Stephen Colbert + DonorsChoose's Charles Best — The power of small goals

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Startups are audacious. They’re big. They’re world-changing. But you can’t achieve scale on day one. Sometimes the best way to achieve that monumental success tomorrow is to take a teeny tiny step today. This is what Charles Best did when he founded one of the world’s first crowdfunding platforms, DonorsChoose. For 20 years, the nonprofit has been helping public school teachers get funding and supplies for classroom projects and it all started with just a handful of projects in the Bronx, where Charles was a public school teacher. Now it funds thousands of projects in all 50 states, raising almost a billion dollars in the process. Charles did it by adeptly creating a flywheel that matches for donors and grantees, allowing them to connect directly with one another, and doing it all one small step at a time. Cameo: Stephen Colbert!!!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,
0:07.8	with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.
0:17.0	We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.
0:24.7	So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.
0:31.2	I'll see you on the other side. Microphone recorder, Mike
0:35.0	stand based. Okay. There we go.
0:40.0	Stephen Colbert is the kind of guy who always has a goal.
0:45.0	Currently, his goal is to set up the microphone we sent him for our interview.
0:50.0	It arrives in a serious looking pelican case.
0:54.0	It looks like I've just been given the nuclear football.
1:00.0	That goes in there.
1:04.0	in there.
1:05.0	Although daunting for some, Stephen is now accustomed to being his own production team
1:10.0	thanks to three months of filming at home during quarantine.
1:14.3	Like he doesn't there.
1:18.3	He also knows that to achieve any goal you have to start somewhere. In this case, start screwing in the mic stand.
1:26.3	There you go. That's it.
1:29.2	Whoa!
1:30.7	Almost there. Reading and hold, and are we rolling?
1:35.0	Yeah.
1:36.0	Six, seven, eight.
1:39.0	And, magic. Magic.
	...

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