The Wilhelm and Karl Maybach Foundation, established in 2005 by Ulrich Schmid-Maybach, the great-grandson of Wilhelm Maybach, is a U.S.-based non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the engineering and design legacy of Wilhelm and Karl Maybach. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the foundation’s mission encompasses showcasing the Maybach heritage to inspire innovation and offering mentoring programs to cultivate exceptional talent.
Ulrich Schmid-Maybach serves as the founder and president of the foundation. With a master’s degree in international business focusing on US–German relations, he has guided the foundation’s efforts to honor his family’s legacy while fostering mentorship and innovation. Schmid-Maybach is also involved in real estate development and entrepreneurship, co-founding the Maybach Icons of Luxury accessory brand and participating in various family office and private wealth conferences worldwide.
Sanjoy Roy, is the MD of Teamwork Arts, having directed and produced over 1000 hours of films and television shows. He is the producer of Jaipur Literary Festival; his company produces 33 annual arts festivals across 17 countries. He is the founder-trustee of Salaam Baalak Trust, that provides support services for street and working children, remains at heart a leading proponent of ‘giving back’ to society.
Uli and Sanjoy talked about philanthropy, automotive, heritage, and mentorship at an exclusive evening hosted by Anubhav Nath, founder, Ojasart Foundation that works closely with tribal art; Anubhav is a young and dedicated philanthropist, himself..
Sanjoy Roy: Uli what’s really interesting, and I think many of the people in the room will resonate with this, you could have well sort of gone on and done Elon Musk like things which is, you know, as we are seeing the consequence today. But the Maybach Foundation is something that you are now pretty much behind and part of you look at a whole host of stuff, and it’s really about giving back. It’s about mentorship. So, what was that moment that you thought that this is something that you need to do?
Ulrich Schmid Maybach: So, I’d like to say two things about that. One is a word of caution, and the other one is sort of the origin story. And thinking that you have this wonderful name and, in a way, what are you going to do with it? Right? And if there’s a way that you can donate it to charity, so to speak. And I remember going around and interviewing different foundations, just foundations that I would work with or partner with or whatever it was. And the Red Cross is huge and you’ll get lost. And then a lot of these smaller ones are run by sort of central guru type figures that without that person, the whole thing won’t work. And that’s also a little bit risky. And having this multinational car company you know, at your back to support you as well.
It allowed us to really go out and say, we’re going to form this foundation. And at that time Dr. Corina Bosler, helped me start that foundation. We’ve been working together for 20 years, on and off, in some capacity. She, I like to say she had written her PhD at, at Maybach, and then I hired her immediately when she matriculated before they could. And it’s been a great working relationship ever since.
The other caution, and I think many of you who are involved in philanthropy, you’re not going to have results right away. And you make mistakes and you try your best and it’s not necessarily the same thing as making a buck, right?
And many of us try to run our foundations like they were, efficient, well-oiled machines. But there’s a lot of inefficiency. There’s a lot of difficult things. And I just find a lot of times you try to do something good and there are people who don’t want you to do it. Okay? There are people who will just stand in your way at just because everything’s not rosy in the world around this thing.
The idea was to help the few to influence the many and to pay it forward, but it’s risky business to invest in just a few people. So that was another learning. And in this day and age, when we have artificial intelligence and Zoom calls and we can do a lot of e-learning and e-mentoring and things that the future is really more in that direction.
We’re working with this one organization, Dr. Ravi Gundlapalli here in India, and actually in the United States as well with his organization, MentorCloud, which is a B2B corporate mentoring organization that was voted one of the Forbes top 200 startup companies here in India. And he’s spending more and more time here just saying, the demand is here and the results are here.
Sanjoy Roy: One of the ways you were able to de-risk in a sense, this risk of generational change, which is any philanthropic has to look at this as generational change is what you said. Look at the mentorship programme. Tell us a little bit about that because one of the things that you did with Anubhav, is that you mentored Vicki Roy, who’s a wonderful photographer from Salam Balak Trust. Vicki ran away from home. He got this amazing opportunity to go and be one of the four young people who were selected to record the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre. And that, for example, is an amazing example of this whole idea of mentorship today. Vicki has given back to society, his more recent project has been about disability. He’s travelled the length and breadth of the country doing this brilliant piece, which is a book and an exhibition, and in many ways, giving back. And he’s always had this, and that’s what mentorship does at the end of the day. But tell us a little bit about the science of mentorship. Why is that mentorship programme so important, especially when you’re bringing about, or looking to bring about generational change?
Ulrich Schmid Maybach: That’s certainly worth thinking about. I like to say your best future is helping somebody else find theirs. And we did some of these early sorts of mentoring experiments, and especially in the Silicon Valley, we would get a lot of, oh yeah, I’d like a mentor, that’d be great. I’d love to have, somebody high up at Facebook or this or that. And I’d say, okay, we can help with that and but you need to also pay it forward and, and mentor somebody else. Oh no, I don’t have time for that. Right? And that’s not really what it’s about because it’s more of a culture of giving. It’s more of a culture of helping. And when I was first exploring the idea of which sort of philanthropic angle do you take, and here I ask, did you read about grain being shipped to starving people. And a lot of the corruption and fraud that happens because that grain actually gets mostly sidelined and resold and the military gets involved, you know, whatever. That wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do. And philanthropy is the love of man, right? So, it’s really one person helping another that seemed to be very archetypical. And it helped to go back to the idea of my own personal family history that, that we would, take that tack moving forward. And so, we crafted these really unique and very individual projects, a lot of them through access that we had through the car company with Julian Schnabel, for instance the Harvard School of Public Health. I met Dr. David Bangsberg just on a plane flying back from some event.
And we talked for 10 hours and then ended up crafting this project that turned into the Maybach Harvard Global Health Scholars Project in East Africa that ended up really over five years supporting of an individual who became Chief of Medicine at his hospital, and probably the most published East African researcher at that time too.
So, but I would like to fast forward a little bit because times changed and we’ve gone through different iterations. We, we published a best practices manual. We explored this e-mentoring thing. We did with a company called Million Ways, an artificial intelligence company. We were trying to really detect mentoring ability and mentoring skill among people.
And it was a 30-minute telephone interview, robot call that people would answer and we did, I don’t know, 30, 40, 50 of these calls and, and we’re really surprised. I remember Martin, the CEO of that company called up and he said, you know, we came up with something really interesting and really disturbing. I said, well, what’s that? And he said, well, what motivates people most about mentoring is power. In the back of your head, you, you kind of understand where that comes from, right? But it’s not really what you wanted to hear. So, I don’t want to come off jaded, it’s so easy for us to polish our results to make it look how fabulous everything’s been.
But it’s hard to get things done. I was speaking with Sanjoy, we were talking today about the where about the work that Sanjoy does bringing basically libraries into the Indian school system. And I get the feeling he’s a little bit of a logistics genius. So, if anybody can pull it off, he can. And his wife has been doing the content part of this for 20 or 30 years now. So, but you must also admit there’s headwinds and failures and the books get stolen or they get lost, or people don’t know how to use them or whatever it is. And sometimes it’s hard to keep pushing.
Sanjoy Roy: One of the challenges that we have here, and it’s not just here today, now across the world, is that both the corporate world as well as governments are looking at not-for-profits and the non-government sector with a great deal of suspicion. And we are seeing that, and, there’s a sense that these are people left of centre. They always pretend to do good, which they don’t actually do. And they are spies or they’re whatever, or they’re anti-Christ or whatever is the equivalent of it is. Do you not have a solution, but what is it that we need to do in the not-for-profit space to be able to build trust between corporates, government and the not-for-profits so that governments and corporates understand that this is a much-needed last mile connectivity. This is a much-needed mentoring of individuals. This is not just about providing support across the board. It’s not a scheme. It’s very personalised and that’s something that the not-for-profits and the NGOs can do. What do we need to do to build on that trust?
Ulrich Schmid Maybach: Wow that’s a big question. One of the things that attracted us to Ravi’s MentorCloud platform is a project that he had done with the Arizona prison systems. And it was a mentoring project. It was a paid mentoring project, and they were able to handpick prisoners and then connect them with mentors outside of prison. And it was 90% success. Again, handpicking. And a lot of these prisoners came out, started their own businesses, became self-sustaining. So, you have money coming from the government you have, in a sense, corporate providing the mentoring ability, whether it’s an electrician’s union or whatever it might be. But then they didn’t renew it, I think because of political wins. So, it costs you what, $8,000 for this six-month period, for each one of these prisoners who would otherwise cost $80,000 a year to keep in prison, right? So instead of spending that money, you spend it on this mentoring thing, but how do you actually get that through and get these projects renewed and you have a pilot project. I suppose you would need to set it up as a whole business unit. And I don’t mean impact investment. I mean, I’m actually talking about just making a buck by doing something good.
Sanjoy Roy: And will that, do you think over a period of time, this looking at it as a business model, will make it far more transparent? Will it be far more efficient, or is that something that comes from the people who are involved in it? Because in the not-for-profit and the non-government sector, it’s also about heart. It’s also about passion. The desire to help, the desire to be able to build that bridge between inequity and sort of get them to a space of equity.
Ulrich Schmid Maybach: Wow. I don’t know how to answer that question. It’s complex. I think it’s again so much of of life is just muddling through, right? You get to a point and you don’t know how to get further and you just crawl through the mud and you kind of keep going, right? And then all of a sudden you come out and the sun’s shining and things are working out again. I think you may have a better perspective on it than I.
Sanjoy Roy: What we’ve seen or experienced over the last whatever, 35-40 years that one’s been involved in, in this particular aspect is that it doesn’t matter at one level. It doesn’t matter what other people think or don’t think, or whether there’s trust or not. You have to just, as you said, crawl through the mud barrel on. And the result is really the changes that you see, the generational changes. Even if one person out of a hundred who you’ve reached out to and tried to help can make it, well, you’ve changed not just a life, but a home and a family. So, you’re looking at creating ecosystems and you’re creating a systemic change that we’ve seen in India for many different reasons. And we’ve been struggling with this because in India, as in America and much of the world, there has been this pushback against the not-for-profit and the NGO sector because people look at it suspiciously. They don’t see that necessarily translating into votes or necessarily translating into support for a particular point of view.
