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Don Gips

Don Gips

Strategic Counselor and CEO Emeritus of the Skoll Foundation; former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa and White House official in the Obama administration.

Jul 20, 2026

1:04
Many people will have heard of the Skoll Foundation, but why don't you give us a little bit of an overview about what the foundation is all about?
1:11
Sure.
1:12
So Skoll, Jeff Skoll, who is one of the founders of eBay, um, created the Skoll Foundation over 20 years ago, and he really, you know, was an entrepreneur his whole life and decided to focus on really establishing the field of social entrepreneurship, bringing a lot of the principles of entrepreneurs in the private sector that he'd experienced, bringing that into the social sector and supporting those who had innovative solutions to some of the world's most challenging problems.
1:47
And really help over 20 plus years has helped build out the field of social entrepreneurship, focusing globally.
1:57
So everything from community health workers to small holder farmers in Africa, to all sorts of people who had new ideas for how to address significant challenges facing the world, education.
2:11
The original Bill Drayton, who founded Ashoka, was probably the person who coined the title social entrepreneurship, and Jeff was very inspired by Bill and by, um, uh, John Gardner, who when Jeff was thinking about what to do with his resources, John Gardner said, "Bet on good people doing great things." And that really was the inspiration that led to the creation of Skoll.
2:40
Jeff pretty early on, and Sally Osberg, who ran the foundation for him, realized that they needed some academic grounding in this, so they started working with Oxford and created the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford.

9 MINS LATER

11:57
In actual fact, perhaps the opposite is true, right?

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