Laila Janah
Founder & CEO, Samasource. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthor@leila_c ↗leilajanah.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Leila Janah founded Samasource (now Sama) to provide digital microwork and AI training data jobs to impoverished communities in Africa and India, and also founded the ethical skincare brand LXMI. She authored the book Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time before passing away in 2020.
1shows
1appearances
21statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Laila Janah said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Janah: Aid-dependent governments prioritize foreign donors over their own citizens
“The great challenge in nonprofits, and you see this in international aid environments, is that, you know, country governments where the budget is largely composed of aid from richer countries are much more accountable to the donors than they are to their own p…”
Janah: Western 'sweatshop' label overlooks local value of developing-world factory jobs
“What we often would consider a sweatshop here in the West could be what people in a developing country regard as a decent job.”
Janah: Low-income gig economy workers do not feel exploited by platforms
“I think in that case, it's a little bit different from the factory model you know, or the sweatshop argument, in that people have a lot more choice and agency with smartphones and with more flexible working arrangements that the gig economy allows, and I have …”
Janah: A slight corporate tax increase should fund gig worker benefits
“You could increase, this might be unpopular, but you could increase the corporate tax rate by a very small amount, and use that increase to fund, you know, the equivalent of four one K's for those workers, or other types of benefits that are necessary.”
Janah: Mark Zuckerberg is not a social entrepreneur despite Facebook's social benefit
“While I don't think that makes Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook co-founders social entrepreneurs, because I don't think they're Our first concern was social justice or improving improving Poverty outcomes, per se, or improving the lives of marginalized people.…”
Janah: Light-touch coding bootcamps fail to get most graduates jobs
“The feedback we've received is that a lot of people who go through these coding programs, especially if they're light touch, don't actually end up with a job.”
Janah: True social impact requires embedding good into supply chains, not donations
“One percent for charity kind of programs, so we'll take one percent of profit and we'll give it away, or five percent of profit or we will, for every product you buy, give away one of something else, and while that's certainly an improvement over zero I think …”
Janah: Lack of economic alternatives is the primary driver of sex trafficking
“The primary driver of sex trafficking is lack of income generating opportunities for Women and their families, which forced them into this horrible trade. People aren't going into that trade because they don't know any better. They're going into it because the…”
Janah: Education alone cannot stop sex trafficking; job creation is required
“So if we want to end sex trafficking, educating people I really don't think is going to solve the problem, but creating better jobs for those women and making sure that they have the appropriate training to attain those jobs, that's the way we're going to solv…”
Janah: Marketplace network effects disproportionately enrich founders and investors over workers
“I would say that the biggest risk we face is that the network effect that's produced by many of these marketplaces, which creates this incredible dividend for the founders and investors and those companies, isn't shared as widely as it could be. With the worke…”
Janah: Silicon Valley startups solving problems for the wealthy lack global impact
“I have seen a lot of companies in the Valley get funded that are working on Me Too problems, or problems that only affect extremely wealthy people in extremely wealthy countries. Personally, that's not very compelling to me, and I don't think those types of bu…”
Janah predicts that every business will eventually become a benefit corporation
“And I really think that that's the future of business. I think in the future, every business will be a benefit corporation.”
Janah: Non-profits are trapped in starvation mode by donors measuring overhead
“I think most nonprofits, I would venture to say, are in starvation mode, and they're in starvation mode largely driven by this culture of measuring them based on how much they spend on overhead versus program, which is just so sad.”
Janah: Social investments should embrace venture-level risk and demand innovation
“We should be willing to take the same level of risk with our social investments, and we should demand of them the same level of innovation and willingness to learn.”
Janah: A non-profit's main duty is reporting objective learnings from experiments
“To me, the only the only obligation you have if you take public money and spend it on a non-profit is to report back truthfully, objectively, and to a great level of detail on what you learned, what was the outcome of the experiment.”
Janah: Donors should tie non-profit funding directly to beneficiary feedback
“And so I think one of the ways we solve that is for donors to kind of force that accountability by demanding in their donor reports actual feedback from the beneficiaries and having that be the primary metric that drives their follow on gifts, as opposed to wh…”
Janah: The internet economy resolves capitalism's asymmetric labor and capital mobility
“The biggest problem with capitalism is that money can move freely across borders, but people cannot, and the internet economy completely turns out on its head”
Janah: Social entrepreneurship is the middle ground between nonprofits and profit-maximizers
“To me, social entrepreneurship is the middle ground between the traditional nonprofit charitable model that receives no earned revenue, and the profit maximizing business whose goal is to maximize profit above other concerns.”
Janah: Employer rating features on digital work platforms empower workers
“Especially when workers can rate the employer, there's a level of transparency, and sort of connection that happens, that's an ultimately really good thing for the worker.”
Janah: Samasource was the first nonprofit to run longitudinal studies via Facebook
“We were actually the first nonprofit that I know of to do longitudinal studies through Facebook, because our workers log into our platform. Originally, they had to authenticate via Facebook platform.”
Janah: Sama Group measures success by sustained poverty reduction to living wages
“In our case at Sama Group, we're not a B Corp, we're a non-profit, but we look at the outcome of Poverty reduction. So we look at how many people were able to move from a baseline of below the poverty line to a living wage level, and how long we can sustain th…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Laila's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Samasource | 1 | 21 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |