create a sense of belonging are important. These outcomes are really, really important.

Greg Jones: I think your invocation of leadership is crucial. You couldn’t do all of these projects around the world without training and developing leaders. You’ve also spoken about the importance of humility—I think you also probably look for humility in the leaders of your projects. Why is humility important when you’re developing entrepreneurial projects and trying to find the solution? What about humility matters?

Kim Tan: We look for four qualities when we're making these investments. 

One is competence, rather than intelligence. I'd rather invest in somebody who's built a small business in the slum than an MBA student out of an Ivy League university. I know how hard it is to build these kinds of businesses among the poor. So obviously, competence. 

Second, they need to be hardworking because it's extremely tough. 

Third, integrity is critical. Sometimes we spend a lot of time just drinking tea and getting to know them on the integrity issue.

And then finally, the fourth quality we look for is humility or modesty. Why? Because pride kills relationships; pride kills businesses. And if we want to scale our businesses, we want people who, when the project grows from 10-50 people to 100-10,000 employees—we want someone who is humble enough to employ people smarter than themselves. If there’s no sense of humility, they will never employ people smarter than themselves because they’ll feel too threatened. Plus, it’s a long relationship with these businesses. We want to be able to enjoy them. And you want someone who is teachable, who will be open to new ideas. That’s why the humility piece is so important.

Sanyin Siang: We’re discovering now that teams, not the individual, are the atomic unit of organizations and communities. And when we think about teams, we often just think about functional interdependencies. We don’t always think about the emotional interdependencies, which would make humility so important.

Now, shifting gears a bit, every single person is different, and everybody wants to make a difference. They may not have the background to create mega partnerships to solve the problems of the world in the way you solve them. What can we all do today to be significant?

Kim Tan: My encouragement to my students when I speak to them is: doing something small is better than doing nothing. So, whatever that is, just go do it. 

For many years before I switched to social impact, I was just involved with running biotech companies. Then it got to a point where I had to make a decision to transition out and go into social impact. I was fortunate enough to have the financial independence to do that. But that was a season. I couldn’t have done it earlier. We need to understand what season of our lives we’re in, and in that season, do the little that we can. Be responsible for the little that you have been charged with and then you'll be given more.

Greg Jones: Kim, I want to pick up on something you said earlier. It sounds like you value cultivating networks of relationships, which creates a multiplier effect. It’s not just that you’re doing these projects and you have all this oversight. You’re also developing the Transformational Business Network that hosts conferences in Asia and in the US, around Africa and other parts of the world, because you value collaboration and significant friendships. Could you talk a bit about how you think of that?

Kim Tan: Very simply, Greg, it's because I’m one individual. What can I really do? I’m one drop in the ocean, I can't do it. Very early on when I started on this journey, I realized we needed a network, a movement. Seventeen years ago, we started this network called the Transformational Business Network. It’s a network of about 3000-4000 disillusioned philanthropists and repentant bankers—that’s how we describe ourselves. And we’d get on planes, go have a holiday in the slums, find a few potential businesses, put a more robust business plan around them, put mentoring in and patient capital, and help them grow and scale their business. In the network, we’re trying to find people who are time poor and cash rich—but have a lot of talents and ability—to help them live a life that’s more significant than just success. 

The network is also now involved with screening businesses and overseeing a six-month mentoring program to help them get everything in place before they become investable. One of the key pieces of the six-moth program is character formation. If you don’t have that, nothing else works right. You need humility. You need integrity.

When we started it was just private individuals like me doing. Now there’s an ecosystem and it’s such a big network that it’s inspired and challenged some of us to leave our day jobs running biotech type funds and run social impact funds. Some of us live in Africa or Asia now within the ecosystem, and we can do deals at a million dollars, up to ten million dollars, because they’re running bigger funds. So, the network has helped to catalyze the ecosystem because the thing that we found within these spaces is not that companies die because of their ideas, but because they run out of cash. We take a disciplined approach and try to fill up this ecosystem at every stage now. These businesses that we’re nurturing have an opportunity to raise bigger and bigger sums of money to help them grow and scale.

Greg Jones: You've told me some stories about particular individuals who've captured your heart in your relationships, in the call center or in specific projects. Is there a specific story of somebody who you just carry around in your heart as an inspiration from day to day that keeps you focused on the big picture? 

Kim Tan: Certainly. At the call center, I always think of the CEO himself, who had been in jail three times, eight years. Nobody would fund him, nobody would believe in him. But we did, and we mentored him. He was able to be taught and has grown the business from nothing. Now he’s employing over 200 people—it’s a sustainable, profitable business that has just been awarded a contract by the government to have a certified training and job placement program for prisoners on parole and open release.

Here’s another person. We have a chain of computer training centers in the slums in South Africa. My wife and I wanted to go see one of the new outlets that they had opened. When we arrived, the founder called the woman who was doing the classroom training to come meet us. She has an amazing story. She used to be a maid and travel by taxi from Khayelitsha, the township in Cape Town. Then she saw an advert for a six-month paid training to have a Microsoft certificate. She decided she was going to register and do this training. She finished and wasn’t satisfied, so then she registered for the C++ coding program. Then she graduated and now she’s the trainer.

You know what that’s about? That’s about creating an environment with opportunities for human flourishing.

Sanyin Siang: Kim. If I were to pick a theme for this entire conversation, it will be that life of significance is about seeing possibilities. Seeing possibilities in people, in networks and in our ability to be able to affect change. 

Kim Tan: I would go one step further. Yes, it is seeing possibility, but is also about serving others, because, I think everyone would say, yeah, we see possibility and talent in everybody, but how many of us are willing to serve and create the environment for human flourishing. 

Sanyin Siang: So it's seeing and acting. It goes back to the very beginning, the generosity and the justice piece, that justice is about acting. And it's all undergirded also on this foundation of character. Character traits such as competency and humility.