Bayview's Person of the Year: Jeff Skoll

Bayview’s billionaire philanthropist

If you were filling up your car in Bayview 30 years ago, you might be surprised to learn that the high school kid pumping your gas would grow up to be a billionaire. Jeff Skoll, former president of EBay, founder and chairman of the philanthropic Skoll Foundation and Participant Media (the film production company behind some of the decade’s most socially conscious films) got his start pumping petrol just down the street.

Toronto doesn’t produce a lot of billionaires, but if we did, we should hope that more of them turn out as Skoll did. Because Skoll isn’t just any old billionaire. Nor is he just a businessman or philanthropist.

The 44-year-old Skoll moved to Toronto from Montreal with his family when he was 13. Skoll is now based in California but returns to Toronto often to visit family (his sister now lives in Richmond Hill) and attend the film festival. He’s got fond memories of his old stomping grounds near Bayview and York Mills. He lived up the street from York Mills Collegiate, where he attended high school — or, more often than not, cut class to play ball hockey with his friends.

“I was small and socially awkward,” he admits. “I always showed up for tests and passed, but I hated going to class.” He graduated with a BASc with honours in 1987 from the University of Toronto where he is still fondly remembered by his old professors. (The endowments the Skoll Foundation has given to U of T probably don’t hurt either.)

“He certainly looked like someone who was going to succeed,” says professor Safwat Zaky, who was Skoll’s adviser on his graduation project. “His initiative and independence were always very striking. He had his own ideas, and he didn’t hesitate to pursue them.”

Skoll has been driven to help save the world since he was a kid. “When I was in school, a teacher had us do an exercise where we wrote down what we’d want to have written on our tombstone,” he says. “I wrote that I wanted to have made a difference in the world.”

Back then, he thought he’d make that difference by becoming a writer, and he was determined to become financially independent as quickly as possible so that he’d be able to concentrate on the things he cared about. “I was good at math and science, so I went into engineering,” says Skoll. After graduation, he started up a computer rental business in Toronto called Computers on the Run. “The name turned out to be very apt,” he says wryly. “The computers kept getting stolen.”

That’s when he decided to learn something more about business, and he headed to Stanford University to get an MBA.

“He’s special,” says his friend and colleague Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Business and a member of the board of the Skoll Foundation. “He got rich the right way — by co-creating and growing a great business that has made the world a better place.”

That business was EBay, which still uses the same basic business plan that Skoll designed while he was there. Skoll was its first president from 1996 until 1998. His years and stock in the company are what turned him into a billionaire. But after leaving EBay, he didn’t just rest on his laurels — or his cash.

“Growing up middle-class in Toronto, I never thought about philanthropy,” says Skoll. “But suddenly I had all this cash, and I could really do something myself.” And he did do something. “Rather than sit back and count his vast fortune, he set off to work as hard as he could giving it away in the most strategically impactful ways,” says Martin. “Not just one way, but multiple ways.”

The accomplishments facilitated by his foundation are too numerous to list thoroughly but include significant grants to the Toronto-based organization Free the Children as well as the microloan organization Kiva.

Participant Media has produced some of the decade’s most socially effective documentaries, such as An Inconvenient Truth, The Cove and more. This year, Participant began its expansion into the publishing world with Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer — and What You Can Do About It, a companion book to their documentary film of the same name.

Participant doesn’t just release films and hope people get the message. Part of the company’s mission is to facilitate social change as well as to inspire it: the company hopes their films will ignite people to act, and it aims to help people make a change. Each film they release is accompanied by a related social activist campaign.

Actions to take are listed clearly on Participant’s main website, and the company recently launched a beta site called Take Part, a social media site aimed at young people who want to become socially involved but are unsure where to begin.

It works, too: the campaign that accompanied The Cove this year was effective in shutting down the Japanese dolphin hunt. In addition to the ongoing achievements of his foundation and production company, Skoll works tirelessly to expand his empire of social activism.

In April of this year, he announced the formation of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, a new organization that will target issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation. “We’re still in the planning stages,” says Skoll. “We’ll be announcing our strategy and our first grants soon, and we’re going to Copenhagen next month for the conference on climate change.”

But despite his global ambitions, Skoll hasn’t forgotten his hometown. Not only has his foundation given some significant endowments to his alma mater, the University of Toronto’s engineering department, but this year, Participant made an equity investment in Me to We, a Toronto enterprise started by Free the Children founders Marc and Craig Kielburger, whom Skoll clearly admires. “Those guys are very impressive,” he says. “Free the Children is one of my favourite projects.”

It’s a nice full-circle moment: the expat Torontonian philanthropist supporting the young Torontonian social entrepreneurs. Maybe Torontonians can save the world, after all.

 

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