July 6, 2016 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the four founding partners of IDinsight brought very different experiences to the table, but all were driven by a strong sense of social justice.
Neil Buddy Shah, 32, was trained as a doctor. Esther Wang Hsu, 33, co-founded a social enterprise, sourcing yak down from herders in rural areas in western China, and spent four years as a consultant with Bain & Company. Her husband, 33-year-old Paul Wang, worked at McKinsey & Company. Andrew Fraker, 36, did research for MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab in India and the United States.
As a teenager, Mr. Fraker lived in a prosperous community in Istanbul that was bordered by slums. “I’ve always felt an urgency to fight for the powerless,” he says. Invoking his Christian faith, Paul Wang says, “My life mission is to serve the poor.”
A ‘mysterious email’ invited the group to meet a potential donor.
Shortly after launching IDinsight in 2011, they were joined by a fifth partner, Ronald Abraham, 32, an Indian national and another Kennedy School grad. All except Fraker are the children of parents born outside of the United States, and all have lived and worked overseas, getting firsthand exposure to the sufferings of the extreme poor. Mr. Abraham is now based in New Delhi, while the Wangs live in Lusaka, Zambia.
Dr. Shah grew up near Scranton, Pa., where his father, an Indian-trained radiologist, practiced medicine. As a Harvard undergrad, he was influenced by the writing of the moral philosopher John Rawls, whose works outlined a vision of egalitarianism and a revitalized social contract.
“Our position is society is completely arbitrary in moral terms — not just whether you are born in the U.S. or Africa and how much your parents invest in you, but your intelligence and even how hard-working you are, which can be genetically determined as well,” Dr. Shah says. “In large part, we don’t actually deserve where we are in society. There was something that struck me as fundamentally unfair about that.”
Dr. Shah went to medical school, with the aim of helping underserved patients, but after earning his M.D., he found himself frustrated by “seeing one patient at a time when there were these broader systemic issues at play.”
Once they came up with a plan for IDinsight, Dr. Shah, Mr. Fraker and the Wangs talked up the idea to academics, foundations, and nonprofits, and earned notice in a Harvard Business School venture competition. About that time, Dr. Shah got what he terms “a mysterious email” inviting them to meet a potential donor in New York. Dr. Shah, Mr. Fraker and Mr. Wang took the Chinatown bus down from Boston, made their pitch, and came away with a promise of $100,000 in seed money.
Mr. Fraker recalls joking: “Does this mean we get to take nicer buses?”
