I knew I wanted an intern.
I wanted new ideas.
I wanted somebody to come and look at the business and
tell me, this particular thing you're doing is not good.
Why don't you do it this way?
So, I applied, and I was told that one young engineer,
she was female, she was Muslim, wanted to come.
And, because I showed interest, and
said, I want this lady who just seems to want me.
I want her.
Despite all the doubts, are we sure she would cope?
Are we sure she would be able to like it?
Everyone want to go to Lagos, why is she picking the village?
And, at last, she came.
And it's one of the most tremendous things that have happened to us as a company.
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>> It's one thing to say, I'm going to go work for a company in Silicon Valley, or
in the United States somewhere, and I'm going to do a marketing project for them.
And that'll oftentimes be a really good experience.
But, what if you can have the same job experience, in other words,
the same marketing project, but in a totally different setting in Ghana?
And, you can go and you can tackle a set of challenges that,
on the one hand, you'll learn about the particular project, but
you'll also learn about a much bigger set of issues, and a better set of challenges.
And I don't think there's any way that you can do that without thinking about
the world differently afterwards. >> I did a five week
internship with the Seed Program.
I was in Lagos Nigeria with a company called Crust Resources.
And they wanted me to do a comprehensive go to market strategy for
their new enterprise resource planning software.
What interested me was, number one, the fact that it was a transformation program.
The mission is to alleviate global poverty.
So, I'm very drawn to that mission.
And secondly, it was operating in the continent of Africa, which is somewhere
I've never been, and always fascinated me. >> I remember meeting Ronnie, and
I was like, wow, he was a really nice guy and I liked him.
And the fact that he had already come to Ghana before, and
worked in a rural area said a lot about his character.
So I took a liking for him, and I decided to mentor him,
because I saw potential in him.
Because it's not easy for you to sacrifice comfort from where you live in America,
and come all the way to Ghana and
into a village to do what he did. >> There's a leverage,
a one and one equals three opportunity, where something even better takes place
because the student now is learning about something they didn't have any idea about,
that they're going to make the world better from that experience.
They're going to help the business succeed more with their creative ideas.
And so, there's a compounding that we see by connecting
these different activities together.
So I think if you're a business leader, and you have the opportunity
to work with a Stanford student through the Seed Internship Program, the number
one thing that you should realize is that Stanford students are amazing.
They are just, really smart, really driven, really energetic people.
It's just an incredible resource. >> It was really taking their ideas, and
taking what they want to do with their business,
with their country, and help them with the means that they can do it.
And by and large, I saw that it was very much welcomed.
>> We had one critical problem, and
that is, sometimes, because we run three shifts, sometimes my boys sleep.
Sometimes on duty, that's the truth.
And when they sleep, sometimes they forget to put on a particular valve,
that makes the starch congeal.
And when that happens, we have to shut down, are we use sometimes 24 hours to
do cleaning, because you have to open all the pipes to clean.
And you lose time, you lose money, you lose energy, you lose everything.
That was the first thing Amal did.
She installed a device on the line, that senses temperature above
a certain limit, and blows a loud alarm.
That even if you are snoring, you will wake up.
I mean, it's really amazing.
Initially the boys, they didn't like it.
Then later they saw that, wow, this is really beautiful.
Like, this is saving the company money.
We no longer have this frequent congealing of the starch in the line, and
a whole lot of other things that she did.
I would have her come over and over again,
she was such a pleasant. >> Some of the students who have come back
have come back with just stories about how connected they feel,
to the people that they have worked for, and worked with, and how much they have
learned about a part of the world where they had really never, that they had
really never going to exposed to before. >> To other students who are considering
the Seed Program, or an internship program, I would say that, go for it.
It is not for the faint hearted,
because you are going to go to a different environment.
But you will get a lot out of it, because you will see how your
work has a really huge impact, and you would develop personally.
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