Laurene Powell Jobs

philanthropic endeavors. So, in recent years, you become one of the largest philanthropists in the United States, but you've done largely this by anonymity that's not well known what you're supporting generally, and you try to stay in the background. I think, so, why do you try to do your

philanthropy this way? Often what happens, David, as you know with philanthropy is that there's a lot of um power that accrues to the giver and not as much to the organizations and the leaders that are doing the work on the ground. And so I wanted to make sure that that we were not the story that we were supporting people who were the story, that the leaders and the incredible workers who were doing day to day work to improve the lives of other humans were actually in

the front and we were in the back. And I didn't ever want there to be the emphasis on me as a donor, or on Emerson Collective as a donor as much as the work that's being done on the ground. So we started off as as almost entirely anonymous donors and givers. Over time, at the behest of the organization or the leader, sometimes we will be in the front. Of course, if you're supporting nonprofit journalism, that has that

has to be publicly acknowledged. So there there are plenty of times where we are where we are happy to acknowledge that we've made um a gift or a donation or what cour it over a long period of time. But that's not how we want to lead. So you do your philanthropy largely through Emerson Collective LLC. That's right. Why do you use an LLC rather than a foundation or nonprofit foundation, which is what people typically do. Yeah,

it's true. From the beginning, I always felt that I didn't want to be encumbered by by a foundational constraint. My intent was always to deploy capital at as smartly and usefully as I possibly could, so define the highest and best use of the next dollar and and so I thought I could always hold off and form a foundation if if it turned out we were only going

to be philanthropists as a group. But I also wanted to use other methodologies for for positive social change, like investing in entrepreneurs, sending companies, and perhaps using advocacy and artists, and and supporting movements and practices, and perhaps um young emerging leaders who didn't have a C three yet. And so I had I kept that level of ultimate flexibility

and nimbleness, and it served us really well. I think the other issue that's really important to note is I came into philanthropy and and and Emerson collective as a broader practice from the vantage point of not wanting to accumulate wealth and and so my intention is to deploy resources and assets as effectively as I can not and so I didn't need any kind of tax preference for the dollars. So a number of the areas that you focus your own philanthropy owner I think worth talking about

for a moment while you're interested in them. One of them, for example, is immigration. What makes you so interested in immigration reform? And why are you spending so much of your time on that issue. I'll back up for a second. The organization that that I founded and was running in the beginning is called College Track, and I started College Track in East Palo Alto, right next to Palo Alto, California,

because I had visited high school class. I had been invited to speak to seniors who were first generation college bound seniors, and the entire class was from East Palo Alto, and despite the fact that they were intending to go to college, I found very quickly that none of them had taken the S A T S. Very few had ever been on a college campus. We were in the fall of their senior year, and they hadn't received any guidance.

So rather than have one time visit, I promised to the class at the end of the hour that I would come back every Friday afternoon and I would be their college counselor. And that realization, that experience changed my life. So I started then with freshman in high school, and by their senior year, I discovered that many of them didn't have a source security number. And these were students who were were fully American. They were raised as American,

but they were brought here as toddlers. And very young, and they didn't know that they were undocumented. This was in the early two thousand's, before people were talking about the Dream Act and before people were talking about undocumented students. So I immediately started learning about immigrated scan law and immigration standing so that I could serve the students in their families properly. And we started advocating for the passage of the Dream Act because what I learned was that

this was not an isolated, rare case. And so we built out at Emerson Collective a bit of UM, a much deeper understanding of the issue, but a bit of a muscle around um, how do we actually work with municipal, state, and federal government to try to clarify this, to try to bring some common sense solutions to this. Because every single one of us it is either a a direct

or a descendant of an immigrant. And the whole nature of the American dream is to come here for economic and social mobility and to activate our own potential, and so for us to be blocking that for people right now in our lifetime seems like something we need to all devote our time and attention to. Another area that you're interested in is climate change and that's an area that many people are focused on. What do you do in climate change that tries to bring your particular expertise

and interest to the subject. We have we have what's invested in what's called the Elemental Accelerator, which is an accelerator for for young companies who are typically between their seed and A rounds, sometimes between their A and B rounds, who need who need the type of capacity building and organizational support that will allow them to dig in, have

further proof of concept and raise further capital. We've had over a hundred and seventy companies go through the accelerator and they've attracted more than seven billion dollars on follow on investment. In addition to that, we have our own funding practice around companies that are leaning into the new

green economy and the transition economy. But then we also have philanthropic practice that focuses on environmental justice and local communities who need to have perhaps a bridge between the state or federal policies that don't often reach local communities and who are the ones most impacted by the the toxicity of their communities air, water, and soil, and also are having deleterious health effects as a result of it.

So we have we have a full kind of holistic focus around what does the change in climate mean for individuals everywhere. Let's talk about your youth, your teenage years, and where you spent them. You grew up in upstate New Jersey, New Jersey. My father died in a plane crash when I was three. He was he was He was a military pilot and um he was. This was during inactive duty. He was training other pilots and he

died during during this training session. And my mother was twenty nine years old at the time with four children under the age of six, and she had been a history high school teacher before she had children. And what she ended up doing within about six months was starting a nursery school. It was it was a really smart pivot for her. She had some family and friends apporting her, but she needed to also take care of her children and support us as a family. So you went to

college at University of Pennsylvania at Wharton. Why don't you pick? Wharton's a great school. But were you interested in business at that time? Well, I started at University of Pennsylvania as pre med and I had in my mind that

I was going to be a doctor. And so I, in addition to work study and and doing my school work and doing waitressing on the side for pocket money, I also volunteered at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania at HUB and the doctors there were really generous with me and allowed me to scrub in on UH surgeries, and and I was in labor and delivery, and I

had all sorts of jobs. And what I noticed, however, was the degree of commitment that is required and how and the narrowing that must happen um to be great at that discipline. And so I I questioned whether that was the right field for me to pursue. At the same time, in my work study job, I was working for penn student agencies and a few months in I had an idea for an agency. So I proposed it to the man who was running in and he was a warton grad student, and he told me to go

write a business planning. So it's a good idea, but you need to write a business plan. So I wrote up a business plan for what we called Parents Services Agency, which was to market to parents the ability to send birthday cakes and care packages to students while they were going through mid terms of finals and obviously for all their birthdays and and the business ended up flourishing and we added more and more services. Uh. What I didn't count on was, of course we were working around the

clock during mid terms and finals on our business. But it gave me that bug I didn't know about about this, uh, the field of entrepreneurism. And so I became an entrepreneur when I was at Penn and I loved it, and so so perhaps sophomore year I decided to I stayed at the College of Arts and Sciences, but then I added in a degree at Warten. So so I ended up getting both degrees. And so you got your degrees,

and then what did you do after you graduated? I had to answer the need to pay off significant student loans. So I ended up going to Maryland Asset Management for about six months. I loved the work. But within a few months Maryland Asset Management had moved from New York City to Plainsborough, Print right near Princeton, New Jersey, which

made everyone accept me very happy. And I was doing a reverse commute to Princeton, and I decided that I needed to find a job in New York City, and um, I knew someone at Goldman tax who who immediately said I should come to join them. So I interviewed and I started working pretty swiftly on the fixed income trading floor. You decided at some point to go to business school and why did you decide to go across the country

to Stanford? A great business school. But a lot of people in East Coast often stay in East Coast, So what prompted you to go to Stanford? I wanted to go and study further, and so I did. And I went to Stanford because that was the place where exciting new things were happening, and that was what I understood. Uh, it was in a golden age of entrepreneurship. I say, all right, so you went to Stanford, and um, you met Steve Jobs then I did. And how did you

meet him? It was my first week of school, first year, and he came and spoke to the the Business School during a speaker series called View from the Top, where there are several leaders that come throughout the year, and and Steve spoke to the Business School and he was electrifying and compelling and funny and delightful. And afterwards he asked me out to dinner and we went to dinner and we were together ever since. So at the time he was not at Apple, but he rejoined Apple, he

was at Next Next. So when he rejoined Apple, did you tell him it was a good idea to rejoin the company had been at before, because usually when you go back to your previous place, employment doesn't always work out.

We had a very long talk about it because it was the first time that in probably is certainly in our married life, that we had a little bit of a reprieve, and he was he was a little torn about going back into a company, of course that he was deeply devoted to and loved, but also he knew that they were not in good shape, and he knew deeply what it was going to take in order to turn things around, and that meant a lot of time away from family. So the company became after Steve went back,

the most valuable company in the world. And Steve helped to invent this little product that says, the greatest consumer product, I guess of all time, the iPhone and most valuable probably, So when he did, he had come home one day and say, guess what I got this iPhone? It's going to be the greatest thing of all time? Or or did he didn't keep it? He kept it from you? What do you think? Uh, well, I'll tell you he

didn't keep it from me. He didn't ever predict that anything that Apple creative was going to be the biggest thing of all time. In fact, he was quite accustomed to Apple being the the David to the rest of the industries Goliath. And they they have a beautiful or had a beautiful ethos and culture of of of being rebels and thinking about things differently and and differentially. So I did have the great fortune of of seeing some

of the products. He didn't really bring them home, but I could go visit them, um, under the cloak of darkness in some of the design studios every now and then, Yes, but we would. We we talked about business and the business of Apple most every night, and it was that was a great joy for me. So when Steve became ill, eventually he decided to step back a bit shortly before

he passed away. Um, but did you talk very much about him in those days about philanthropy, because he had not been that actively involved in philanthropy compared to what you have done. He thought about his work in the way that artists often think about their work, and so in his body of work, he felt that he was giving some service to humanity. Steve greatly esteemed what Andrew

Carnegie did. He thought the creation of the libraries across the United States was the greatest active philanthropy because it allowed people to use their own determination and resolve and motivation too to further educate themselves. So having resources and and information and knowledge available and accessible to people what was for him the most important thing. He himself was an autodidact. He was immensely curious. I am also immensely curious.

I think humans are immensely curious creatures, and so giving everyone the ability two improve their their area of interest, to improve their situation in an accessible, equal way, was what he thought we should be doing. You announced recently, I believe is that you're going to do something called those Steve Jobs Archive. And what is that designed to do. It's um, it's under construction in a certain way, it

is evolving. I will say. We are trying to honor and elevate individuals through the inspiration of Steve in his life, and so we are we are collecting stories, remembrances, uh, data archival material, so original archival material in a thoughtful way.

We have archivists who are doing that, but I think much more importantly, we are trying to find the best way to communicate to others his ethos and his sense of enormous human possibility, so that people can encounter the archive and feel inspired to do something even greater in their own lives, or to stretch what they think is a boundary or or something that they didn't contemplate for themselves. So so we we are still in the collection and

development mode. We're building out programs. I think you'll see in the future. You'll see some scholarships and fellowships, you may see some publications, but it's it's much more about forward looking and inspiring people to think about how they can be part of positive movement. When you do philanthropy or when you do business through Emerson, you have metrics. In the business world, when you make an investment, you typically are looking for profitability or some kind of internal

ready return. In philanthropy, there's not an easily agreed upon metric that you meant to measure success. So how do you measure success in your philanthropic undertaking? So how do you measure success in your investment entertaining? Oh, well, there are a lot of ways to measure success in philanthropy. I actually disagree with you. Um, there are plenty of metrics.

It depends on what the goal is. Uh So, for example, if you have an education organization, you can measure student learning, you can measure students, serves, you can see if there's economic and social mobility over the course of a decade. So there are a lot of quantifiable measurements and we and we look at all of them. There's a lot

of data to collect. There's also qualitative data where we can we can and do talk to people directly and we are in communities and we ask people about how how they're feeling about their lives and their opportunities and the possibilities, and so we we collect both qualitative and quantitative metrics. You collect this data, do you ever say, well, it's not really working and we should try something else, or you typically continue to support the projects you initially

start with. Well, it's a good question. Sometimes the arc of change happens slower than one would like, and so there are there are indicators that could be positive, indicators that don't quite reach the goal, and so we we sometimes double down and sometimes we stick within. Other times we often make exit grants. And in the same way

you exit investments, we exit investments and grants. So, when you're a well known philanthropist as you are, how do you avoid having people come up to you at every cocktail party or every event and say, I have a great idea for you, and you must have a process for filtering these things. But how do you avoid all that?

I don't avoid. Well, I wited by not going out to cocktail parties, but otherwise I don't avoid it because I know great ideas come from everywhere, and I read all my own email, even though there's there can be several hundred a day, and and I'm always sending ideas on two different team members or responding we say no an awful lot. But every now and then we find someone who's doing something remarkable, and I never want to

correct for that. I will. I will happily go through hours and hours of of of people pitching me on ideas for that one gem. So, um, you were close to President Obama. I think you knew him really well. Um, suppose President Obama had said or President Biden said, I'd like to appoint you to a senior cabinet position. Come in the government, or somebody said to you you should run for governor or center. Any interest in doing anythings

like that in the government. I do live a life of service now, and I feel like I am getting good at it, better and better each day, learning a ton. I love what I do. To stop doing what I'm doing for a different way the realm of service would would require a great deal of deliberation. It's not my intention, but I would not necessarily shy away from another opportunity if I thought this was the highest and best use

of my time. I think what I'm doing right now is the highest and best use of my time, and it took me a while to get here, so I'm very happily doing it. Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews. You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen.