Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.

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 have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide.

I still feel that the kind of leader I want to be is one that spends time understanding our work in a way that allows me to translate it for policymakers and people who have real access to resources.

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

Why do some people stop growing at age 30, just going from work to the couch and television, when others stay vibrant, curious, almost childlike into their nineties?

On the one hand, I loved being a banker. I loved how numbers could tell a story and how you can invest in ideas and see them translate into products and services and create jobs. What I didn't like, particularly where I was working in Brazil during the debt crisis of the early '80s, was how the poor were excluded from the banking system. I made the decision to try and experiment with whether we could use the tools of banking to extend the benefits of the economy to the poor.