Paul Polak (September 3, 1933 – October 10, 2019) was the co-founder and CEO of Windhorse International, a for-profit social venture with the mission of inspiring and leading a revolution in how companies design, price, market and distribute products to benefit the 2.6 billion customers who live on less than $2 a day.

IDE has ended poverty for 19 million of the world’s poorest people by making radically affordable irrigation technology available to farmers through local small-scale entrepreneurs, and opening private sector access to markets for their crops.

His family fled the country in 1939 when Paul was only six-years-old to escape the Nazis in World War II, arriving in Hamilton, Canada as refugees.

This sparked his entrepreneurial spirit and he, along with two partners, Morley Leatherdale and Ed Cummins, started a strawberry farm that earned him $700 for two summers’ work.

[citation needed] Polak had a wide and varying career in medicine, which included a stint as a deputy coroner and as a medical officer in Melrose, Scotland.

In the late 1960's, Polak headed the Research Department at the Fort Logan Mental Health Center in Denver Colorado.

On the other hand, helping people confront family conflict and deal with the associated emotion, lead to lasting changes that eluded other therapy techniques.

After a trip to Bangladesh, Polak was inspired to use the skills he had honed while working with homeless veterans and mentally ill patients in Denver to help serve the 800 million people living on a dollar a day around the world.

Employing the same tactics he pioneered as a psychiatrist, Polak spent time “walking with farmers through their one-acre farms and enjoying a cup of tea with their families, sitting on a stool in front of their thatched-roof mud–and–wattle homes”.

[15] In 2007 Polak founded Windhorse International; a private company based on his ideas that business could benefit the bottom billions.

He was the subject of articles in print media such as National Geographic, Scientific American, Forbes, Harpers, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Working to alleviate poverty is a lively, exciting field capable of generating new hope and inspiration, not feelings of gloom and doom.

Learning the truth about poverty generates disruptive innovations capable of enriching the lives of rich people even more than those of poor people.”[23] A second book written by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick that was published on September 9, 2013.

Together, they show how their design principles and vision can enable unapologetic capitalists to supply the very poor with clean drinking water, electricity, irrigation, housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities at a fraction of the usual cost and at profit margins attractive to investors.