It Began With Books

My defining moment happened 10 years ago. In April 1998, I'd spent seven go-go years at Microsoft. Tech was booming, I was working 24/7 and had 75 people reporting to me. I needed to get away. The Annapurna circuit in the Himalayas seemed the ideal escape.

That's where it happened. I know "epiphany" is an overused word, but on the second day of the trek, I was invited to visit a local school. When we got there, I was shocked. I'd thought I was going trekking through Shangri-La, but here was absolute poverty, and poverty of opportunity. What really struck me was when the headmaster showed me their "library." They had no desks, no chairs, no shelves—and no books. He then spoke a sentence that would forever change my adult life: "Perhaps, sir, you will come back with books." A very simple statement, but it hit me hard. I'd had the good fortune to grow up in a household that valued reading, and my own family had used education as a ticket out of poverty. I'd made a decent amount of money at a young age, and I thought, I can get 500 or 1,000 books and help give these kids an education.

Back in Katmandu, my first stop was a cybercafé, where I e-mailed friends around the world asking for help. I thought maybe we would get a couple of hundred books. But 3,000 arrived in the first month, and by early '99 the book drive was a wild success.

By then I was based in Beijing, running business development for Microsoft's Greater China Region. On the first anniversary of the trek, I went back with my 73-year-old father—my new unpaid volunteer—and 3,000 books on the backs of six rented donkeys (on future trips, I'd upgrade to yaks). We visited 10 schools, and the outpouring of emotion was overwhelming. When the kids saw the books, they started grabbing them wildly—it was like a mosh pit—and they would then sit calmly reading to each other with these huge smiles on their faces. Nothing had ever felt better to me.

I sat down that night with my father and asked, "Is this enough?" There are hundreds of thousands of villages across the world in this situation. It was great to do these 10 libraries, but this was a drop in the ocean.

I knew there was something ticking inside me, telling me that Microsoft probably wasn't my future.