 My friend, Amit Gupta, is 32 years old. If I had to use one word to describe him, I would call him an entrepreneur. Like a true entrepreneur, he had an idea for a business in college and took two and a half years off to run it. Since then, he has founded and runs successful companies like Photo Jojo and Jelly, two companies which have brought together over a million people. He's living happily in San Francisco until about two months ago in October when he started feeling sick, started losing weight. When he went to the doctor, he caught a call back two weeks later and his doctor was brief and to the point, Amit, you have acute myeloid leukemia, need to enter treatment right away. And Amit's first reaction was, what the heck is acute myeloid leukemia? As he's packing for the hospital, he goes on his iPhone and finds out that he has to go through months and months of chemotherapy and radiation. But even then, his chances of survival are not that great, about 40%. And he has that dreaded conversation with his doctor who tells him that there's something that can double his chances of survival, something that may completely cure him. A bone marrow transplant procedure can save Amit's life. But the solution isn't that simple. The fact is that although 30% of patients find a match within their immediate families, Amit was not one of them. He had to turn to local bone marrow registries that have been set up around the world to help find matches for individual patients. But the problem is that although Amit's donor would most likely come from a South Asian individual, of the 1.5 billion South Asians in the world, less than 300,000 were registered as bone marrow donors. Amit's chances of finding a match were slim, very slim. One in 20,000. To put it in context, Amit had a better chance of catching the ball of a six at the Cricket World Cup final than finding a bone marrow donor. And although Amit would probably not get this analogy because he doesn't really watch cricket. And to make matters worse, in India, a country of 1.2 billion people, there was no national bone marrow registry. So Amit had to find South Asians outside of South Asia. And I tell you this story because over the past year, I've led an organization aimed at helping people like Amit. His story is not a singular one. His struggle is not an uncommon one. There are patients fighting every single day to find a bone marrow donor. So what did Amit do? Well, he contacted us. He contacted our group. We're a group of 12 inexperienced, but infectiously enthusiastic and passionate students at Stanford University. And we started, our goal was to get 100,000 people around the world to give their information to these registries and register as bone marrow donors. And through almost a year working on this problem, we realized several critical things. And when Amit contacted us, you know, being designers and technology geeks, we figured that we would think of Amit search like a game, like a lottery game. Hey, what's the scenario? Swab your cheek and that's your lottery ticket. Match with Amit and you win $30,000. So this was great. It was interesting. It was quirky. It got Amit's campaign a lot of press, but it was also illegal. It was illegal to pay someone to donate bone marrow. And the challenge wasn't just about telling people to register. It was about educating them about what happened if they matched with Amit. Many people have this image of bone marrow in mind. And while this may have been true in the 1980s, in 2011 things are a little bit different. And the fact is that bone marrow donation is now more like a four-hour blood transfusion. You can be watching TV the whole time. You can be listening to music. And I just want to give you a very recent example of Jordan. Jordan is a 15-year-old boy who's diagnosed with leukemia and his six-year-old sister became his bone marrow donor. And the fact is that there are countless minority individuals desperately trying to find a match against our community's uniquely terrible odds. And through almost a year of working on this problem, we discovered something really special. I love this quote. Humans are designed not to understand logic, but to value stories that we are motivated not by the needs of thousands, but by the story of one. And what we decided to do was think about what separated campaigns that were successful versus those that weren't. What made people look? What made them want to act? And it was three things. It was three specific principles that separated campaigns that were successful at mobilizing thousands of people versus those that weren't. And today I want to share with you these three principles and how we applied them to find Amit Gupta, a bone marrow donor, number one, cultivating optimism. There is something about the word cancer that depresses us, yet we know that it's truly hope that motivates us to act. Of all the forces that make for a better world, it is truly hope that is the most powerful. And our question was, how do you portray something that is so inherently sad into something that is positive and uplifting? Well, we decided that we're going to have an ethos of hope, irreverence, humor. And that wasn't hard because that's just who Amit was. In every single web page, every single newspaper article, this was the image that we used because it emphasized several things. It emphasized humor over tragedy, irreverence over pity, hope over guilt. And this was hugely important for the success of our campaign. Number two, designing for others. I want to show you a video that Aziz Ansari and Chris Bratt who are two American celebrities created for Amit. My friend Amit Gupta has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant before he runs out of time. You can help him and so many others now. Join dosomething.org, give a spit campaign and start your own registry drive. You can actually save somebody's life. That'd be pretty cool. And then you can run around campus and be like, yeah, I'm a philanthropist. I help people. I save people's lives. I'm a hero. And the girls will love you. Are those directly correlated? Yes. Absolutely. Join now by texting spit to 38383. Everybody's doing it. Does that still work? Don't you want to be cool? This is an example of using humor to enable action. Don't you want to be cool? But what's key here is a clear and direct call to action. Now that you know Amit's story, text this number, go on this website, or click this link. And what was true of every single tweet, every single blog post, every single newspaper article, if you're South Asian, we want you to register. If you're not, we want you to run a drive and help us register more. But even more important than telling people what to do was making it easy for them. While signing up to be a donor was pretty easy. It took about five or 10 minutes in a cheek swab. Running a drive was a little more complicated. And we got so many requests from people around the world who were pretty overwhelmed and these people didn't even know where to start running a bone marrow drive. And Nicole and Sid Han from our team created this website called Bone Marrow Drive in a Box. This broke down the complex process of running a bone marrow drive into six easy steps. Step one, find volunteers. Step two, advertise. Step three, run the drive. At every stage it provided resources, cut, paste, send letters, and tips that people could utilize to run an effective drive. It was making it easy for people and we launched the site in a week and within a day, 30 people around the country were using the site to run bone marrow drives. It was amazing. Number three was harnessing the power of networks. It's the final piece of the puzzle. How do you get your message out to the world? And while we tend to think of networks mostly in terms of traditional media, what was key here, what was truly amazing, and this was a highlight of the campaign is that people did things that we didn't really expect. And this was nowhere more true than in the realm of social media. The hashtags I swapped for Amit and for Amit had over 100 million impressions on Facebook and Twitter. And Amit, who was alone at the start of his search, is not alone anymore. There were people rooting for him all over the world. And through persistent optimism, designing for others and harnessing networks, over 1200 people signed up to conduct drives. This is just one example, a full link that people used on AOL.com's email page. Be the match. The major national registry in the US told us they had never seen anything like this because the response from Amit's story was overwhelming. Over 20,000 people requested a cheek swap kit since October for Amit and over 40,000 people around the world have registered. It is incredible. And what's Amit's status? Well, the truth is that as of today, Amit is still searching for a match. So I ask you to be a part of his story and his search and register as a donor. The fact remains that this problem is bigger than Amit. There are patients that contact me and my team every single week that need a match. So how do we help them? Well, we know what's effective. It's these three design principles. We ask ourselves, why not just create a tool that enables patients and families to be able to utilize the power of social and personal networks so that they can allow people around the world to give hope, to give time, and to give voice to patients with cancer? Why not just do what we did for Amit and open source it? And so we realized that we could have a viral impact. We created a tool at harnessing the power, the collective power of small acts from people all over the world to solve this problem. So you can be not just a part of these movements. You can help start them. And we call this new site, Meritree. We're launching on New Year's Day, 2012. And with the addition of 40,000 names to our database, courtesy of Amit, we have helped register not just reached our goal but surpassed our goal of 100,000 cheeks. And our new goal is to register a million people and we need your help to accomplish this, especially right here in India. In India, we can't just register a million people. We can help register a billion people. Let's recruit them. Let's do this. Let's Amit's story be your guiding light. Let his story be a strong call to action. And let his story be an affirmation of her belief that we, on our own, can truly save lives and change the world. All it takes is a simple cheek swab. Thank you.