Ranjay Gulati

I discovered that most of these people had a personal belief.

Now I'll go back to my mother.

My mother was a self-made woman in a very male-dominated society.

where she had to fight against all kinds of gender odds to do what she had done.

And she'd been pushed around by a lot of these people in business and government and so forth.

And so this guy showing up was just another man showing up trying to bully her saying, I'm taking away your land and you can't do anything about it.

So it touched her at a very personal level.

It was about her identity.

Who am I?

So it starts from that kind of place where you have a conviction or a belief.

I mean, Frances Haugen did not want a whistleblower because it would blow up her career, a hard-charging Harvard MBA.

And she was talking to her parents and she said, why me, mom?

Let somebody else do it.

There's a lot of people at Facebook who should be doing this.

Why should I do it?

And her parents flipped it around and said, if not you, then who?

And she was like, yeah.

But that story also reveals another scene, which is courage rarely happens alone.

The Hollywood portrayal is one of like,

James Bond, Jason Bourne, the solitary hero, it's usually a collective effort.