At 14, Pari Singh made just enough money to stir up an existential crisis.

17 years later, Singh still can’t talk about the details of that business (at least, not to a reporter). But the deal kicked off a seminal episode in his life.

“It wasn’t a lot of money, but enough that I thought I’d sold out,” said Singh, who grew up in London. “I was 14 and I had to work out what I wanted to do with my life. So, every day for two weeks, I thought about it really deeply. I did nothing else. And I basically came to a set of conclusions that have driven my life ever since: There are two universes, one in which you’re born, and one in which you’re not. The delta between the two, the positive difference, is how much good you’ve done as a human—and you want to maximize that.”

This perhaps conjures a

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