Chuck Slaughter is the founder of Living Goods. Living Goods supports over 10,000 digitally-empowered community health workers to reduce child deaths by over 25% at an annual cost of under $4 per person. As a Senior Advisor to TPG Rise (a $10 billion impact investing platform), Director of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and a successful entrepreneur, Chuck has a rich perspective on how digital is reshaping aid and development work. Tune in today to hear Chuck’s guidance on whether to ‘build or buy’ tech, why nonprofits struggle to deliver the best technology products, and how governments and the private sector need to work together to scale high-impact innovations.
Chuck serves on the boards of Yale’s School of Management, Tidepool, Reach Health, and the Horace W Goldsmith Foundation. He received a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, a Draper Richards Kaplan Fellowship, and is a World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year.
Conversation Highlights
- (6m27s) – How Chuck and Living Goods became digital first
- (13m45s) – The DESC metaphor of Living Goods: Digital, Equipped, Supervised and Compensated
- (22m01s) – Working with new technologies: the ‘build or buy’ debate
- (28m24s) – Why non-profits struggle to build great tech
- (32m09s) – The digital transformation of aid: grantmaking through the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
- (37m08s) – Financing scale: how government and the private sector need to work together
- (40m19s) – Rapid fire questions, shoutouts, and recommendations
Links
- Rocket Learning is the group in India which Chuck funded. They tackled early childhood development through a cost-effective, digital-first intervention using WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform there.
- Chuck is keeping an eye on the digital health companies Babylon and Ada because of the compelling ways in which they use digital health. He is also following Omada and Livongo for their novel treatment of chronic conditions.
- In emerging markets, Chuck’s supports the work of Reach Digital Health (formerly Praekelt.org) and the for-profit technology spin-off Turn.io.
- In the education space, Chuck highlights Sal Khan’s work at the Khan Academy, and in particular their partnership with OpenAI to deliver AI-driven, personalized tutoring.
- Chuck’s podcast obsessions include People I Mostly Admire and Freakonomics.
Similar Episodes
- Chuck gives a shout-out to Debbie Rogers and Gustav Praekelt of the nonprofit, Reach Digital Health, as well as the for-profit spin-off, Turn.io. This is an intriguing case study of an innovation born in a nonprofit that subsequently sought scale through commercialization in a for-profit entity.
- Yaw Anokwa of ODK shares the many trials and tribulations of developing a sustainable business model to sustain a global digital public good
- John Fairhurst of the Global Fund and Andy Pattison of the WHO have both earlier shared their perspective on how public and private actors work together to deploy innovations in global health