The human spirit is extraordinary. If we give the 3 billion people who live in poverty the opportunity to change their lives, they will. For too long, we've looked at needing to "save" these people - with an emphasis on "these people" - rather than removing the constraints keeping them from solving their own problems.

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.

We can send people to the Moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get $5 [mosquito] nets to 500 million people?

When it comes to solving problems of poverty, impact investing can act as a catalyst, but it is not a silver bullet. Successful businesses serving the poor need more than investment capital. They also need infrastructure to enable effective distribution, strong regulatory systems, access to markets, technical assistance as they scale up, and more

Listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions.

Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.

Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.