Atul Satija: Give Till It Hurts

He kept promising himself he would fight poverty one day. First at retirement. Then in his fifties. Then his forties. Until the day it felt like he was lying to himself. So one weekend he started cold-calling nonprofits at random, and walked away from a career most people spend their lives chasing.

Atul Satija is the founder of The/Nudge Institute, one of India’s most ambitious anti-poverty organisations, and the “Founder 2.0” of GiveIndia. Before that, he spent nearly two decades in the front line of the tech industry: Google, then InMobi, where he sat in the room as it raised 200 million dollars from SoftBank and had to make the calls that come with that kind of money. He has pledged half his net worth to giving. He is the person JP wanted to talk to about the single hardest question in social impact: not how to care, but how to make caring actually work at scale.

I came to this conversation from my own leap. When I moved from leading teams at Microsoft to building Live for Good, I discovered something that still surprises me: it can be harder to raise a small grant for a good cause than to close an enormous enterprise deal. Atul has lived that gap for years, and he has thought harder than almost anyone about how to close it. What he taught me is that generosity is not enough. You have to engineer it.

In our conversation, we explore:

→ What extreme poverty actually is: families of five or six living on three hundred dollars a year, and why the loss of dignity cuts as deep as the loss of income
→ Why the model that lifts a family out of poverty for good worked everywhere and scaled nowhere, and his answer: shape the state, do not replace it
→ The jar, the rocks and the sand: “you don’t want to build a parallel railroad, you want to fix what’s broken so bigger trains run on the same track”
→ Give till it hurts: why the poorest communities give a larger share of what they have than the richest do
→ AI seen from the bottom: why, for those who have almost nothing, there is nothing left for it to take

“If you’re giving what does not change anything in your life, then it is not really giving. You’re buying something with some extra money.”

Atul Satija, founder of The/Nudge Institute

If you have ever told yourself you will do the meaningful thing later, once the timing is right, this episode is about the day later stops being an option.

🎧 Related episodes:

• Nandan Nilekani, who wrote The/Nudge’s first cheque, “Achieving ambitious goals”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/13663342
• James Chen, “Seeing the Future and Transforming Millions of Lives”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/16724860
• Raj Sisodia, “How Conscious Capitalism Brings Love into Business”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/19005670

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