Turning Your “Aha Moment” into Action: Matt Dalio Inspires Students of Global Citizen Year Academy
When he was just 11 years old, Endless Founder and CEO Matt Dalio moved to China to live with a family he had never met. He attended school in China and learned Mandarin from his new friends. “I had the best year of my life,” he says, citing the experience as the first little domino push that set the course for his future.
Dalio recently spoke about his entrepreneurial journey to students in Global Citizen Year Academy, a 12-week program for young changemakers to connect and build skills to help solve global challenges. Expert leaders like Dalio are invited to support students in developing a deeper understanding of their strengths, purpose, and identity while gaining concrete leadership skills in public speaking, asset-based community development, conducting root cause analysis, writing a project proposal, and pitching ideas.
The students, who logged into the conversation from countries ranging from Kenya to Belize, engaged Matt in an open and honest conversation about the paths he’s taken to start China Care Foundation (CCF) and Endless.
Matt Dalio speaks to students from Global Citizen Year Academy on April 20, 2021
Getting Started
After personally witnessing the experiences of orphans in China, including challenging living conditions and low adoption rates, Dalio founded CCF at age 16 to offer orphaned children with special needs a brighter future. What started as placing children in foster care quickly became much more as Dalio continued to learn about the nuanced needs of these children and their caretakers. Since then, CCF has supported 2663 Surgeries to get kids healthy for adoption, 588 foster care placements, and almost $500,000 in grants and loans awarded directly to families adopting special needs children.
While creating CCF, Dalio was humbled by the realization that “I, as Matt, could make a difference. When you look and you realize that our actions have consequences, our actions literally can change the lives of others in meaningful ways, it became those two things: I love building things and I love to link things that actually make a difference.”
When a GYC Academy student asked Dalio how he got people to believe in his vision as a young person, he said he actually leaned into being young: “People love youth that are doing good things and that’s a good story and people want to support that. You have your youth – use that, harness that, make people want to support that. All you have to do is give them the reasons to believe.”
His advice for getting started? Just take one small step, one that brings you closer to the person you are trying to uplift.
The Aha Moment
Dalio has always believed that access to a computer improves lives. In 2010, he had his first “aha moment'' when he realized that smartphones, while all the rage in Silicon Valley, hadn’t yet spread globally: In India, he saw that phone stores had walls and walls of traditional phones and just one small kiosk of smartphones. Recognizing smartphones were soon to be ubiquitous - but still not as powerful for users as computers - Dalio knew he could harness this new technology to change lives in dramatic ways. What if you plugged a smartphone into a TV and added a keyboard? For the small cost of that technology, you could unlock a computer experience for millions of users. That, he says, “set us in motion for everything we do now.”
Recognizing how much Endless’ key initiatives have evolved since then, Dalio emphasized the nature of the “pivot” in a journey: the beginning might not always directly relate to the end, and that’s part of what makes it exciting.
The Journey
The students wondered how Dalio persevered over obstacles like language barriers, lack of resources, and the other challenges that come with entrepreneurship and leadership. “When you start a journey and you have a goal, you realize along the way that the goal is important enough to find your way around the obstacles.”
Maintaining the vision of the destination while grappling with challenges on the way is hard, but critical, and Dalio believes the key is staying close to the people - the users - where the “vision and the dream of ‘I believe every child in the world should have access to the best educational technology’” is clearest.
This is what inspired him to start thinking about the digital divide, which still affects billions of people worldwide. Dalio believes that a person’s inability to access the internet shouldn’t close them off from resources that could improve their agency, education and literacy. And when he realized that storage—like what you could fit on a USB stick or a hard drive—is always available and always cheap due to the ever-growing supply chain, he concluded that Endless could “use storage to bring in the content that we need so that anyone anywhere can have access to the basics.” From that moment on, offline access became a major pillar for Endless.
Dalio’s other big ‘aha moment’ at this stage happened when he realized that most of Endless’ engineers learned to code by hacking the video games they were playing as kids. He thought: “what if you could hack your own video games? What if you took games and the fact that games use codes and you can manipulate the code to change the game?”
Every kid needs to be prepared for the skills of the 21st century regardless of his or her background. At scale, “the education system is not preparing kids to learn how to code, to learn computational thinking, to learn [computer-aided design], to learn collaboration, how open source software works. All of this stuff is fundamental no matter what industry you go into – you need to have the basics of that and we believe video games are the best way to do that.”
Dalio encouraged the GCY Academy students to take that first step in their journeys and look for inspiration in all places and people. “You all have so much power in your hands! Go do something with it. Find out what it is that drives you and follow it!” For him, it was that first trip to China that led him to his eventual guiding belief: “It is not impossible for every child in the world to have access to the best educational technology in the world. Soon.”
Matt Dalio is the founder, CEO, and Chief of Product of Endless. Global Citizen Year (GCY) Academy is a 12-week leadership experience that equips students worldwide with powerful skills for a lifetime of social impact.