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[MUSIC] Welcome, everyone.
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I am Joy Pong one of the view from top student leaders.
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On behalf of our team, thank you for joining us today.
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We hope that you find this conversation important and relevant. >> Thank you Joy.
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>> So welcome everyone to view from the top, today I have the pleasure of introducing Priscilla Chan, the co founder and the co CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.
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Priscilla and her husband Mark founded CZI in 2015 to leverage technology, community driven solutions and collaboration to help solve some of the world's toughest challenges.
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She is a physician, an educator and philanthropist who approaches philanthropy and indeed everything with rigor, data and curiosity.
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And really looking forward to learning more from Priscilla and hearing about what's on her mind the things she is thinking about today in her conversation with Rex Woodbury MBA 2021.
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So thank you again for so for joining us and really looking forward to the discussion.
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Priscilla, thank you so much for being here. >> It's good to be here. Here virtually.
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Well, it's been an emotional week with the Shogun trial with ongoing police shootings with gun violence but I want to say I've personally been so inspired by the work that you're doing at the Chan Zuckerberg.
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Initiative on education and racial equity and criminal justice reform and I'm thrilled to be having this conversation and I know that my classmates are thrilled to be here listening to you today.
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>> Yeah thanks for making up during the work and putting this together.
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And I have to say, this past week, I was just a huge mixed bag of emotions like relief for the verdict in the murder of George Floyd.
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And what like in just like sadness that it had to happen that it happened this way and but also hope we're going to get better.
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>> Yeah, I want to talk specifically in a little bit about some of the initiatives that you're working on which I think touch on all of those aspects or values that you just mentioned.
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But I do want to start with your family because you have a very incredible family story you're the daughter of Chinese Vietnamese refugees.
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Your grandparents were business people in Vietnam who worked at canning pineapple and making paper and running a restaurant.
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And I was wondering if you could share with us the story of how your family left Vietnam and came to America.
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>> So this happened before my time.
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My grandparents were business partners.
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My dad's parents I had six kids and my mom's parents had my mom's dad actually had two wives.
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And a really interesting part of my family history that's but I just want to name is my mom's mom was a second wife.
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And she was an indentured servant who was brought into the family to have more kids.
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And so my between the mix of those two really large and eclectic families.
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My grandparents were business partners and when the war was getting to be a pretty dark place, they decided to smuggle their children out.
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And they were going to become send their kids and boats and in the United States they're known as boat people but the way they made their journey as boat people was incredibly it's just real.
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And there were stories of boats sinking, and people dying on the boats.
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And so my grandparents decided that they didn't want a single boat to sink with all their children.
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So what they did and the unstated next step is that they would lose all their children.
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What they did is they paired up their children into twos or threes so that they would have company on the journey.
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But if any boat went down they would only lose one to two children.
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And that's how my grandparents said goodbye to their kids on these little boats in the middle of the night, sending them off into the South China Sea.
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And hopes that they'll see each other again and I hold on, obviously I wasn't there.
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But I hold on to that image and sort of a moment of how big a decision parents.
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People make for their families, for their livelihoods and the immense amount of optimism and faith that you have to have in order to make that decision.
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I like to believe that, that's somehow genetic and I've inherited it, but that's sort of what I always come back to like we there has to be better and we will get there.
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And then long story short, my boats, everyone made it and it took about a decade for everyone to get back together.
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But and then my parents stayed together for longer than the boat ride and here I am.
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>> It's an incredible story.
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And you've said that I love to hear if you're open to speaking about it those early kind of years.
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And I think it was suburban, Massachusetts, kind of outside of the Boston area.
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Your family's building a home there and you've said that you were bullied when you were younger and kind of put your head down and worked really hard and then got into Harvard.
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And if you're open, I'd love to hear about, how that early experience of being bullied or growing up in that environment shaped you and then that transition moment.
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I imagine it was quite a shock going from that family life to the world of Harvard when you were 18.
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>> Yeah, so we were sponsored it at the time, refugees were sponsored by all different groups in the Catholic Church played a really big role.
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And we were sponsored by the Catholic Church my family was so we ended up in an Irish Catholic town outside of Boston.
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And we were the first to arrive and which otherwise was just like straight up good will hunting with like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as my neighbors.
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So I did not fit it and believe it or not and there's so many reasons why I didn't fit in.
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But I remember thinking that I don't know what's out there, but there has to be more If I worked really hard, I will get there and then I remember the day I made that decision.
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I was being bullied in middle school Middle School is awful.
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Thank God we're all not in middle school. >> It really is.
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>> And I was eating lunch in the bathroom in a public school bathroom, because I didn't want to go out to the playground.
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The blacktop after lunch and I was just like, this can't be the rest of my life, right?
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Like, there's got to be more.
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And so like, I remember as a sixth grader, I was like, I'm going to buckle down.
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I don't know what's out there men are really hard and I'm going to get there.
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So I spent a lot of time chasing that dream.
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And then I got into Harvard, which was a little bit confusing because if my parents didn't go to college, my parents didn't really speak English.
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And like Harvard was like an idea, but it was unclear how attainable or unattainable it was, it was like we didn't have access to anything.
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So maybe this was just like normal inaccessible, not like sort of out of this world and accessible.
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So like, I didn't know how to parse the idea of going there.
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Or at least didn't get nervous enough in time, I got there and I was like, holy cow, these people like first of all, like as an outsider going to Harvard, everyone dresses the same.
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Everyone's wearing the same clothes, everyone's talking about the same places.
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And I've never been there and I definitely don't even know where to get clothes that look like that and I was also no longer a big fish in a little pond.
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And I was Incredibly, feeling like a failure or feeling like a fraud and the turning point was realizing that I wasn't the only one.
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I joined that service house at Harvard, where I was a part of the Philip sports house and there were other people, who had stories like mine.
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And there were people and they were giving back and I wanted to do that too, that's been my mission ever since.
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But the most important thing that I learned in that moment that I try to hold on to always, is that if you hide you're powerless.
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If you hide in the bathroom, if you hide behind who you know, who you think you should be, you're powerless.
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But if you name what's hard, if you name while you're different, if you name your story that gives you power and so I always try to be upfront about who I am and sort of name my experience name what I'm feeling.
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Because when you're not hiding you can be your best self.
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>> And I'm not sure if it was when you were at Harvard or or later when you were volunteer or educator or doctor, but you've talked about a moment when you realize that the problems were bigger, bigger than you bigger than you thought that the structure and the system was broken.
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I think, I'm sure that resonates with a lot of our classmates when you step back and kind of realize that you have to be part of the solution or you have to get involved.
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And I'm curious, can you talk about when that moment hit for you, and how formative that was and realizing that you actually needed to start a sort of step one build the new system, right?
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Or at least have a part in that.
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>> Yeah, it's a terrifying moment and one where I will add in the spirit of naming things as I failed.
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I was taking care of an 8 year old little boy in my practice at San Francisco General Hospital, and I've been taking care of him for like 2 or 3 years.
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And I was like, what's like?
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It was confusing because his mom kept telling me he had seizures and I was like, I don't think he has seizures like I looked everything up, he doesn't have seizures.
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And I kind of like, and then I was like, maybe there's something developmentally going wrong and like with the school and I've been trying to get in touch with the school.
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But the school hours somehow didn't match up with my clinic hours and we couldn't get like the only way to get information between like the school and me was like a piece of paper that we were having mom bring back and forth.
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And so like we're kind of stuck like this for a few years and then I realized he was a that there had been a giant miscommunication.
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That mom had been telling the school that he had a seizure disorder and he had missed, he was eight so third grade.
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By third grade, he had missed 180 days of school, which is one school year.
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Because the school had excused all this for his medical issue, which was presumed to be a seizure disorder and they were doing, they were trying to do what was best for the kid.
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And meanwhile I was like, no seizure disorder, he should be in school.
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And after we sort of like had an emergency series of meetings, we realized that he had been witness to very severe domestic violence at home and he was acting out in a way that looked like seizures, but weren't.
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And so, in that series of miscommunications, he had missed exactly what he needed a safe environment that understood his needs holistically and instead he had missed a full year of school.
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And he as an 8 year old, didn't know his letters, couldn't read, struggled with numbers and when we tested him he was of a normal intelligence like big time fail.
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And the teacher and the principle thought that they were doing exactly the right thing and for this kid, I thought I was advocating for the kid as someone who like always asked about school, how things are going.
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And so we had a collision of people who are trying their best and that the way we structure the way we care for our most vulnerable is completely broken and we've just completely missed the mark.
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And then I was like panic because I'm like, Well, I got to tell someone, like someone needs to know that there's a big problem.
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And I'm sure many of you, like are very good at identifying problems and like going to the authorities.
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The only problem is eventually you'll find that there is no authority and that, no, you're the grown up in the room.
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You're the only one who cares enough about this problem to do something about it.
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And and so I spent a good 6 months I was like if I do enough research, I'll find a way that this problem has been solved or if I do enough this, I'll find the solution.
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And I realized that it just, it didn't exist.
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And and when you confront that moment you have to think like what am I going to do it about it now?
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And so that's what led me down the road of eventually starting the primary school.
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where I started a school in a fit of insanity at the same time as having a child and starting CCI, it's doing great now, but they really work on through knitting changing the way the system works knitting together healthcare.
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Especially those in our safety nets and the school environment.
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>> I mean, what's so interesting to me about your sort of two lives or multiple lives here of being a doctor?
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And you know, some of this is coming from my own my brother's a doctor, and I think he and I talked a lot about depth of impact versus breadth of impact.
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And you've spoken about what you said, you call it the trolley problem of you know, would you rather help 100 people deeply or you know, help everyone a little bit.
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And, this will lead us I'm sure to talking about CCI.
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But I'm curious in your career as you evolve through different chapters, how have you thought about balancing depth of impact and breadth of impact?
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>> I've gone through all different versions of this and I think a couple things here, one is In order to make the, let's see, which one are you calling depth and breadth?
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Is your brother taking care of a single patient depths in your breath?
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Like- >> I would say, and maybe this resonates with some business school classmates, I would say my brother subscribes to the philosophy, if he helps one patient very deeply in his career, I think he views it as a success and he's fulfilled.
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Whereas I think somewhere along the road and this is probably true of many GSB students, we think much more about breath, let's scale this business, let's grow the system let's.
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And I'm always telling my brother, I'm saying Carson think big, fix the structural issues of healthcare and maybe it's a different sort of personal fulfilment of where you get fulfilment from.
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But I think of medicine is depth of impact, and maybe business are fixing the structure as breath. >> Okay.
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And I have the same definition.
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But I will argue that you actually, not every person needs to do both, people naturally gravitate to one or another.
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But to really make change you need to understand this.
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And because in order to actually change the, we'll take the change the system see, you need to actually understand what the problems are.
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And what your brother really, what Carson really understands, is what are the barriers that made it hard for this patient to get to access care, or what made it hard for them to remember to take their meds every day.
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As a good doctor, he knows that, and he has an intuition for it.
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And it's oftentimes surprising, the bus schedule used to determine and whether or not the, art was running on time used to determine whether or not my patients would get to clinic and whether or not my clinic would run smoothly.
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So it wasn't going to be some sort of change management process in the way we check patients in, it's like what is screwing over my clinic schedule.
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And so, you have to understand and have a clear vision of what the actual issues are, the real barriers, that affects the lives of the people we want to impact in order to impact with breath.
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And so at CCI, we hold that as a core value, and we call it staying close to the work.
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We have to be proximate to understand how to make systemic change.
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We intentionally hire people with both.
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And I can tell you that there are disagreements and I'm sure we can name many, and sort of just like language and orientation barriers around when you bring such different people of all different backgrounds, all different orientations around the work to solve a problem together.
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But that's when you actually understand with clarity what you're trying to do, and then you can scale something meaningful, something good in the world.
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[CROSSTALK] But on a personal note, I plan on going back to a fellowship when I'm done, with my run at CCI, so I am someone who loves being with kids and families.
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I mentor kids, little kids over zoom and at the school I love that.
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I need that to nourish my soul.
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But I have to say the systemic work is what gives me hope.
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And that's why a lot of, to use your brother again as an example, it's amazing being on the front lines and that's incredibly gratifying, but if you run into the same problem for the 100th or 1,000th time, you can lose hope.
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And so it's the work and changing the systems that gives me hope in that work.
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>> Well, it's good to know that you can do both, you can have different chapters and reinvent yourself in different chapters of life and career, but I do want to talk about the systemic stuff and CZI specifically, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
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I've heard you say that, I think you started at the same year that you had your daughter Max, and I've heard you say being a new parent and starting a don't drop a co organization or assembler, so I'm curious what you mean by that.
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>> Man, keep you up at night, it's a lot of sleepless nights for different reasons.
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It's either the baby or building an organization and I think the core of it though, is what I mean is when you guys all go out there and contribute to organizations of all different phases and stages, it's I'll use the pediatrician term is like, is it developmentally appropriate.
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And you talk to people, all organizations have sort of goofy things about them and things that they're working through.
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And, but some problems are developmentally appropriate for the stage of the organization.
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And some art, and when you're up at night wondering, is Max okay, is she smiling or no you're googling for the parents in the room, they're googling smiling at five weeks, okay?
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There's a similar version of what happens when you build an organization, is it okay that, we there were moments at CCI where we had our internet cut off because we forgot to pay the internet bill and that was okay, week eight, but it is not okay at year five.
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And so I think just understanding sort of the cadence, and evolution, and growth of an organization and giving yourself Some slack when you're like it's okay, this is a problem that many organizations have, we'll get to it and solving the right ones at the right moment in time for the organization.
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>> And you stepped away from medicine to be co CEO of CCI.
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And I think one journalist wrote about you.
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She's a doctor that has become a crusader, I'm curious what is a trait from your medicine days that you've carried with you that's been surprisingly helpful in running CCI and what's sort of something you've had to learn that new >> Let's see.
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I love being a student, so I don't know if that's a crusader but I will trade seats and will just soak in knowledge at any moment.
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But I think the same thing that brought me to education, to medicine, and now to CCI, is that, these are people's lives we're touching.
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And you can track metrics, you can think about sort of dollars, and impact, and all different ways that you can quantify but at the end of the day, we're touching people's lives, and people's lives are complex.
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We need to see the whole picture, and we can't forget that and when I think about, the patient that I just told you about, or many of I have many a catalogue of faces that sort of like it's get me going better than coffee every morning. I can't stop.
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Because I have to do better, and there's no choice to give up.
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I can fail and I fail all the time.
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But I can't stop, because it's not an intellectual idea that I'm pursuing.
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I'm trying to actually touch and change people's lives at the end of my time.
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And so quitting is not really an option, let's see things that I learned new.
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I couldn't, honestly at one point I was like, I should go to business school.
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I don't know anything about, I'm like, what is HR?
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Because remember, I think there's some a few MBAs in the room, HR, nobody's ever cared about me.
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Nobody's ever told me like that, they like I've been yelled at in the middle they're people that are supposed to take care of me.
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That's cool, so learning about HR learning about operational management, Gantt charts are a thing like and make things run smoothly.
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I think I'm just saying words that I've heard that no other people helped me do.
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But, being smart about the way you prioritize when projects and get people convinced people that you have a mission, worth pursuing.
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>> And I think we're seeing this bleeding, I mean social impact, business.
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At Stanford, our social innovation is important to a lot of students and it's a big focus of the curriculum.
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But I think we're seeing bleeding lines between the two.
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And I was really moved by your letter to your grant partners from a couple weeks back about.
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The attacks on Asian Americans and how it personally resonated with you and your and grandparents story.
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I'm curious if you could speak about, what that emotional, time for you but also from a business perspective.
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What are ways that leaders can can get involved and can take issues and options on those different problems.
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>> Yeah, I have to, I have to be honest.
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I had to take a step back and do some learning and reflection, and this all happened because in sort of my experience growing up.
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In a, one of the few Asian American families in our community.
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And then going to Harvard where being really involved in social justice.
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And often in our country that's about black and Latin x and the historically underserved populations. That's been my calling.
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And I relate because I'm like, I get it, I'm an immigrant, I've been an outsider, I identify with the issues that you face.
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And I've never, until recently, never really taken a moment to reflect on my own racial identity.
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Because I sort of just always assumed, one, that it was an anomaly.
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And two, and this is probably the result of being raised by refugees.
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Just put your head down, it's going to be fine.
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Just take what you can get and, keep going and you'll be fine and.
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The interesting impact is it made easier for me to advocate for others than it was to advocate for myself.
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And this is not a new phenomena, it's well studied and well document that for instance women.
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Can advocate very well other women, and struggle with advocating for themselves.
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And, so I did some reflection, there's a five-part PBS series.
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That's excellent on called Asian Americans. I highly recommend it.
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And starting to really think about how to make sure that we're not always forgetting the AAPI community when we talk about people of color.
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Because, they are people of color that have very complex relationships with their own race, other minorities in our country.
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And we need to examine it collectively, and I have to say I've spoken to many Asian American leaders.
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In the wake of the shootings, and they, it's a very similar story.
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They're yeah, I, I gotta wake up to this.
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And so I would say for others in the business community is understanding we do some learning.
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And, also, think about how, just because a group doesn't speak up doesn't mean that there aren't needs.
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Because this is a group that's historically in our country for one reason or another not trained to speak up for many reasons.
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>> We still have one more question for you before we care from two students.
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And I want to go back to your grandparents and parents coming to America on the boat from Saigon.
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Yeah, you've spoken about them, you've spoken about your own kids.
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What's one important lesson, yeah?.
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If you had to pick one lesson that your parents, grandparents, that you've taken from them that you want to teach your own kids. What would that be?
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>> The optimism that I was, Joe, I hope it's in me.
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I want them to feel that optimism too, and not a Pollyanna type of optimism.
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But a faith that people will continue like things will if we work hard and we continue the fight.
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Things will improve and to always believe that there has to be better gratitude.
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And this one is going to be a, I grew up as a child of people who were politically persecuted.
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Refugees on boats just like, just grateful for every day.
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And the last one is sometimes for many reasons not seen as a very popular sentiment, but I love our country.
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And, it's popular to, sometimes like, one side of the political spectrum gets to love our country.
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Or, there's so many things broken that, how can you love the United States of America?
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This country is founded on wrong ideals that are not perfect but it is our responsibility to build a better country.
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And if you don't love it and you don't nourish it, you cannot live up to its potential.
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Gosh, I didn't realize I was so patriotic until just now.
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>> [LAUGH] That's great, thank you.
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Well, I do actually one more, I know I said that was last time, I have one more question for you.
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But first, we're going to hear from two of our students and I want to make sure We have time for that.
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I think first up is Jessica, so we'll hear from Jessica.
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>> Hi Priscilla, thanks for being here today and sharing your wisdom with all of us.
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My question is around the huge health disparities we've seen, especially during this pits on that.
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Now as a doctor and ethical enterprise, how do you think we can solve some of the health inequities in this country?
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>> I think it is important to realize that related to this sort of understand the problem that you're trying to solve.
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Is that everyone has different barriers and there's not a one size fits all in there.
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We have to take A community centric approach to addressing health disparities.
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We, very early on COVID, we ran a study on the prevalence of Coronavirus in one census track in the mission and what we realized is Diane Hablar did this and from UCSF is that in this one census track.
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Zero people of Caucasian descent had Coronavirus and I think it was near 20% of individuals with a Latin X background had Coronavirus during this period that they were doing the test.
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And first of all that naming the disparity that you named In the two groups had different access and different barriers to actually accessing testing and accessing care.
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And what that group then did was partner with the community.
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They partnered with the Latino Task Force and said like, what is the best way to get tested?
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What is the best way to follow up and under and because it was such a deep partnership.
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The testing and treatment and now vaccination of that community, is incredibly strong and we sort of spread those learnings across the city.
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But the same thing that would have worked for honestly, I had a colleague who fell into the census track.
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Who wouldn't work for David, doesn't work for someone else who has an entirely different set of life circumstances.
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And so, it's not about scaling.
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What work sometimes can work for you URI, it's about working deeply with the community to understand like.
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Name help us name the solution together.
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>> Thank you, >> Thank you Jessica.
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Next we have a question from Mary Grace. >> Hi Priscilla.
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My name is Mary Grace Reeves.
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I'm in my fifth year of Stanford's dual MBA program.
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And I'm looking forward to starting residency this summer.
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And it's such a privilege to hear you speak.
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Thank you for being with us.
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I'm wondering in founding and leading the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, you're tackling the most pressing societal challenges of our time.
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And through that process, what have you learned about building a successful team?
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And how has that allowed your team at CCI to navigate diverse initiatives?
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You know, building, I think building a good team is sort of it's I wouldn't say it's specific to our work at CZI, but it's naming things being clear about what problem you're trying to solve.
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Prioritizing it, and being really direct with other people when things are working or when they're not working and I will name, I fallen into the same traps, I don't want to say it might hurt their feelings, I don't want to be mean.
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And I realized along the way look, I am who I am, but like they're in, they're going to like me or they're not.
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But like I do know that people like to be successful.
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And the way I make them successful is I tell them as clear as I can with what I want to see and what feedback I have and so, I have to say not specific to our work at CCI, but just like, say it like it is Mary Grace. >> Thank you.
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>> Thank you, Mary Grace.
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>> First of all, I have one last question for you, which is actually a question that we're asking to all of our speakers this year.
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It is what are the principles that you rely on when you're facing the toughest moments as a leader?
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>> In my toughest moments, the pictures of the kids that I served and I've.
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Had successes and failures with I keep them in my mind.
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And I remember those lessons, I have to like how would I solve this problem? For him or for her.
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And like build up from the community, like I was just saying earlier.
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Like try to understand the context that people's lives are in and solve from there.
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And that collaboration is key.
36:33
Not one person has understands the solution fully and not one person can see no one see the problem and no one sees the whole solution but if we come together with different tools, different skill sets, we can solve this together and those are the two bits and that if this is also, it's a lifetime of work.
37:02
And so you got to break it down into little pieces and, like, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.
37:13
>> I can't say I've heard that phrase but that's what I'm going to take away. >> I didn't invent that. >> Okay.
37:17
>> I think that's either Desmond Tutu or Mandela.
37:22
Well, thank you so much for so.
37:23
I think I speak for everyone when we're inspired by your story by what you're doing at Chan Zuckerberg, by the different live chapters that you've had and how you live with values and with those principles.
37:36
So, thank you so much for your time.
37:38
We hope to have you back Hopefully in person one time soon, but thank you for joining us virtually.
37:44
Yeah, thanks for having me next year in person. [MUSIC]