From this small personal goal stemmed one of the largest nonprofit educational organizations in the world, Room to Read (R2R), which Wood founded in 2000 after nearly a decade as a top executive at Microsoft. He was 35.

While such life-changing decisions certainly come at no small cost, Wood considers his a trade-up.

“Yes, it has been a financial sacrifice, ... and I work more hours and I travel more than I’ve ever travelled. But in my heart I’m much happier,” said Wood, who is also R2R’s CEO, during a Taipei press event yesterday at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT).

The Time Magazine Asia’s Heroes Award recipient and Draper Richards Foundation Fellow is in town at the invitation of an international think tank to share his experience with R2R, and discuss how he applied key business lessons from one of the most successful companies in the world to one of the most pressing problems in the world — the lack of basic literacy.

He sums up his work of social entrepreneurship as “taking the compassion of Mother Teresa and combining it with the focus and the tenacity of a for-profit blue-chip company ... but having a social return of the investment, and just leaving the world a better place.”

In the developing world today, there are 800 million people who cannot read or write, Wood said. On top of that, there are 100 million children between the ages of five and 10 who are not enrolled in school — two-thirds of which are girls.

“It is for this reason that I left Microsoft in 1999 after being in Nepal and delivering books on the back of a yak to a rural village ... to devote the rest of my adult life to bringing this life-long gift of education ... to children across the poorest parts of the world,” he explained.

The Connecticut native attributes his parents as a source of inspiration for his decision to start R2R.

“My parents always told me that if you make a lot of money that does not make you a good person. What makes you a good person is what you do with that money. So I was taking their lesson,” he said.

And, “leaving Microsoft to devote your life to philanthropy is now such an important trend that Bill Gates has decided to follow my example,” he added with a laugh as he joked about his ex-boss.

R2R aims to break the cycle of poverty through education, thereby empowering communities to ultimately improve their socioeconomic conditions in a sustainable manner. Their motto: “World change starts with educated children.”

R2R has received several awards, including The Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Sand Hill Group Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurship Award.

Since 2000, R2R has impacted the lives of over 1.3 million children by establishing 287 schools and over 3,870 libraries, publishing 146 new local language children’s titles, donating over three million books, funding over 3,400 long-term girls’ scholarships, and establishing 136 computer and language labs.

By the end of 2007, R2R will have opened 437 schools, of which four have been funded by donors from Taiwan, noted Wood. Also by the end of the year, four million books will have been donated, and R2R’s 5,000th school library will open in Nepal. Looking forward, R2R aims to reach three million children by 2010, and 10 million by the end of 2020, as well as open 10,000 libraries in the next three years.

This impressive growth is by no means a coincidence, as Wood remarks, “We believe in running R2R as a business and measuring everything and growing quickly” — a growth which he says has been possible due to “very big goals,” “very strong local teams,” and “very generous financial commitments from some of the world’s leading companies.”

R2R operates in some of the countries most in need for educational resources, such as Nepal, Cambodia, India, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, South Africa and Zambia.

Future expansion plans include at least three more countries in Africa and three new ones in Latin America by 2010, while continuing their current efforts in Asia.

Asked about R2R’s country selection criteria, Wood explains that the nonprofit looks for countries “where the government is increasing its investment in education ... where parents are willing to donate labor .. and where there’s a lot of interest from donors.”

In terms of Taiwan, the CEO said he hoped to start relationships with business executives and corporations. “As Taiwanese companies go more and more global, we are hoping that philanthropy will also go more global.”

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