As the first president of eBay, Jeff Skoll made a comfortable dot-com fortune that he chose to use to raise social awareness worldwide.
After leaving eBay, Jeff Skoll used his considerable fortune to create the film house Participant Productions, which makes movies “to inspire social change.” Several of the titles include Syriana; Good Night, and Good Luck; Murderball; and An Inconvenient Truth.
He also established the Skoll Foundation in 1999, whose purpose is to invest in, connect and celebrate social entrepreneurs. The foundation offers grants to individuals and groups who “build businesses, schools and services for communities in need.” They also present the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford every year, and run Social Edge, which is a networking site for social entrepreneurs.
Participant Productions, which Skoll calls a “pro-social media company,” makes both feature films and documentaries that “address social and political issues and drive real change.” He says, “Someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn’t make a difference in the world. I think that’s just a horrible thing.” Skoll is showing the world, one social entrepreneur, documentary, and feature film at a time, that it is truly the individual who must make the changes that will make the world a better place for all of humanity.
