Don’t Follow Your Passion — Do This Instead | Crankstart Foundation's CEO Missy Narula

Most people in philanthropy wouldn't call themselves a "safety-net capitalist." Most people aren't Missy Narula.

Missy’s made a career being comfortable in contradictions like “following your passion is overrated”—and she’s got the resume to prove it. 

After Yale, Boston Consulting Group, and TPG, Missy walked away from all of it to start a company making phone holders that kept babies entertained during diaper changes. She got a patent. The company failed. She'll tell you those were the best years of her career. 

Now she's CEO of Crankstart Foundation. Crankstart's work is mostly about San Francisco: affordable housing, healthcare career ladders, the kind of cross-sector partnerships Missy says the philanthropy field doesn't do enough of. One recent project put $10 million into a 168-unit affordable housing building. Another is a UCSF partnership that builds a career ladder from medical assistant to radiologist.

On this episode of Is This Working?!, she tells Connor about the eight years she spent at blue-chip firms specifically to earn herself the option to fail later. About what it took to look herself in the mirror and admit she wasn't good at being an entrepreneur. About why the best career advice she has for a 22-year-old is take a hard job, learn something hard, and trust you'll find what calls your heart later.

And then she tells him about her mom, who died when Missy was 19 and her mom was 46. "I thought she had lived a lot," Missy says. "But now that I'm 44, I realize she was just getting started."

CHAPTERS

Chapters

00:00:00 Being okay with being wrong 00:00:57 McDonald's University and the hardest job ever 00:01:54 Parental expectations and the privilege of freedom 00:03:18 The competitive child 00:04:29 Performance through play — High achievement without pressure 00:07:19 The credibility sprint — Building a bank of signals 00:09:09 Don't follow your passion — Do this instead 00:14:55 The failed entrepreneur who never had more fun 00:21:01 Parenthood as a superpower in the workplace 00:24:30 From bloodthirsty capitalist to foundation leader 00:30:52 Working with Michael Moritz — Excellence teaches excellence 00:34:18 Making philanthropy less transactional 00:42:22 The trust battery and rising tides lift all boats 00:43:54 San Francisco needs grace, patience, and capital 00:45:29 Losing her mom at 19 — Nobody's entitled to tomorrow