Entrepreneurs almost always have to step out of existing institutions that embody old ways of doing things to build their vision.

The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.

The most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one's willingness to give oneself permission. To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.

We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.

The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.

The first - the most obvious test of a true social entrepreneur - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea.