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Earlier this year, while the U.S. government was cutting billions in foreign aid, a refugee education program called Yeti Confetti did something remarkable: It took a single grant and scaled from serving 35 to 1,400+ students in Lebanon and NYC. They anticipate doubling that within the next few months. While hundreds of humanitarian organizations suspended programs because of the U.S. foreign assistance freeze, Rocket Learning, an education tech platform in India, is reaching 3 million children across 10 states and territories at $1.50 per child per year, a fraction of comparable traditional early childhood programs. This dichotomy was reflected in two types of conversations I heard during the United Nations General Assembly week in September 2025. In one, senior leaders from development agencies were genuinely grappling with an existential moment, with deep cuts in international aid worldwide. Then, there were the people closer to the work who had already moved ontoo busy delivering and craving for scale. WHAT GOT US HERE WONT GET US THERE The decades-long development of infrastructure created real expertise and crucial services to communities that desperately needed support. That matters and still does. The challenge isn’t the people or the expertiseit’s the operating system. That system was built for a world with more money than innovation. We now live in a world with more innovation than money. Layers of oversight, risk-averse funding cycles, and multiple intermediaries mean the infrastructure can’t move at the speed or cost-efficiency the moment demands. In 2024, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that 305 million people worldwide would need humanitarian assistance by 2025. Despite the growing need, by November 2024, less than half (43%) of the requested $50 billion had been received. Climate disasters aren’t slowing down. Neither is conflict. Neither is displacement. When the gap between need and allocated resources grows this wide, shouldnt the calculation change? This isn’t about replacing institutional knowledge but about restructuring who holds resources and how they flow. It’s about multilateral agencies recognizing that their greatest value might be directly platforming solutions rather than implementing them or hiring intermediaries. It’s about foundations embracing risk, treating innovation as a core strategy rather than a side portfolio. WHAT THE DOERS KNOW Theres a solution to a problem the traditional sector has been trying to solve for yearshow to reach more people, faster, with less money. There’s an entire generation of entrepreneurs who never waited for perfect conditions or for permission. Take Kate Kallots Amini in Africa. Her data platform is solving the continents critical data scarcity and information inaccessibility by providing hyper-accurate, granular data localized to smallholder farms. Its now benefitting 7.5 million people across 25 countries, including partnerships with the governments of Barbados, Côte dIvoire, and Sierra Leone. Rocket Learning, mentioned above, became the Indian government’s technical partner for 230,000 rural childcare centers, with students scoring 30% higher in their classrooms than others. The detailed economic analyses reveal a remarkable benefit-to-cost ratio of $1,274 per child. The solutions that work have these traits in common: They’re cheaper: Technology enables reach without decreasing marginal costs. They’re faster: Different organizational structures enabling different speeds. They’re sustainable: They generate revenue, create jobs, and outlast any single funding cycle. Moving resources directly to entrepreneurs introduces different risks. Safeguarding protocols exist for good reasons. But the current approach also carries riskthe risk of reaching fewer people, taking longer, at a higher cost per beneficiary. We need to be honest about which risks we can afford at this moment in time. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT The bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s the infrastructure connecting local entrepreneurs addressing the pressing challenges of their communities to resources and scale. Here’s what would accelerate impact: Early and direct capital is where the leverage is highest compared to the years of pilot data that traditional funders want. Bespoke support from people who’ve done it before, not another workshop on Theory of Change. Networks for scale toconnect proven solutions to government partners, procurement processes, and private sector distribution channels. Many entrepreneurs can build great products but lack relationships with decision-makers who control access to millions of beneficiaries. Patient growth capital because one-year grants don’t match the timeline of building sustainable organizations that scale to millions. Validation infrastructure so development agencies can shift from primary implementers to validators and amplifiers of what’s working. Using institutional credibility and expertise to assess, endorse, and help scale entrepreneur-led solutions that meet rigorous standards. For funders, this isn’t charity. It’s leverage. Wed be backing solutions that become self-sustaining, building systems that outlast any administration’s foreign policy shifts, reaching more people for a fraction of traditional cost-per-beneficiary, and getting closer to aid independence, which countries in the Global South are hungry for. The future of global development is happening right now in Tripoli, Kolkata, Mombasa, Ho Chi Minh, in the hands of entrepreneurs who saw that the system couldn’t move fast enough and decided to build something that would. This transition asks people to reimagine systems they’ve spent careers building. Thats not easy. The expertise and relationships built over decades matter. The question is how to channel those assets toward what’s demonstrably working. The ground has already shifted. The doers never stopped moving. Lets join them. Hala Hanna is the executive director of MIT Solve.
Category:
E-Commerce
Have you ever tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces? Thats what its like to run a business with siloed systems. Business data is critical in every industry, but if its siloed across departments, teams, and peoplethat is, if your puzzle pieces are scattered across your homeyou may never figure out how to make that information work for you. Left unaddressed, this fragmentation can eventually undermine customer trust, brand integrity, and employee retention, severely impacting your business goals. True integration isnt just about building more efficient systems: Its about centering the entirety of your customers needs in every system you build. From my time as CEO of Sollis Health, as well as my background creating seamless, loyalty-building customer experiences across industries, heres what Ive learned how to connect vital data points, ultimately breaking these silos. FRAGMENTATION FRUSTRATES YOUR CUSTOMER In traditional healthcare, patients are shuttled between clinics, hospitals, and specialists, and each stop possesses only part of their medical record. If this gap between providers isnt closed, medical data falls through the cracks, causing confusion, inconvenience, and even negative health outcomes. Other industries face a similar challenge: Siloed customer data in banking, retail, and fitness makes the customer experience more confusing and difficult, impacting loyalty and damaging brands. Take the travel industry, for years frequent travelers of franchised hotels were unable to immediately access their folios, which are itemized records of all charges incurred during their stay, via hotel apps or websites. Its only been within the past five or so years that many hotels integrated their systems and resolved this problem. Like pushing together two puzzle pieces that dont fit, poor integration creates friction and weakens the bond between your brand and your customer. Damage that bond and you damage the brand. As a result, trust erodes and loyalty declines, and what could have been a lasting relationship is reduced to a one-time transaction. SYSTEM INTEGRATION REVIVES BRAND LOYALTY Of course, integrating siloed systems is easier said than done. Shortsighted thinkers may regard this process as merely a perk or upgrade, not a loyalty strategy. But any situation where customers are left to connect their own dots leaves them feeling unseen and underserved. That unseen feeling has tangible results. If you dont consider qualitative feedback as valuable as operational data, you run the risk of overlooking a vital opportunity to connect the dots for customers and secure their loyalty. Consumers are increasingly willing to share medical and personal data if it improves outcomes, according to this McKinsey report. Integration thats seamless and private isnt just welcomed but increasingly in demand. At Sollis, we fulfill that demand (and put our data to good use) with Qualtrics, which harnesses the power of AI to review and summarize qualitative, free-form feedback. Instead of using guesswork to improve the customer experience, this vital feedback guides our next move, whether thats adding additional benefits to a membership tier or opening in a new market. System integration is more than streamlining or maintenance. An investment in an entirely new technology system can enhance trust between you and your customer if it enables you to remember their preferences and history. This signals that you understand them, making it possible to anticipate their needs, deliver a seamless experience, and build the kind of loyalty that lasts. CONNECT the dots for your customers Frustrated by their jigsaw puzzle, some business leaders make the mistake of passing on their incomplete set of pieces to the consumer. Siloed systems push the burden onto the customer, whether its a patient managing their own referrals or a hotel guest juggling multiple logins. Business leaders seeking to relieve customers of the burden of being their own managers must build systems that anticipate their needs and then address those needs proactively through seamless, personalized solutions. Sometimes, the solution is as simple as a tech upgrade. Sollis recently adopted Metriport, a tool that (with a patient’s explicit consent) pulls data from the Health Information Exchange national database, then uses AI to summarize key conditions, allergies, recent scans, and other medical data. This gives our clinicians a brief but thorough view of a members medical history prior to their appointment, providing a more coordinated care experience that saves time for clinicians and patients alike, while streamlining treatment. Our patients dont have to spend their time tracking down a lifetimes worth of medical records every time they need care, and our clinicians are at far less risk of overlooking key data that could impact decision-making. Siloed systems dont just slow operations: they fail your customers, often at critical junctions in the customer experience. True integration is not a back-end fix, but a tool for understanding your customer holistically. When companies connect the dots, they move from treating customers as transactions to recognizing them as people. Like a completed puzzle, the picture finally comes into focus. Brad Olson is CEO of Sollis Health.
Category:
E-Commerce
When a leader inherits a business in crisis, what decisions can they make to steady the ship and drive positive change? The Honest Company CEO Carla Vernón and National Womens Soccer League commissioner Jessica Berman riff on counterintuitive methods for gaining employee trust after public scandals and share practical advice on reframing strategy. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian and recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You each came into your leadership roles in crisis in a lot of ways. Honest Company was facing public scrutiny over some of its products. Cash reserves were dwindling. Jessica, at the NWSL, there were accusations of sexual misconduct around the team, and the league’s culture was talked about as toxic. I’m going to start with you, Jessica. Those early days when you first get there, players are in revolt. Megan Rapinoe is saying, “Let it burn.” What do you do to address that from the start? I mean, I know you ultimately got a collective bargaining agreement that sort of changed the relationship between players in the leagues, but how do you get them to the place where you can even have that conversation? BERMAN: Well, it’s definitely daunting to start a new job as a first-time commissioner, first-time CEO, and knowing that someone like Megan Rapinoe had just posted on Twitter, Let. It. Burn. And she was talking about the league . . . It’s not a vote of confidence. BERMAN: No. Well, the league was really at a crossroads, and the crossroads was: Do we go out of business and potentially restart? The history of this league is that there were three prior women’s professional soccer leagues that had failed. And so, that was a cycle that this sport had known before. And the alternative was that we go and hire a new commissioner and see if we could turn it around. And I think from my perspective, there were really two pieces. First, I had a job when I got the call from the headhunter. So I felt like I could be very honest and transparent with the players and actually with the board of governors who hired me. I was asked to interview with them, and I sat with them and I said: “Do you see a world where you can trust this institution? Because if the answer is no, then I could be the best leader in the world . . .” It’s not going to matter. BERMAN: . . . then it’s not going to matter. And what I heard from the players was, while they lacked confidence in the league and had a very, very, very long list of gripes that needed to be addressed, that they actually did want the league to succeed. And what they expected was a leader who would show up with vulnerability and humility and actually join them in understanding their lived experience. And really respect and understand the labor relationship, and that the underpinning of professional sports in this country is the relationship between management and labor. And I’m a labor lawyer by training. Everyone always says, “Are you a soccer player?” I’m like, no, I’m a labor lawyer. And actually being a labor lawyer is what helped create the fabric and the culture that we have reset in NWSL. Because you knew that building the trust was about having that relationship reset by this collective bargaining agreement, giving the players a stake in a different kind of way. BERMAN: There is no business in professional sports without a constructive, productive relationship with your union and the players. So Carla, you joined Honest from Amazon. VERNÓN: Yes. Much bigger entity. You ran a huge part of the business, all the consumables, household products, and food and beverage, and health and wellness and beauty. Then you come to Honest as the CEO, the team doesn’t know you, the business is kind of on fire. And so to gain their trust, you invoked cartoon characters. Why cartoon characters, and what was that about? VERNÓN: Well, I feel like we have so much in common, Jessica, in our story. It’s important to back up and say, the Honest Company, for people who don’t know, is a very purpose-driven company. We were founded to really break up the personal care sort of old-school lens on things. So all of our products are very cleanly formulated to a high standard of clean. Which means we attract a very emotionally centered, purpose-centered employee base. And our employee base66% of my employees are millennials or Gen Z, so they’re younger. So I knew that I couldn’t bring the tools that I had from old corporate America. I used to work at General Mills, a 150-year-old company. Everything that you could Google about taking a team through change . . . Wasn’t going to work. VERNÓN: Old corporate America is not going to work. So, I am a mom of teenagers, and I remember going to see Inside Out, the first movie, with my kids. And I loved, as a mom, how it told me about the different pieces of the emotional psyche, how genuine they are, and how essential they are to all of us. And so I thought that might be a less corporate way to help my employees feel normal about the change and the fear or excitement that they had about me as an outsider and what I represented. So this kind of became a bit of our culture. Yeah, now you’re dealing with this sort of internal culture at the same time. You’ve got this cash flow problem that you’ve got to fix at the same time that you want to expand the reach of the brand. I mean, that’s a tough balancing act to, like, we’re going to cut back but we’re going to expand. VERNÓN: It seems like it would be tough, but in a lot of cases, that old adage that you hear, “less is more,” turns out to be true in business. It is so helpful to define the core essential elements of what you are in business to do and what the people you serve really want from you, and in my case, from our brands. So some of the ability to say we are actually going to decide what we’re not going to do as much as we’re going to decide what we are going to do helped us to unlock the biggest pieces of our portfoliothe most profitable pieces, the pieces that were growing the mostand to really invest and focus in them. The other thing that we did, Bob, was make sure we had disciplined practices so that we just kept repeating and focusing on what was most important and not getting worried aout the stuff that’s on the edges. I mean, it’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do, right? Everyone’s, yeah, we’re going to be disciplined, but we all get distracted by whatever. VERNÓN: But if you’ve ever worked at Amazon, you will learn how to be disciplined.
Category:
E-Commerce
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