Watch Sheryl Sandberg Interview Priscilla Chan At Fortune's MPW Summit | Fortune Most Powerful Women

So I have been fortunate to attend this conference for many, many years, and it has been important to me in my career. And there is nothing like walking into this room with all of these women. Feels just like the rest of our days, right? Just like another day in the office. Anyway, really excited to be here, and even more excited to introduce this audience to one of the most special people I know, brilliant philanthropist and a really dear friend. So Priscilla, you and Mark, obviously, almost a year ago, Max is about to turn a year, started CVI. And that is, as Nina said, a tremendous commitment to philanthropy, but also one you're doing far younger in life than you look at any other philanthropist like you. Why were you inspired to make public service so central in your life? And why take that step at this stage, which again, is very, very unusual. Well, this work is incredibly important in personal living. I am the daughter of Chinese Vietnamese refugees who came to this country with nothing and believed in the power of education to make sure that me and my sisters had a chance at really succeeding in life. And my teachers in public school carried me there. They paved the way for me to arrive at Harvard, where I realized that I had reached a place of incredible opportunity that not many other children who were in circumstances like mine have a chance of really accessing. And it was at that moment that I realized that I was gonna make public service central in my life. So right there in college, I began running an afterschool program where I helped, in name, we were supposed to help children living in a low-income housing project with their homework. In reality, we did whatever we needed to do to help those children thrive. Helped with work at home, things going on at home, homework, health, everything. And it was in that work that I had a really important experience in my life. One of my students was absent for a couple days, and someone from the school came to see me to help find that student. And I agreed to and walked out to the play yard after program that day, and I found her. And she immediately looked at me and started answering why she hadn't been to school. And I saw immediately why. The two front seats were broken, and I was, I just flooded with questions. What happened? Did someone hurt her? What could I have done to prevent this from happening? And it's that question that drives all of my work. It's a really complicated question, and I certainly didn't have the tools at 21 to solve it, and that's why in that moment, I decided to go to medical school to learn more about how I could advocate for the lives and health of children. And now, the potential for our work is really thinking about how we learn more about keeping children healthy, and how do we build systems and empower people to keep children engaged and learning in the classroom? Those are incredibly challenging questions, and hard to really even get your mind around and understand. And so, it's incredibly important that Mark and I invest now, that we take risks in making big, important investments that may take 25, 50, 100 years to pan out. But during that time, starting now, Mark and I can really take advantage of the opportunity to learn and to get better, to really optimize our chances of actually making an impact. You have, yeah, took some of these early experiences, and this year, you opened up a school in East Palo Alto, and the school has a really unusual goal, which is you're not trying to provide just education, but you're trying to provide health care, and that clearly comes right from the experience that we're talking about. Talk to us about what the school is doing, what its goals are, and how you're trying to do those, and why that's important. Yeah, the school is really a continuation of my work as a pediatrician. I went to medical school and have been practicing as a primary care pediatrician at our county safety net hospital for the past five years. And when I began my practice, I said, I am gonna be a pediatrician that really thinks about and understands a child's educational trajectory and how to set them up for success from the health standpoint, so that they can be present and ready to learn. And I was diligent, I asked the questions, I wrote down the answers to my questions, and a couple years in, I encountered a patient where, I can tell you, I literally failed. I was taking care of a second grader who was coming to me with acute problems, really struggling in school, and a seizure disorder. And the story didn't really quite fit, so I spent many visits over the course of the year helping untap what was going on. And what I realized after that year was that this child did not have a seizure disorder. This child had been exposed to extreme trauma at home, and what manifested was a behavioral problem that made it so that the school and the mom excused his participation in school under the guise of seizure disorder. So this child missed 150 days of school, nearly a year, because of the lack of communication between school and health providers, and also lack of empowerment of the mother to really make sure that the kid, she had what she needed to allow the kid to proceed. And I've missed that as a pediatrician who tried herself in really thinking about health and education through the same lens. And so the primary school's goal is to really bring together these really incredibly important systems, health and education, to work together to improve the lives of the kids who need these systems to work the most. And we're nine weeks old, so there's a lot to learn, but that's our vision of what we can hopefully accomplish in the next, the decades to come. You've been a teacher, you've been a doctor, you're now running a school. Mark's a technologist. And when you launched UCI, you laid out your priorities. I'd love for you to share with the audience what those priorities were, and how your experience as a teacher and doctor, Mark's as a technologist, have informed those priorities. Yeah. Running a school's not enough. That's just one of the things here. What we've learned so far is that Mark and I can make the biggest impact when we not only invest our resources, but we also bring our expertise and passion to the table to solve problems as well. And like you said, Mark's a computer engineer, and so he's got, along with you, a lot of experience building tools and scaling them. That would be mostly him talking, but. Thank you. It's a partnership. She's always really generous. And for me, I have the experience of bringing the lens of being a pediatrician and an educator to really understand the different problems that we're tackling. And that together really has enriched both our understanding of the problems that we're trying to solve, and the additional insight and being part of building the solution that Mark and I can really participate in. And I'll give you an example. We're building a tool for personalized learning. And so Mark has really been engaged in thinking about how can we build the best tool possible to allow these students to have an incredible resource to really drive and own their education. And the kids are very critical. They give feedback on how the tool isn't working. And that's really, he and the team are working hard on it. But for me, I think about how is this tool gonna engage students? How is this tool gonna engage families? How is this tool gonna empower teachers to be even better at their work? And so that's how we bring ourselves as practitioners to the work. And that work rounds us in helping us understand and keep laser focused on what's the most important thing in what we do. Great. So not a lot of people work with the person they're married to. Raise your hand if you are working with a partner of some kind. How does this partnership work for you and Mark? Well, it starts with lots of phone calls to you. His other partner. But in all honesty, it's really fun. And we have a lot to learn from each other. We really, we are complimentary and we drive each other to really, we challenge each other to think more deeply about the questions that we're faced with. Whether Mark is asking me questions to keep me laser focused on what our goals are. If we're really making decisions that advance our goal or whether or not we are deviating from the mission that we've set out for ourselves. And for me, I force him to learn more about what's the context? What are we trying to do? Who are the people involved? What are the cultures that we're trying to work with? And how can we learn more from the people already doing the work? And so we push each other in different ways. It can be uncomfortable at times, but it's really fun. One of the ways you've pushed each other and I think challenged everyone is you just recently announced KPI Science. And with a really big audacious poll, talk about that. Yeah, we've spent the past two years talking to scientists all over the world, all different levels of training, post-graduates to Nobel Prize laureates. And really trying to learn, how can we help? How can we make your work even better? And what we've heard is really a need for tools and technology. I think for those not in health or science, it may not be obvious, but the tools and access to technology that you have to make your lives and your work better are not available to one of the most important sectors that we have, health and science. That big gap makes it difficult for the scientists to really be able to ask the next level of question and really innovative and creative inquiry about the work that they're studying, about the human body. And so after hearing that and hearing about the tools that they're asking for, we decided that is a great match for what we're able to bring. We just announced the hire of our CTO at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And he's gonna build a world-class engineering team to make sure that we bring the highest quality tools and technologies to the people who are gonna make the discoveries that change the way all of us live and stay healthy. Pretty amazing. Got a big gasp from the audience. So you're, as you said, the first college graduate in your family. And I've certainly seen how you've taken your experience. I've watched the advice you've given my children as they've grown over the past eight years. We're at a conference for women. This is a lean-in crowd. These women have leaned in hard in lots of ways to support themselves, support their families, and get into this room. What's your advice for women and girls out there on how to lean in? I think the most important piece of advice that I've heard from you as well, encouraging all women to lean in, is you, and I have to remind myself of this, you are capable beyond your wildest imagination. And whatever you wanna do, do it now. There's gonna be a village to help support you, the village. And it will be great. All right, we're gonna do a quick lightning round for fun, and then we'll probably have time for an audience question or two. All right, who's your real-life heroine? Well, you've got me started on this. My real-life heroine is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She blazed the trail. What is the book that changed your perspective on it? There's this book called Far From the Tree. It's by Andrew Solomon. It's about parents who raise children who are fundamentally different from them, whether or not their child is a genius or deaf or have severe physical disabilities. It talks about the experience of parents and those children, and that book really helped me relate to the parents and the families that I take care of as a teenager. Mark's favorite thing to cook for you? Okay, Mark cooks, and this is all one unit. You can't have less or more or any different. He cooks two racks of baby back ribs, and that's the Mark special. It's true. Actually, very early, Priscilla and I were talking about this. Very early in my tenure at Facebook, there was one weekend where Priscilla was out of town, and Dave was out of town, so Mark and I looked at each other. We're like, what are you doing tomorrow? I'm like, I have no plans. You have no plans. He's like, come over for dinner, and so Mark made me meat, like literally. He started the grill, and he cooked for the two of us like this much steak, and there was nothing else. There was just this much steak, and then he took it off, and he did it himself, and it was completely delicious. It's just I wasn't used to having a meal of all-meat steak. I was kind of, and you know, he's my new boss. I didn't want to insult him. I was kind of looking around for the salad, anything else, it wasn't there, but the steak was delicious. Do you cook for him? Rarely, but when we're tired of the all-meat diet, I jump in a little bit. Who are you more excited to dress up for Halloween, Max or Beast? Well, it's gonna be. People love Beast. Beast is dog famous. We're doing a whole family costume, so I think the person I'm most excited to see me dressed up is Mark. All right, we look forward to seeing it on Facebook and Instagram. Did you have a favorite class or something in medical school? This is kind of a fun story. I had this one lecture in medical school that I remember very vividly. It was led by a man at UCSF called Joe DeRisi, and he was so energetic, so enthusiastic about this work, and his work that he was describing was so out of this world that it sounded like science fiction, and I was just enthralled by his lecture and tracked him and his career over the next decade or so, and when it came time to found the Biohub, this new institute that we are building in the Bay Area where we bring together engineers, scientists, physicians to really solve hard problems about human health, his name came up again, and now he's leading the Biohub, so you never know when you're really gonna make an incredibly strong impression and impact on someone. All right, and this is breaking news because it just happened. Max's first word. Yes, this is really exciting. So Max's first word, I think influenced by beasts in our lives, is dog. That's right, and we, I think she has a second word for plane, it doesn't sound anything like plane, but she says it consistently, but that's not, it has not yet passed Mark's bar of qualifying as a word. All right, we have like less than one minute left, maybe we can grab one question from the audience. We're under very strict instructions to be on time, yeah. Hi there, Lee Morgan with the Gates Foundation. I have one question for you, Priscilla. What do you like best and least about the philanthropic sector? I am completely moved by people's dedication and inspiration for their work. Everyone is working towards a similar awe-inspiring goal of how do we make the world and people's lives better? One point of frustration that I think we can all really grow from, because I think there's a lot of focus on it right now, is how can we be more evidence and data-driven? How can we actually find ways to hold ourselves accountable for the work that we're doing? Okay, Priscilla Chan. Woo!