What does the word “refugee” mean to you? Poverty? hardship? Misfortune? What about entrepreneurship, innovation and opportunity?

Patricia Letayf is the Executive Director at Five One Labs, a groundbreaking organization that empowers refugees to become entrepreneurs in places like Kurdistan, Iraq and Barranquilla, Colombia. Starting with $15,000 in seed money won in a pitch competition in graduate school, it’s become a global force for entrepreneurship.

Through incubators, accelerators and a global network of mentors and experts, the organization has supported over 130 startups and awarded nearly $1 million in seed funding to founders since 2017.

On this episode, Patricia shares her inspiring story and how she and her co-founders turned an idea into an engine for economic growth, and why investing in refugees isn’t just an act of goodwill—it’s an investment in the future of the communities and countries that welcome them.

Five One Labs website: https://fiveonelabs.org/

Five One Labs LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fiveonelabs

Five One Labs Annual Report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64b8d2eaacd68b3c353279d7/t/65cc6a078281c75008d6ee06/1734738647141/Annual+Report+2023.pdf

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When Jeff Softley joined Experian’s consumer division ten years ago, things looked bleak. The business had endured 16 quarters of declining revenues. It was being disrupted by venture backed fintech startups that didn’t need to turn a profit for years—if ever.

How do you run a business charging customers for what other companies are giving away for free? How do you compete against companies that don’t need to earn money?

That, in a nutshell, was the challenge Jeff Softley was facing.

The key to his salvation—And Experian’s—was understanding that they needed to change. You can complain that the competition is unfair all you want. But unless you can create new value, you’re toast.

So Jeff and his team set out to find how they could create a new business model that served consumers well. There were no easy answers, but they worked the problem and iterated until they got it right.

Today, Jeff Softley runs a $1.5 billion business serving 70 million customers

1. “Mobilizing people is only useful if you can channel it to influence institutions.” — Greg Satell
2. “Disruption teaches you that you’ve always got to be looking for what you can do that others cannot.” — Jeff Softley
3. “We didn’t tell anybody—we started with a test because tests are not threatening.” — Jeff Softley
4. “A new idea is like an ugly baby—you don’t take it to a biker bar and leave it to fend for itself.” — Greg Satell
5. “We clarified a North Star: we were going to build products that were first to market, best in market, or the only place on planet Earth you could get them.” — Jeff Softley

• Experian Boost – experian.com/boost
• Greg Satell’s Book, Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change – Amazon Link
• Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. on Leading Innovation – Amazon Link

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Bob Sutton is among the most influential business scholars today. One of Stanford’s Business School’s most distinguished professors, a bestselling author of seven books including, most recently, The Friction Project, he has advised CEO’s ranging from Pixar’s Ed Catmull to IDEO’s David Kelley.

Yet his career didn’t start out in an ivory tower, but in a pizza shop smoking pot. It was through a series of relationships, starting with the woman who would become his wife, that he found his path. Along the way he built the bonds that led to penetrating insights about how organizations function.

In this episode, Bob shares his thoughts on how leaders do—and don’t—create the conditions for their organizations to succeed and shares personal anecdotes about famous CEOs, the founding of Stanford’s “D-School” and much more.

Bob Sutton’s website: https://www.bobsutton.net/

Bob’s new book: https://amzn.to/40gaDTH

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