By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 9, 2006; C01
How to put this gently? John Wood is making the rest of us look bad.
Oh, he doesn't mean to. The founder and CEO of a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization called Room to Read, who's just published a book called "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World," doesn't blame us for not quitting our nice, secure jobs pushing paper or marketing digital widgets, as he did seven years ago at age 35, and throwing ourselves into planet-enhancing philanthropy.
He knows that few people have the ability or the desire to drop everything else in life for a chosen cause -- in Wood's case, sending millions of books to village children in places such as Nepal, Sri Lanka and Vietnam; building thousands of libraries and hundreds of schools; and funding more than 2,000 long-term scholarships for education-deprived girls.
But Wood also knows that some of us wish we could. He's living our fantasy life. Which can be a wonderful fundraising tool.
He strides through Union Station, a tall, fit-looking man with a Boy Scout's smile and a salesman's focus. He's in town, he explains, to help expand the network of folks, many from the local tech community, "who can't quit their day jobs, who didn't get the lucky break with the stock options package" -- but who want at least a bit part in the world-changing dream he's living.
Fantasy lives come at a price, of course.
Wood has paid it.
But to hear the emotion in his voice, as he recalls the reception he got while delivering his first shipment of books to Nepal, is to think: He got himself a pretty good deal.
* * *
A documentary of John Wood's childhood would look so much like a series of Norman Rockwell paintings that it comes as a relief to discover -- though he's not indulging at lunch this day -- that the guy has been known to drink an occasional beer.
Rockwell No. 1 might show 5-year-old John trotting up one of his Connecticut neighbors' walks, primed to hawk his paintings of sailboats for a nickel apiece. His mother, Carolyn, soon forbade this door-to-door entrepreneurship. No problem: He subcontracted the sales effort to a friend, who got a 20 percent cut.
No. 2 in the series might show him as an underage paperboy in Athens, Pa., chatting up customers or schlepping their empty trash cans in from the curb unasked. Wood's mom remembers getting a call from a woman who wanted her to know that John had used his paper route money to buy the woman's hospitalized mother a box of candy.
And there would certainly be a painting that evoked his passion for books: a preschool John, perhaps, sitting on the lap of his mother, grandmother or older sister as they read him "Green Eggs and Ham." Or a 10-year-old pedaling his bike back from the Athens library with the dozen volumes he'd negotiated instead of the normal maximum of eight.
All in all, an unusual boy. "If we hadn't had natural childbirth," says Carolyn Wood, "I would have said we got him mixed up in the nursery."
He went to college at the University of Colorado, got an MBA at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, did a stint in commercial banking. Then he got recruited by Microsoft, where he was hired despite showing up for his interview in a smirk-inducing banker's suit.
Flash forward almost a decade. Wood had driven himself hard. He loved exploring new places and had volunteered repeatedly for international assignments. Now he was rewarding himself with his longest vacation since joining Bill Gates's mega-corporation: three weeks of trekking in the Himalayas.
On the first day out, he struck up a conversation with a Nepalese man who turned out to be the "resource person" for 17 rural schools. The man told him that he really didn't have any resources to offer and that Nepal had a 70 percent illiteracy rate.
The next day, they toured a village school together. It had a room labeled "School Library," but there were no books in sight.
Where were they?
Locked up, Wood was told, before being shown a tiny collection made up of what looked like trekker castoffs: a Danielle Steel romance, an Umberto Ecco novel in Italian, a Lonely Planet guide to Mongolia, a copy of "Finnegans Wake." These random volumes were considered so precious, he writes, "that the teachers did not want to risk the children damaging them."
"Perhaps, sir," the headmaster suggested, "you will someday come back with books."
Okay.
From a cyber cafe in Kathmandu, he fired off an e-mail slugged "Books for Nepal -- Please Help" to everyone in his online address book. He asked them to send donations of books in care of his parents.
Thousands arrived. Wood flew home to help sort them. Then he and his dad -- with whom he'd never managed much emotional closeness -- embarked on a father-son bonding trip for the ages. Accompanying a book-laden donkey train to the Nepalese village, they found themselves walking through a human corridor of grateful children.
Some hung marigold garlands around their necks. The younger ones pressed flower petals into their hands.
What happened next can be shorthanded as a fairy-tale ending: Having discovered his true calling, Wood quit Microsoft, founded Room to Read and never looked back.
The real story is a bit more complicated.
Wrestling with mid-career angst, Wood actually quit Microsoft twice, the first time before he had a clue as to what he wanted to do next. He was lured back by the offer of a high-level job in China, where his then-girlfriend had been dispatched by her employer. But his time in Beijing turned sour, professionally and personally.
In his book, he takes care not to burn his Microsoft bridges. Still, his frustrations come through. A chapter titled "Gates in China" tells how he knocked himself out to prepare for a visit by his multibillionaire boss, who cavalierly ignored his suggestions about dealing with the Chinese. On the advice of a friend, he threw out some other negatives about his time with the company.
"You're a positive, optimistic guy," she told him. "Leave that stuff behind the scenes."
Around the time of the Gates visit, he was also coming to understand that his girlfriend -- with whom he'd thought himself headed toward marriage -- had a vision of life incompatible with his. Most important, it had no room for the hardships and rewards of engagement with the Third World. When he finally told her it wasn't going to work out between them, he writes, she smashed a painting she'd given him against their bedroom wall.
His mother says she cried when she read that part.
Wood is a positive, optimistic guy, and when he decided to launch Room to Read he threw himself totally into the effort. That didn't mean he wasn't frightened about the cliff he'd just jumped off. He figured he had enough saved to work for free for a long time -- but that was before the tech bubble burst and his $2 million worth of Microsoft stock lost nearly half its value. He discovered he could buy a house in San Francisco or do Room to Read, but not both.
He's still renting.
And there was status anxiety to go with the financial kind.
"So much of who you are is defined by your job," Wood says. When strangers meet, they exchange "secret handshakes and code words about what they do." He'd been accustomed to working for an elite company. Now he was contemplating bartending jobs to make ends meet. The secret handshake thing was going to be a problem.
As things worked out, he didn't end up pouring drinks. But he still recalls a conversation with a Microsoft buddy he ran into in the Singapore airport. The guy showed not the slightest interest in Wood's new venture.
"He gave me the five-minute download on his life," Wood says, with a hint of uncharacteristic bitterness. "And then he goes, 'Are you still doing that thing that you were doing?' "
At the time Wood started doing that thing, according to U.N. reports, an estimated 850 million of the world's people lacked basic literacy, meaning they couldn't write or read a simple sentence. "I had to read the number three times," he writes, "to convince myself that it was not too large to be true."
Over lunch, he puts Room to Read's efforts in statistical context. "We've reached, so far, 800,000 kids," he says, calculating the total number of children benefiting from the organization's library- and school-building programs. By Room to Read's 20th anniversary in 2020, he hopes, that number will be 8 million.
The Room to Read Web site notes that more than 120 million children of primary school age are not in school. Eight million would be less than 7 percent of that figure -- which would make Wood's efforts either an amazing accomplishment or a discouragingly small start, depending on your point of view.
But nothing can undercut Wood's congenital optimism. He's totally a "glass-half-full kind of person," says Room to Read Chief Operating Officer Erin Ganju, another refugee from corporate life who talked her way into a job as Wood's first U.S.-based employee because she admired what he was doing and wanted to help him expand.
Expand he has.
In the early days, Wood's father says, he served as Room to Read's treasurer and bookkeeper -- but it was soon "too much for me to handle." Microsoft had taught his son to think big, to be data-driven and to focus on "results, results, results."
His entrepreneurial worldview appealed to funders from the high-tech world, among them big-time venture capitalists William Draper of Draper Richards and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, who provided crucial seed grants. After he worked for free for four years, Wood's board of directors insisted he start taking a salary (at $105,000, it's less than he made the year after he got his MBA).
Wood has the same attributes venture capitalists look for in for-profit entrepreneurs, says Valentine, whose firm was an early investor in Apple and Google: He's "an evangelist" with the "passion and personal charisma" to sell others his dream. Valentine also likes Wood's intense frugality, as well as the way Room to Read gets "buy-in" from the cash-poor communities it helps -- requiring investments in the form of labor or land.
What Room to Read does not do, despite its tech-oriented backers, is focus on high-tech solutions.
"These kids in rural Cambodia can't even read yet," Wood says. "What are they going to do with a computer?" A small rural library serving 400 kids costs $2,000 to set up. Five dollars a child. Computers are far more expensive. There are places and times when computer labs can be helpful, Wood says, and Room to Read will fund about 30 this year. But "we'll do 900 libraries. We'll do about 85 new school construction projects."
Another way Room to Read differentiates itself is its focus on educating girls. Early on -- with encouragement and funding from Valentine, his wife and their daughter Hilary, now co-chair of the Room to Read board -- Wood decided to offer long-term scholarships so that girls who otherwise might have to drop out can keep studying.
He explains this decision on a number of levels. There's basic justice: Two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women, after all. There's large-scale pragmatism: "How can you have a big effect? Get the girls in school, because they pass on knowledge to the next generation." And there's a fundraising pragmatism as well: In many wealthy families, Wood points out, charitable decisions are made by wives.
All true, says Hilary Valentine, but there's something else to think about when it comes to Wood and girls' education:
"For him, it's emotional," she says. "His mother read to him. That bond formed who he is. He can't imagine a child without that."
* * *
Lunch is almost over. Wood has places to be. He may be leading a fantasy life, but it doesn't come with a lot of personal downtime.
Before he heads out, he talks about a few of his heroes. There's Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, the force behind the international push for micro-credit. There's former president Jimmy Carter, whose insistence on thinking big greatly reduced the scourge of Guinea worm disease. Most important, there's literacy champion Andrew Carnegie.
"To build that many libraries," he says of the robber baron turned philanthropist, "that's just the most fantastic legacy." He found it "amazing and slightly appalling" that no one had tried to replicate Carnegie's work on an international scale.
Wood doesn't confuse himself with Carnegie, and he hopes bigger players will emerge. He's not waiting around, though. So far, the organization has concentrated on Asian countries, but Africa is next: There are plans to go into South Africa, Zambia, Ethiopia and probably Mozambique. Latin America likely will follow.
"Passion sells," he notes in "Leaving Microsoft," and he's right: It's hard to be around him for an hour without reaching for your checkbook. Does he see himself, he is asked, building Room to Read, 24/7, forever?
No hesitation is detectable.
"Mmm hmm," Wood says. "Pretty much. Yeah."
