Fireside Chat with Melinda Gates and Robin Roberts | Salesforce

If you want to change the world, it helps if you can get your goal down to a very short, punchy statement that everyone can remember. I know one guy who said our mission is the end of software. Worked out rather well. There's another organization that has stated its goal with equal force and effect. They want us to see an AIDS free generation. Salesforce is humbled by the chance to be part of the extraordinary effectiveness of, of their progress toward a goal that many said could not be done. Please take a moment now to learn more about red.

I lost my mother in 95 and I lost my father in 99 not knowing that they were HIV positive. No one knew what was wrong with me until I was 10. That's when doctors diagnosed me with HIV. How can I put it? It was, it was just for me. I felt like this is just the end of the world. When I was growing up, doctors told me to say that this girl won't reach the age of 13. I felt like giving up.

It's impossible to describe the hopelessness. Every home in every village was devastated from HIV graves in the front yard of the entire family, orphan run households. Everyone assumed they would die. And when you have that, why would you educate your children? Why would you try to get a job? The entire lifeblood of a village, of a community, of a nation was drained.

But at the same time then a movement started to say, hey, we have to change that. We cannot morally afford to let millions of people die if actually we have treatment available. That led to the creation of the Global Fund. With this simple idea, let, let countries, let individuals, let companies who can afford to share some money share that. So governments started to contribute and we mobilized billions of dollars so that we can make health services available for those in greatest need. And then came this brilliant idea by Bono and Bobby Shriver. Let's focus on iconic brands. And they would engage their customers to say, hey, by purchasing fantastic products, we can actually save lives.

It's really about charity, it's about justice and that each life has equal value. When you see people that don't get medication and where they live determines whether they live or die, it does take your breath away. And it makes it seem like, okay, for 30 cents a day to keep somebody alive, we should be doing that. And so the world rallied. We've given $360 million to the global Fund and we work very hard to raise awareness of where we are in the fight against. In particular, women and girls are hit hardest.

So imagine being a young girl who was not registered at birth because she's a girl. Didn't matter. Imagine being a girl who's told that if she wants to go to secondary school, she has to get some money, which often means encouraging sexual relations, which leads to an HIV epidemic in these young girls. We cannot see the end of this epidemic without a more gender equal world. There are clubs like RISE that bring adolescent girls and young women together to tell them the truth, that they have equal dignity and worth and give them the power to act.

So what we're trying to do through the RISE program, which is funded by.

The Global Fund, is to allow young.

Women to form a sisterhood and encourage each other and then take responsible action.

RISE gave me the power that I am a woman. I need to stand up there and do what I want. And being amongst young women who have the same dream as you, it gives you that power. Hope came in with me. Understanding, understanding. Support groups help me to accept and see that I can still live. And there is a reason for me to leave. I've got a daughter which I was told that I won't even have babies. I think she's the main person that I can say that I'm fighting my life for. So I want to be the best mother ever that I didn't have. And here I am at the age of 25, still alive and living healthy as ever.

We get to hear these amazing stories every day from the people who have been impacted by the red funds. And now thanks to Salesforce, we're actually able to combine all those stories and to share them in a really beautiful and easy way. In addition to millions of dollars that Salesforce has given, they've helped us have the tools to run better. We need to be smarter, more efficient, mobile on the go. Having this increased capacity because of Salesforce just means more partners, more products and more campaigns, which ultimately is more money to the Global Fund.

Programs supported by the global have saved 20 million lives. 20 million lives. Virtually everyone 15 years ago said where we are today was impossible, that we couldn't accomplish this. It was too complicated, couldn't be done.

It's been done.

Ten years ago, 1500 babies were born each day with HIV. Now it's down to 400. By 2020, we can get that to virtually zero. And we'll have an AIDS free generation.

And so much hope, if you believe.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome co anchor of abc's good morning america, robin roberts.

I almost said good morning out of habit. Hey, how's everybody doing? That is the perfect setup. Seeing that video, it is a pleasure for me to introduce to you someone that I have enjoyed really getting to know in recent years. Melinda Gates is the co chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which just happens to be the largest private foundation in the world. And it is guided by the belief that every life has equal value. And she is somebody who has truly dedicated her life to making life better for others, achieving it through transformational, transformational improvements in the lives, in the health, in the prosperity of families, communities and societies all around the globe. I want you to give a dreamforce welcome to Melinda Gates. Thank you. You're welcome. You know Melinda, I could have gone on and on and on and talk here. You know, when we're in this environment, it is so uplifting to be among others who dream big, not only for themselves but for others. And I believe in dreaming big, but focusing small in those day to day things that can ultimately get us to the goals that we want to achieve. I understand that you've always been very goal oriented. Take us back. Little girl growing up in Dallas.

Well, I grew up in Dallas. My parents and I had three siblings and you know, I went to an all girls Catholic school. I went K through 8 to co ed Catholic school and then high school to Ursuline Academy, an all girls Catholic school. And my parents wanted to send me there because the school had this motto of serviam that is to serve. And luckily, besides having that incredible motto and them sending us out in the community, I had some incredible science and math teachers. And because of that I got very hooked on computers early on. And that's eventually what led me onto college and onto career at Microsoft.

And not just any computer, it was an Apple computer. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

So we, the first computer we had at our home was an Apple. And you may not have actually heard a lot of people heard of the Apple ii. There's a picture of it way back when this is in about 1980 actually we got this computer and I think now it'd probably be good for a doorstop. But at the time it was really cutting edge. In fact, later when I, much later when I met Bill, which maybe we'll talk about or not, but.

Oh we will.

Ok. He was quite surprised to hear my family had an Apple III because a lot of people had Apple IIs, but this Apple III, apparently only about 2,000 of them were sold. But I had a teacher in high school that went to the head nun, the principal and said these girls are learning math and they're doing incredibly well. But she had just gone to a conference and she said, you know, we need to be teaching the girls computer science. We need to be teaching them how to code. And so she went to the head principal, she got us about a dozen Apple IIs in our classroom, and she asked a bunch of us who were quite interested in math whether we wanted to learn to code. And I did. And I thought I fell in love with coding in high school. And then my dad bought this computer for us because I wanted to code at home. And then we were also running on the side. My parents were running a family business on the side, a rental properties business that would put my siblings and I through college without any debt. And so we as a family kept the books on this Apple iii. And so I actually learned the inflows and outflows of money as well on VisiCalc, which was a spreadsheet at the time.

So that's where the seed was planted. And I understand that you wanted to go to Notre Dame, but they didn't have the same outlook about computers, did they?

No, they didn't quite.

What'd they say to you?

I had actually gotten into Notre Dame and thought I was going to go because I was coming from a Catholic school that was like the place to go. And when I went and toured, they said that they were devolving their computer science program back out into the departments because they kind of thought computer science was a fad. And I was actually kind of crushed because that was my dream school and I was in and I still had time to apply to other schools. And so I started touring other schools and I toured Duke University, and they had just gotten a huge grant from IBM at the time and had two amazing labs of computers and some good computer professors. And so I decided to go there and study computer science.

Plan B, Duke, Plan B work. Yeah, that's a pretty good plan B going there. And then Microsoft comes along and you kept. Your mother took the note when Microsoft offered you a position. Do you remember that time?

I do remember that time. So I was graduating. I graduated undergraduate in computer science. This is the note. So this is a note that my mom kept when Microsoft called my home to make the offer. In fact, my parents are in the audience. I didn't even know we had this note until about a year ago that my mom had kept these phone notes. But I had gone, done computer science at Duke and then had gone right away to get my mba, went three years undergraduate, and then two years later, two years more to get my mba. And Microsoft came recruiting that year at Duke, and I Had worked for IBM for several summers in Dallas, which was my hometown. And I thought I was going to go work for IBM, but they knew I was interviewing with other companies. And I came home. It was my spring break. I came home through Dallas on my way to go interview at Microsoft. I met with my hiring manager at IBM and she said, are you ready to take this offer from IBM? And I said, well, I have just one more company I'm going to go interview with. It's this young company called Microsoft. And she stopped me dead in my tracks. And she said, if you get an offer from that company, you should take it. And I was shocked because here's this woman who's going to be my hiring manager. And she said, but if you go there and if your chance for advancement as a young woman, if you're as good as I think you are, will be astronomical versus staying here and kind of going through the rungs and having a career here. So I went and interviewed with Microsoft. I loved everybody. I loved the whole company and what was going on there. And I had gone off on another trip. And so when the recruiter, David Pritchard, who's on this note, called my family home to make me the offer, I wasn't home. And so my mom asked, well, could you please just tell me whether she's going to get an offer because she'd be moving away from Dallas. And he said, well, I'm not saying supposed to tell you, but in fact, she is. And so my parents went off to the library and looked on the microfiche to learn more about this company, Microsoft, that I was going to go to work for in Seattle. And that was in 1987. And Microsoft had about 1400 employees at the time. And I was part of the first class of MBAs. There were nine men and me. And that was my start of my career at Microsoft.

Nine men and you?

Yes.

And tell us a little bit more about those early days at Microsoft.

Well, they were fascinating. We were changing the world. We were creating products that no one had ever seen before. We were thinking hard about what features people might want. There were lots of mistakes. We used to joke that you didn't get promoted till you made your first mistake. And it was interesting, actually, this group of. I got to know these nine young men that started at the same time as I did. And our first. First meeting that we all sat around, we were in the boardroom of Microsoft because they only had four buildings. It was a small campus, and we were supposed to. Several of the people were Coming in, presenting to the VP of the division we were going to work in. We were just starting, I mean literally we hadn't even begun yet. They had us out to kind of assess which groups we should go in. And the young man next to me who was from Stanford, picked a fight with the VP of the division. And I thought, we haven't even started yet and he's picking a fight. And it just seemed sort of unusual to me. But later that guy officed next to me about a year later and we were out at night, a group of us for drinks after a while and we started talking. I said, do you remember that fight you picked? And he said, yeah. He'd been in an organizational behavior class at Stanford and they were telling him that he didn't speak up enough and so he was trying his new style out. It definitely threw me for a loop. But I loved the work, I loved what we were doing. It was a very fast paced industry. It was just a lot of fun.

And you were doing very well, you were moving up in the company and that. And then you meet this guy Bill.

Yeah.

How'd that come about?

Well, I actually met him three weeks after I started. It was a very small company and I had never been to New York before. I traveled around the US some, but I had never been to New York before. And Microsoft sent me off to a meeting that I was to lead in New York and. And when you emailed the travel department back then, they would say, well, we double you up with roommates and we're going to give you a female roommate because there's an expo going on and so you'll have this female roommate. So I arrive in New York, I have this female roommate from Microsoft and she says, well, a bunch of us are here, 30 of us for this computer show. You're here by yourself, why don't you, after you go do this business, come join us for this conference dinner tonight. It'll be just Microsoft people and there'll be 30 of us, three dozen. I say great. I came across town, I came in late, there were two open seats and I took the second to last open seat. And about 15 minutes later Bill came in and sat in the last open seat. And so that's when we first met. I could sense that he was a bit interested and it took him quite a few months before he finally asked me out.

And he said, you played hard to get a little.

Yeah, well, there was a lot going.

On back then, I'm sure. So it's a Saturday because everybody Worked on a Saturday at Microsoft. You're in the parking lot, and what.

Does it say to you a couple months later? So it turned out his mom knew somebody who was on the board at Microsoft. It was on the board, sorry, at Duke. And so I guess he'd been asking for kind of some information about me. He knew I had worked at Duke, I had gone to Duke, and then came to work at Microsoft. So anyway, we were working on a Saturday. I worked in a different building, but I guess we'd parked somewhere near each other, and I was coming out of the building, and so was he out of his building. And he struck up a conversation, and we started talking, and then this was on a Saturday. And he said he finally kind of got around. He said, well, would you go out with me two weeks from Friday night? And I'm like, two weeks from Friday night. Who knows their calendar that far out? I said, that wasn't really that spontaneous enough for me. Maybe call me closer to the date. That would be interesting, but call me a couple days ahead. And so I gave him my phone number, and he called me two hours later at home. He said, well, I have two things I have to go to tonight, a user group dinner and something else. But then could you go out with me for a drink? And I said, well, I guess that's a little more spontaneous. So I ended up going out with them.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Is history. Even before you got married, you all determined that you were going to contribute a great deal of your wealth to others. How did that conversation come about, and why did you all decide to do that?

Well, we both had been from families who really believed in volunteerism, believed in community service and giving back, and that was embedded deeply in both of our family structures. If you go back. And so we'd been dating for about five and a half years. And during the time we were engaged, we took our first trip to Africa. Neither of us had ever been to the continent of Africa. We went, yeah, a little bit younger then. We went to see the animals and the savannah. We went on a safari. We took other couples with us. It was beautiful. We fell in love with everything we saw. But it's really not at all trite to say that we really fell in love with the people. And it started us on this series of questions of sort of saying to ourselves, what. What is going on here? Why is it we can be in a Land Rover, a Jeep, but there aren't many great roads? And how is it that we see all these People walking along the road to an open air market, men in flip flops, women often with bare feet and a child in their belly and one on their back and something on their head. What has gone on here that things haven't started? And at the end of this trip we went off to an island that we were planning to go just for a few days before we came home off the coast of Africa and we were already engaged to be married. And we had a series of marriage questionnaire we had done to prepare for getting married. We had a few things we wanted to go over where we wanted to make sure our values were the same, et cetera. And we started to talk on that trip that the vast majority of the resources from Microsoft would go back for society. And that was just, it was a given and it was, it was an easy discussion. It's what we both believed and we fundamentally wanted to do. And we just thought it would be later in our lives when we got.

To do it because he was encouraged to do that later in the 60s when he was a little bit older. But you decided to do it for various reasons earlier. What was it about? And I've heard when I've traveled to Africa and I can remember distinctly, it's just like it gets in your soul. And I saw when you were watching the video highlighting red and seeing the women there, there's just something that you just light up.

Yeah, it's just the people are amazing. There's this amazing ingenuity. I mean there's a, there's just a feeling when you're on the ground in Africa that's hard to describe. They're my, still my favorite trips to take some years. I get to go as many as three times. My youngest daughter, who's now 14, she spent three weeks in Africa living with a family last summer, two weeks the summer before that. But there's a feeling of movement and ingenuity and possibility. And you meet these people and you cannot believe they are eking out a life on a tiny farm that's maybe, you know, four times the size of this stage. And they are somehow trying to make ends meet and to get their kids in school. And when you open, ask them about their hopes and their dreams for their family. It's all about getting their kids in school and the lengths they're going to put a meal on the table or clean water on the table. It's just really unbelievable. And you realize if we could get some of the infrastructure and the pieces started in the right way for them, this potential would just be unlocked. And it's really, when you meet them, they're amazing, and they'll invite you into their home and tell you about their lives. And it's been a huge privilege of mine to get to do that.

I remember the first time I traveled to South Africa, and we were going through a village that was just really decimated in many ways, and a group of women were dancing, and we had an interpreter, and I said, well, why is it somebody's birthday party? What's going on? And he went over to them, and he came back. He said, no, they're celebrating life. I'm like, wow, what if we would do that all around the world? Just simply celebrate life.

Vaccines.

That was something that you initially with the group and the foundation wanted to do. Why vaccines?

Yeah. So we started the foundation with the premise, as you said, of all lives have equal value. And Bill and I really took, at first, a very economic approach to, okay, for every $100 thousand we would put down, what are the most number of lives you could possibly save for $1,000? Well, the natural place to look is at child. You look at all the childhood deaths around the world, and you say, could those children be saved? And you look at adult deaths, and you say, could those adults be saved? And as we started to learn about this vaccine system around what had gone on around the world, we read an article in the New York Times, actually, shortly after we were home, about rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that was killing millions of children. Millions. And we're saying, kids are dying of diarrhea. Like in the United States, you go down to the drugstore, you don't even go to your doctor most of the time. Right. And we started to say, well, what's going on here? And as we started to learn, there had been an amazing vaccine system that had been built up around the world, but it had crumbled in the last 20 years. And when we would get a vaccine out in the United states or the UK or Japan, it was taking 20 to 25 years to get to Africa. And when it got there, it wasn't even the right strains they needed. And so we started to say, what is it a philanthropy could do to get the vaccine system up and running again? Create the vaccines that are needed in Africa to save the most number of lives. And so that's where we began, and we helped form a very large public private partnership, something called the alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations. And today it has saved now 7 million children's lives.

7 million lives have been 7 million. And keep evolving, keep adding, keep doing different things. And then when you hit that magical five zero, the big five O, we all like kind of take a look at ourselves and decide what we're going to do. But I agree. Fabulous. And 50 club. Let's do that. Fabulous 50 you decided. Empowering women and girls all around the globe. What was it about that time in your life just, just a couple of years ago that you decided you wanted to do that?

Well, I've been traveling now for over 15 years from the foundation. I'm in the developing world many times a year and I really take the time to do not just the political meetings, those are very, very important, and the policy meetings, but I go out in villages and I sit with people. And I'm also often just a Western woman in a pair of khaki pants and a T shirt. But I will sit with men and women and hear the stories of their lives. And, and as I would be out hearing this, I started to learn what really is transformative for people. And when I first started the foundation work, I actually kind of thought, oh, I want to stay away. I don't want to talk about women's issues. I don't want to go to the women's stuff. That's the soft, squishy stuff, right? I'm a data geek. I grew up in computer science. I believe in data, hardcore issues. But as I have learned and been in the developing world, what I realized is that the transformative work, you want to lift up a family, a community, a society, you invest in women. And if we don't invest in women, we won't get those transformative effects. And so I finally decided, I finally decided I needed to use my voice behind that cause. And that part of the reason that we don't actually make large scale investments as a world behind women in the developing world is we don't actually collect the data. We actually don't know very much. Mark Dibel talked in that red video about girls are born with no name, no birth certificate, not registered. I mean, we don't track where they go to school, what economic opportunity they have. So I know from business that what we measure is what we do and we work on. If we don't collect this data and measure things about women, it's part of the reason we don't make investments because we don't lay down the money because we don't know if it will be transformative. So I'm actually leading an effort now where we're collecting serious Amounts of data. We're going to start collecting serious amounts of data about women in the developing world. And we're going to unbiased the data because today we go into a household and we might ask, we'll say who in this household earns money? And as soon as the man answers, we don't even ask the woman about the income that she makes because she does bring in lots of income at times or small amounts of income. And that's what she puts into her family. She takes every marginal dollar. She's twice as likely to invest in her children. And if you invest in the mom in the family and she's educated, her children are half as likely to die by their fifth birthday. Half as likely if she's educated. So you want to hit the eye of the needle. You should go straight for women. And we got to do that.

Yeah. And you being out in the field has really helped inform your decisions. Because what you're talking about, you know this because you're not sitting back in an office somewhere. You're out there in the field.

You have to be. It's the only way I really know what's going on is you. People will invite you into their homes, they'll tell you about their lives. If you stay long enough, you might go in with your set of questions, but they'll talk about what, what they want to talk about then. And quite often I'll pick up all these anecdotal stories. And then as I come back and I look at the data and I have to look at, well, is the data telling us that, Are there gaps in the data? It turns out there are huge gaps in the data about women or you can look at the high level data, but it's not until you dig down deep. So we all know, like everybody sitting in this room, we know where big data is going in the United States. We know how important data is and we mine it. And we're going all kinds of places with it. If we don't collect that, we don't even know where a woman's born and what her name is, how are you ever going to let her own property or help her get into school or make sure she stays from school to an economic opportunity. So we've just got to make those investments.

What about here in the U.S. i mean, gender equity is just, it's a pipe dream in many places. We're doing what we can here in the US what is the work that we need to do here at home where that's concerned?

Well, it's interesting because I would be in so many of these countries, particularly many countries in Africa, and I would be thinking to myself, gosh, women just aren't far enough yet here. They haven't gotten empowered in this way. And we do have so much work to do in these low income countries. But as I'd be flying home, I had to ask myself, well, how far are we really in the United States? How far have we come? And I kept coming back to the answer that we've made huge strides for women in the U.S. huge, right? But there are some places where there's still enormous gaps. So to me, three huge ones that stand out for me are political representation. You know, less than 20% of people in Congress are women today. When I look at women in business and you look at the heads of Fortune 500 companies, there's a paucity of women. There's a great movement happening in the United States to try and get 30% of corporate boards to be women's representation. That's fantastic. But how about 50%? How about 50% of corporate boards are women? Right? I mean, why we're sitting here, you know, it's 2016 for Pete's sake, we're half the population then. The other big glaring hole to me is in the tech sector. And I've become very passionate about this because when I was in college, we were about to about on par in terms of computer science degrees that were being awarded. About 38% were being awarded to women. And so we were about on par where law and medicine were. Well, law and medicine have gone up. Now you have almost 50% of the graduates in law and medicine almost are women. Computer science went from 38% at its peak down to 17%. So we've gone like this for women in computer science at the time when technology, technology has boomed like this. It's pervasive. So and you think about what are the best jobs and some of the best jobs in society, best paying, most exciting. If I was going back to work, I'd go in tech. But we've got to make sure that we get women into these fields.

So how do we do that? Because I know as you said, you recently really started delving into this women in tech. So what do we do?

I think we look at, I think everybody's starting to look at the leaky pipeline. It starts at elementary school because of bias.

Bias.

We all have men and women have bias about can women do well in tech, can they code, can they have a seat at leadership, seat at the table? So you have to look at elementary, middle, high school, college, all of the lost points, even college onto industry. There's no silver bullet here, but I think one place to look is at that college entry level. There are a few universities around the country that are making a very, very welcoming, popular CS class and they're putting problem sets in that women are interested in looking at poverty, looking at homelessness, looking at mental health, have a set of problems that women find or gravitate towards naturally. Make sure you've got adjunct associate and real professors who are women teaching the class. Make sure you make the environment, not the basement of some engineering building, but it's in the humanities building, it's out in the auto auditorium and that there's role modeling going on. We know that women in society have more doubt than men. So you have to do a little bit more just like you do in high school on math and science. You have to do a little bit more to keep women's self esteem up. Learning computer science is like learning a new language. You got to keep your self esteem up in those uncomfortable parts. But if a woman gets into that popular CS class and likes it, and you keep her in class one, in class two, you're likely to keep her all the way through. And so I think we need to replicate some of the things these great universities doing, but replicate it all over the country. Because computer science ought to be just a fantastic place where droves of young women want to go into it and want to code.

And all that you're talking about is not just like the right thing to do.

It's good business, it's really good business. And when you think about where society is going, I mean, why, you know, if you think about technology and you think about, okay, should we have a diverse workforce working on technology, sitting at the table, coding. Yes. And to me, the reason it's a yes is if we don't make this change. Now I think back about, to be honest about the framing of our country, who was sitting at the table when we framed the Constitution? Well, there weren't women and there weren't minorities and look how long it's taken us to overcome that writing of the Constitution. So in computer science, when you think about where we are going with technology, I mean, think about where it is today compared to when I was in school. But it's pervasive. But where we're going with artificial intelligence and with data is astronomical. It's fantastic. What it's going to do for society in terms of early diagnosis in medicine, precision Medicine, self driving cars. It's exciting. But if we don't have women and minorities, underrepresented minorities at the table, we're going to keep making some of the mistakes that right now seem somewhat small, but they actually could be enormous. So, okay, you know, one of the health apps came out and there was nothing about menstruation in it. Well, most of the women in this room probably are going to menstruate 40 years of their life. That's a pretty big miss. Okay, why are all of the assistants that are coming online, Siri, Cortana, alone, Alexa, Why are they women's voices? Why are women assistants? That's a bias. That's a hidden bias. I mean, the workforce I work in now, there are a lot of male assistants too. They're men and women. But why do we not put them in the expert position? Why do we also, why is it that when we're serving up great jobs, high paying jobs, when an artificial intelligence serves them up, they serve the high paying jobs up to men and not to women. That is a problem. So you gotta have a seat at the table so that you're designing AI and the right set of questions and the data you're putting in the system is unbiased. So you don't want to have a photo app that comes out and doesn't recognize skin color or doesn't recognize that, okay, it's an Asian person's photograph. It's not that their eyes are blinking, it's that those are their eyes. Right. We need to make sure the diversity is rich in the system. So all the data we're using and all the rules based stuff that we're extracting works for everybody because we're all part of this society. And I see AI as being a phenomenal place that's going to democratize society. That's what technology can do. But it's got to be designed the right way. And it takes a lot of voices to make that happen.

It's about inclusion.

It is absolutely about inclusion.

Let's talk about pay equity. And I say this because Mark has led the way and has challenged other CEOs to open the books. Equal work, equal pay, bottom line.

Absolutely. And it's, It's phenomenal. I mean, the day I saw that come out in the press, I was like, thank goodness, right? Somebody's doing it, putting their voice behind it, who is not only doing it, but is role modeling and saying, okay, let's be transparent. And by the way, this is what I learned inside of Salesforce by looking at my own data. And he was transparent about, hey, we have a few things we had to fix inside of Salesforce and we are doing it. And guess what? We're going to be a better company for it. I think data and transparency. Whenever you have transparency around an issue, then you get rid of bias and then you can all, we're all looking at the same data and information and then you can decide we're going to move forward, society forward. So I think it's fantastic. It's made us even inside the foundation. You know, I'm trying to walk the talk inside of our foundation. So the CEO, Sue Desmond Hellman, she's made a huge commitment in terms of equity inside of our foundation. We all have. We're trying some things even with recruiting now, we've always kept our interview loops open for the hard to find positions to get women scientists at the table. We keep the recruiting pool open so we get good resumes of women, lots before we even close the pool. But we're also even starting to do some blind recruiting where we don't look at which colleges people are coming out of. We're looking at more. What have they actually done? And we're trying some things in that area. I think we all have to role model. You know, one of the other things that I think the tech sector does incredibly well and that I'm starting to put my voice behind is paid family leave. And not paid maternity leave, paid family leave. If you look at where the United States is compared to our neighboring countries, our other economically neighboring countries, the OECD's, we are at the very bottom of the list because we have unpaid leave. We don't have paid leave. And paid leave, if you give it to a man and a woman and you make it acceptable for a man or a woman to take it when they have a sick or elderly parent, when they have a young child, it benefits society. And we know that if men participate, there's great research. If men participate when their children are young, they participate more on all the way through and that's good for the child. So we'd have to make it okay. And so again, the role modeling the tech industry is doing, we gotta see that happen at the state level and the federal level. And to me, it's just basically about time.

It is past time.

Yeah, it's long past time.

Long past time. You were saying earlier, you said data geek, you're like, you own it. And bill is the same way. How do two data geeks go on to form the largest private foundation in the world. And the people who are here also talk about the importance of that being a part of your business.

Yeah, I think, you know, we are absolutely data geeks. So we want to know that when we put a dollar down or we ask another government to put a million or a thousand dollars down or whatever, we're asking them that we're using the money efficiently. I mean, we want these resources that have been massed, lucky enough to have been masked by Microsoft to go back efficiently. And at the same time, we also, though I think you have to know that we believe in social justice. We both believe in social justice and a common humanity. And I think it's that empathy. It's that understanding other people's situation and trying to put yourself in it and say, that could be me. You know, I could have been born in that country, in Africa, or in that village, and what length would I go to help raise up my children? Or I could be that woman who's spending three hours a day. That's what women do on average, three hours a day, collecting firewood, to boil water, to have clean water for their family. And so I think it's that mix of empathy and caring and then saying, okay, how. How is it we can change the world? You know, I went to this Catholic school, and one of the things I was taught in high school is that every individual can change the world. And sometimes it's just that one act, that one act of kindness, that one act of caring, that one act of compassion that you lift somebody else up, you put them, you set them on the journey of their life's path. We're not trying to give handouts to everybody. From now on, it's about giving them the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty and give them dignity and let their productivity come forward. And so I think it's that mix of the travels we've been able to do around the world, and we do a lot of processing together. I often say that, you know, the first person I want to talk to when I come back from a trip is Bill. I want to tell him what I've learned. And, you know, I've taken many a phone call late at night from Bill, you know, when he's been on the other side of the world. You know, I'll never forget, he was in a tuberculosis hospital. And he called me and he was essentially in tears. And he said, every person in the hospital I was in today is going to die. Every single person. It is a death sentence. And there's something we can do about it. I mean, we can change the face of that disease with the right medicines, the right tools, the right interventions. And so we keep putting our hearts and minds, we keep mining the data, keep making sure we have the right data, and then we put our hearts and minds on our shoulders to figuring out, okay, what is it we can do as a foundation to change the world and to hopefully bring others along in this journey. Because we look at.

You have a lot of partners that help in this.

So many partners. There is nothing we can ever do alone. And I mean that there's nothing because. Because all the things we try to work on, whether it's vaccines or family planning or aids, tuberculosis, malaria, women and girls issues, our money can only be a catalytic wedge. We've always looked at our foundation that way, that even though it looks enormous, you know, if you count the amount of our money and Warren's money, each of those issues is enormous. We could spend down our foundation just in two years based on what the state of California spends on its education budget.

Right.

If we just put it all in California and spend it on education. So we won't do that. We have to be this catalytic wedge philanthropy. And I encourage everyone to think about this in the room is your mind and thinking about things, your ability or the way you think about taking a risk or starting a project or lifting somebody else up. You can show root causes and examples, you can gather data, you can show what works. And then you crowd in government funding because they're the ones that take things to huge scale. But that's all philanthropy can do, is we can be that catalytic wedge to kind of try and show the way. And we do that in partnership with many, many other people around the world.

And you do it around the world and globally. And I remember the first time we sat down, something really struck me, because after the interview, there were some of the viewers who said, you know, it starts at home. Why across the globe? Why not here? And you said something that was very interesting, and it stayed with me. Melinda, you said, it's not either or. It's.

And.

And.

And when you look at it like that, and you could apply that to many facets and areas of our life, but it's not an either or thing. It's and.

It's an and. And you. I think you have to work in your local community to understand the ecosystem of what's going on around you, because I think we can all get up in the morning and drive our nice car to work and stay in our own Little bubble of our life. But if you don't go out and work in the community and understand what's going on with whatever the issue is, you care about homelessness, mental health issues going on, the elderly and the aging. You have to understand what's going on in your backyard. And I think that is often what sparks people to get started. And then I encourage people to then also they'll look out into the larger world and say, okay, when you travel, if you get to travel, what else can you learn about? And how might what you learn in your own backyard also apply to others around the world? Because the hopes and dreams of people around the world, that's what you learn as you travel, is that they are the same. The hopes and dreams for their children, for their own life, for what they want. That is the common humanity. And I think you can work in both situations, locally and globally.

My mom often said we have more in common than not. So why don't we focus on those similarities, such as family and things like that, as opposed to the few differences that seem to take up so much of the oxygen in the room. How about your children? How are they becoming involved?

Well, they've traveled with us from a very early age. And as soon as they were old enough, which was about nine or 10, I started taking them into places. So they've been into slums, they've been into townships, so they get to do the luxury travel, too, and see the savannah and the safari, but to really see it. And then I took my oldest daughter when she was 15, and we did a homestay with a Maasai family in Tanzania. And you want to talk about eye opening? I thought it was going to be eye opening for her. It was so eye opening for me because we stayed in a mud hut, a dung hut, that was part of this family's tiny little compound. And you want to talk about dark at night. You know, we were out doing dishes. We were out chopping wood with the women in the family during the day, carrying sticks, carrying water, which is very heavy. But I never factored in how dark it is in Africa at night if you have no electricity and you're out in the middle of the savannah, and we were out doing dishes at 10:30 at night and in the dark with the women in the family after the meal was over. And one of the young women, who was. Her name was Grace, she was right on the edge of puberty, and she and her twin brother were going to school. And the family, all the talk in the family was how Nervous they were that the brother had passed the exams into secondary school and she had failed the first time, but she had a second shot. And so she was trying to study, but Grace was right on puberty and she was very, very shy. And so she would hide away. She wouldn't talk to Jen and me very much. But at night, when my daughter jen, who was 15, came out of our hut with a headlight that we had brought, Grace came right over to us and said to my daughter, when you leave, can I have your headlamp? Because then I can study at night for my exams. And I thought, that's the difference. That's that unpaid sort of work that we don't talk about much, or the unpaid bias around the world. All the young women in the family and the mom were doing all the work at night, cleaning the dishes, getting ready for the meal, cleaning up at night. That's what was keeping Grace from her studies. And because she didn't have light, no wonder she couldn't study at night. Right. And we. So anyway, Jen and I learned a lot on that trip. And subsequently I've done a homestay with my son Rory in Malawi. And now my youngest daughter, Phoebe, is doing quite a few homestays on her own. And I'm going to visit her when she spends two and three weeks in Rwanda. And it's been very eye opening.

And we can learn so much through young people. They really want to be a part of the solution when it comes to what we're seeing in the world. Wasn't the last you and Bill, the letter that you do every year, your annual report, it was really geared and you talk to teenagers and were written just so amazed at their approach and their response to it.

Yeah, we've been talking. We geared our annual letter. Bill and I do an annual letter every year in around January, February, and we geared it last year to young people because there's so much energy, enthusiasm and optimism. And I think one of the things technology is allowing young people to do is to see the world in a different way. These amazing stories and I think the power of storytelling, which we're just now starting to see on the. The Internet. And I think it's going to get better and better over time that people can connect with other people on the other side of the world, even if they can't travel there, they can learn their story and realize, okay, I put $10 of my allowance up as a kid for a bed net that saves a baby's life. Right. Or I decide to make a Small investment in a microloan for a woman so she can get new tools on her farm, that connection is happening. And so, yeah, I see the next generation as full of possibilities for making these connections around the world that help us make investments on behalf of others.

You say optimism. What do you often say you're an impatient optimist?

Optimist?

What do you mean by that?

Well, I think both Bill and I are impatient because we see all the problems of the world. We see that there are things that we can solve, we can solve in our lifetime. We will have a cure for malaria in our life. Bill and I dream and believe that we actually can wipe malaria off the map in our lifetime. So we're impatient for it to happen and for the tools to come and the science to catch up and all the pieces we're working on to come together. But we're also optimistic because we see the amazing ingenuity, the global fund, that was highlighted on the video earlier. I mean, people are alive in Africa because of that fund. It used to be that you go to Africa because of the stigma of aids, and because there was no medicine, people didn't talk about having aids. That stigma is being broken through because AIDS medicines are available. Malaria medicines are available. And so we have this optimism about. We see the world changing. I go to Tanzania or Kenya today. It is very different than when I traveled there 15 years ago. So we see the possibility and the way the world is changing, that we're just impatient for it to happen even more quickly.

What is it like to work together with Bill?

With Bill?

Well, as you can imagine, he's intense. I don't, you know, I speak the truth and. But it's an intensity on behalf of the world, and it's. So. It's a lot of fun to work together. We really enjoy it. We have very honest conversations at home about how did we do today as a couple, or were we too tough on somebody? So there's a maturation, I think, that has happened there over the years, which has been pretty great. And one of the most fun things about working with Bill is that he loves to learn and he loves to teach, and he believes that anybody can learn anything. So when I am sometimes too tough on myself, like, oh, I didn't learn enough in biology in high school or enough chemistry, or, you know, he'll be like, are you kidding? Just go learn the field now. Like, I'll teach you what I know. You can go on the Internet and learn. You can find this great expert. Or if I feel Like I don't know enough in malaria, let's say, or tuberculosis. So he just believes that life is a learning journey and that we all should be curious and continuous learners. So he brings that to everything he does at work and he brings it to our home life in spades. And we're spending a lot of time learning in our home. And that, that's just really a lot of fun.

And he has a great sense of humor.

He has a great sense of humor. A little dark sometimes, but dry is dry.

Dry, dry.

That's it.

Dry. That's even better. So in the final moments that we have here, what is it that you, your final message that you want to get to this great group?

I would just say, you know, everyone in this room has the ability to change somebody's life. And I go back to what Mother Teresa said that. She says that if she didn't lift up that first person, you know, people often ask, how did you build this huge organization and, you know, orphans and saving so many people? And she said, if I hadn't picked up that one person, I never would have started. And so it does start. It starts with that one individual act. And I think everyone in this room, if they just look at the one individual act that they want to do, whether it's once a day or once a week, you build from there and you start to find that the things that you do, maybe in your business or, or in your family life, that those have huge ripple effects in the world and that if you put your mind and your shoulder and your energy and your heart against those things, you can change the world and be part of changing the world, and it can end up growing, maybe to even be in your life's avocation, if that's where you want it to go. And it's very, very rewarding, fulfilling, because of the people that you meet and that journey along the way.

Well, thank you for taking us along on your journey and thank you, Robert. Thank you making a difference that you are. Melinda Gates.

Thank you.

Belinda G.

All of us, by virtue of where we were born, have been lucky if we have educated mothers, educated fathers. We're lucky if we have a government school system that may not be perfect, but that works pretty well. We're very, very lucky, those of us who have been successful in life. I think we have an excellent, great opportunity to give back to those who might not have had that same luck. The cruelest fate for 5 year old, 6 year olds to be told you're born in the wrong place at the wrong Time So you're not going to get educated. You'll be one more generation to live in poverty.

Education is an amazing tool. It can unlock solutions to almost every problem you can think of in the world. And that's Room to Read's job is to ensure that every child is reached through education.

When the Khmer Rouge occupied the country I lost my parents because of the genocide regime and I becoming an orphan kid since I was about 12 and a half years old forced to work in the rice field. And until six, seven years later I back to school. I remember all my parents told me no matter where you are, make sure you go to school. And that's why I always have dream. If I have money I will build a school for my parents and dedicate to my parents. I do believe in all the tragedy, the poverty, all these things people suffer here. It's a root at people have no education. If they had been educated. I don't think the general side regime will take place in Cambodia. So our strategy here is to make sure children have access to school because like the philosophy says here can't start with educated children.

Statistically 2/3 of those who are out of school, 2/3 of those who are illiterate are girls and young women. We also know that when a girl or a woman gets educated it changes everything. It changes things for the family, for the community, for the whole society. That's why remarry decided to have a special focus on girls and women.

So walking into Pire's house and meeting her parents and her younger sister to show us the bookshelf that clearly Pire just has so much pride in her bookshelf. She's got all these medical books, she wants to be a doctor. It's amazing. That's a bold dream for a 15 year old girl. You know the mother pointed out the one light that they have in the house and with such pride that her daughter could sit under that one light. There was so much love and joy in the family and they're so proud of their daughter.

If a girl stays in school just one extra year in secondary school, her earning potential goes up by 15 to 20% every year. If she makes it to the end of 12th grade, she is a completely different future in front of her.

The fact that over 28,000 girls are now enrolled in our long term girls education program, the fact that we have worked in over 1,800 villages, the fact that there's over 17,000 communities, we've run our lives literacy program. We have to be able to track all of that. Salesforce has been a really important partner for Room to Read from the very beginning.

We're really lucky to have Salesforce. We really wouldn't be the organization that we are without having those metrics and the information and the data to share with people. It's just an integral part of how we operate.

And I'll never forget one time I emailed Mark and I was like, oh, I hope, you know, I hope he at least reads it. And I got a reply within literally about 45 seconds seconds. And he said, whatever you guys need, you get. And that was it.

I'm incredibly grateful to be in Cambodia, both with my local staff, but also with an incredible group of volunteers from Salesforce. We worked together with Salesforce to fund the building of a new structure for these families and to be able to provide them with just a safe place to come home to is just an amazing opportunity.

I've had kids in Nepal, a landlocked state. Ask me what does the ocean taste like, right? I've had children in Cambodia, which, you know, never gets below like 95 degrees. Asked me what does snow feel like? What does it feel like to be cold? They read about it in a book.

Remnorite's vision is very simple. It's to tell every kid in the world you were born in the right place at the right time because we were there for you. Salesforce was there for you.

On behalf of Cambodian children, we were really, really thankful to Salesforce. I went to Pagodaire and a ritual festival. I pray to my parents and I told them that I build school for them once every month. At least, at least if you can.

Reach that many children and then they grow up to raise an educated family. They grow up to be part of a peaceful, productive, stable society. This is right up there with the archidamies quote, give me a lever long enough and I can move the earth. 15 million kids getting educated is a pretty long way.