Jeffrey Skoll

My goal is to make the biggest difference possible in the world. I have only so many resources and so much time.

My goal was to leverage the power of movies and the reach they have and include important messages. Of course, they still have to be entertaining so that people will watch them, but I wanted to make sure there was a message, a takeaway.

My goal was to be at the point - no older than 40 - where I would have enough resources to make a difference in the lives of disadvantaged people.

I backpacked around the world and went to places like Mexico City and Pakistan, where I'm like, 'Oh. Things aren't quite as good.'

It's in my own interest - it's in everybody's interest - to have streets that are safe, children that are educated, and drug use that's diminished, crimes that are not affecting us.

As a philanthropist, I give away a lot of money every year. Yet I thought there was a higher leverage to come in and create movies and TV shows that were actually able to do some good in the world.

When I was 14, my dad came home one day and told us he had cancer. It was looking pretty bad. And I remember him saying how afraid he was that he hadn't gotten to do the things he wanted to do during his life. He had surgery and survived. And he's still alive today, thank God. But it made a big impact on me.

I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto, and living off their leftovers, to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources. And I wanted to figure out how I could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world.

If you believe that people are basically good, and you remove obstacles, then they'll do the right thing by each other.

I wanted to be a writer, to write these stories that would make people see the world in a different way. But I ended up going to business school because I thought I could ultimately get to where I wanted to go faster that way.

At Participant, I am the board. I am the sole greenlight at the company. If something happened to me, that would be a problem.

Young entrepreneurs, in general, feel they're too busy running their companies, which I think is a mistake. But once they're older, you see much more of a propensity to be involved in philanthropy.