Leila Janah

Janah was born on October 9, 1982, in Lewiston, New York, near Niagara Falls.⁠[1]

Her parents were immigrants from India; she was raised in a suburb of Los Angeles, attended the California Academy of Mathematics and Science, and while in high school won a scholarship to teach English in Ghana.⁠[2]

Janah designed her own degree in African development studies at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in development studies; as an undergraduate she worked in the World Bank’s Development Research Group.⁠[2][1]

After graduating she worked as a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners, a New York consultancy, and was a founding director of Incentives for Global Health.⁠[1]

In 2008 Janah founded Samasource in Nairobi, Kenya; “sama” means “equal” in Sanskrit. Set up as a nonprofit, it gave people in poverty digital work such as photo tagging and image annotation, with delivery centers in Kenya, Uganda and India.⁠[1][3]

Samasource trained young people and women in Kenya and Uganda in a 10-day data annotation course and then employed them at a living wage; its clients included GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, Facebook and Walmart. Salesforce VenturesSalesforce VenturesSalesforce Ventures is Salesforce’s corporate venture capital arm. Active since 2009, it backs companies from seed through growth across enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, data, security and AI. Salesforce supplies all of its capital.Open the full entry wrote in 2020 that the model had positively affected the lives of more than 50,000 people.⁠[3][1]

Janah described her approach as giving work rather than aid, saying that “the greatest challenge of the next 50 years will be to create dignified work for everyone.”⁠[2]

In 2013 Janah founded Samaschool, a nonprofit that trained people in basic digital literacy to improve their access to online jobs.⁠[2]

In 2015, after traveling in Uganda, Janah founded LXMI, a fair-trade organic skincare brand that employed hundreds of poor women in the Nile River Valley, mainly in Uganda, to harvest nuts for butter exported to the United States; LXMI was later selected for Sephora’s Accelerate cohort for female founders.⁠[2][1]

On August 31, 2015, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released “a16z Podcast: Connecting People with Digital Work, the Gig Economy, and More.” As founder and CEO of Samasource, Janah spoke with Sonal Chokshi, then editor in chief of Frontier at Andreessen Horowitz, about whether digital work can fight poverty, whether companies can be profitable while doing social good, and employment of all kinds, from sweatshop work to the gig economy and remote work; she also argued that nonprofits should borrow attitudes toward failure and better measures of success from for-profit startups.⁠[4]

The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019, under the title “a16z Podcast | Connecting People with Digital Work, the Gig Economy, and More.”⁠[5]

To scale its AI data business, Samasource moved to a for-profit model, with the original nonprofit becoming a shareholder in the new company; Salesforce Ventures dates the change to 2018, while Sama dates it to 2019 and describes the original nonprofit as the company’s largest shareholder.⁠[3][2]

After the transition, the Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund invested in Samasource’s Series A alongside Ridge Ventures, Social Impact Ventures, Bestseller Foundation and Bluecrest Limited Capital; the amount was not disclosed.⁠[3]

Janah died in Manhattan on January 24, 2020, at the age of 37.⁠[1]

On January 27, 2020, Skoll Foundation chief strategy officer Shivani Garg Patel published a remembrance noting that the two had co-founded Samahope.⁠[6]

Janah was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, received the Heinz Award and wrote the book Give Work.⁠[3]

Sama: Official website: https://sama.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]