Jaeson Rosenfeld
Jaeson Rosenfeld met Jeremy Hockenstein as a business analyst at McKinsey in Cleveland in 1995, and they've been friends and sometimes roommates ever since. After McKinsey, he earned master's degrees at Fletcher School and the London School of Economics, then was one of five Digital Divide Data founders. The companies he founded include StatDNA—a football analytics firm that still provides jobs to DDD—which he sold to Arsenal, where he served on the executive team from 2012 to 2020. He advised FIFA for the last World Cup, helped buy the Saint-Étienne football club in France, and now works with Jeremy at the Livelihood Impact Fund while running the Urban Living Standards Initiative, which works to improve life for urban slum dwellers in Kenya. When he finished grad school in 2001 with a little McKinsey money in his pocket, Jeremy suggested they meet in Cambodia for a month to see if there was anything they could do to help. Cambodia then had only bicycles and motos, with a handful of cars. The outsourcing movement was starting, wages were low, and they figured there was probably some work that didn't require English fluency. "That was our very structured business plan," he says.
DDD bootstrapped from a $25,000 initial grant, hiring 10 people and keeping it small. For seven years, they operated on a dirt road in half of a house without air conditioning because they couldn't afford it. They tried hiring a cohort of sex-trafficked women, but many of them lacked functional literacy and struggled to do the work—a lesson about the balance between who you want to help and the productivity required to cover costs and pay fair wages. Disabled populations became some of their best employees. Sales and middle management have always been the hardest challenges. Clients were concerned about sending work to Cambodia in 2001, when people associated it with killing fields and genocide, not outsourcing. The Battambang office wasn't beneficial enough to justify the added complexity. Managing three countries at DDD's scale wasn't easy. His dream for the future is cracking local clients in each country, so operations aren't all competing for the same international pool of business, and more people can get the work. When he went to Cambodia a few years ago for a graduate gathering, he saw people he'd known as kids who are now adult professionals in leadership positions. Four DDD graduates now execute his projects at the Livelihood Impact Fund. "Honestly, they're amazing," he says. "It's incredible what they're doing."
