Doug Galen∶ Supporting Social Enterprises, Silicon Valley Style

The Sydcast

Episode Summary:

What would happen if you took Silicon Valley smarts and talent and applied it to helping social impact entrepreneurs scale their enterprises? Doug Galen decided to find out. Motivated by his daughter's drive to make the world a better place, Doug founded RippleWorks, an organization that has now helped social ventures in 59 countries and counting. This is his story.

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Doug Galen

Doug Galen has been building innovative and disruptive companies for some twenty-five years. Doug Galen is the Co-Founder and CEO of RippleWorks. RippleWorks is relentlessly focused on the needs of social ventures, providing the practical support impactful entrepreneurs and their teams need to improve more lives. We work in 59 countries and have a portfolio of 110 organizations of which these ventures have helped 216 million people.

In addition to RippleWorks, Doug teaches Startup Garage at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Doug sits on the Boards of Heifer International and Kenzie Academy as well as advises early-stage companies.

Prior to RippleWorks, Doug served as Chief Revenue Officer at Shopkick, a mobile app startup backed by Kleiner Perkins and Greylock that successfully sold to a Fortune 50 company, SVP of business and corporate development at Shutterfly where he helped grow revenue from $50 million to $500 million and a successful IPO, VP and GM of new ventures for eBay where he helped create eight new business units with revenues of $500 million and was employee #3 and Vice President of Sales and Business Development for E-LOAN which had a successful IPO.

Insights from the Episode:

• Understanding the ability to bridge from where you are to where you want to go in your career.
• How to pursue what you love doing: pursue it and stop when it is not working.
• How to acknowledge when you are out of sync and figure out what you have to do about it.
• How to marry purpose and impact into your day job and enjoy and feel happy about your work.

Quotes from the show:

• “Naivety is a blessing and a curse when you are starting a company” -Doug Galen [14:53]

• “Trust isn’t always in a great product or about speed, rather it is in the testimonials and attaching credibility to your company” -Doug Galen [20:10]

• “Trust is almost like the underpinnings of a capitalist society” -Sydney Finkelstein [26:12]

• “It’s important to build a company that adds value and withstands hard times” -Doug Galen [23:05]

• “Money is a scarce resource, but so are skills and the ability to scale an organization” -Doug Galen [43:13]

• “There are a lot of people in the world who would like to help and give back but they do not know how to or where to begin” -Doug Galen [45:25]

• “Some of our best lessons in life come from our mistakes” -Doug Galen [43:59]

• “When an organization becomes really big, a great strategy is to zoom in on their operations and focus on something narrow that you can do better than them” -Doug Galen [1:04:20]

• “Don’t go after what you should do, go after what you want to do. And if you go after what you want to do and it doesn’t work, it is okay to stop and start over” -Doug Galen [1:07:00]

Stay Connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Doug Galen

Website: Homepage - Rippleworks

Facebook: Doug Galen

LinkedIn: Doug Galen

Twitter: @DougGalen

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.