Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- In 1998, John Wood was a high-flying, highly paid international marketing exec at Microsoft Corp. who worked nonstop. ``It seemed as if my mantra was, `You can sleep when you are dead and buried,''' he writes in ``Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.''

After an overdue vacation in Nepal, he quit to become a philanthropist. His epiphany came during a surreal moment: A visit to a rural school library with no books.

In 2000, Wood founded Room to Read, a San Francisco-based literacy organization dedicated to building schools and providing books and scholarships in developing countries. I talked with Wood, now 42, at Bloomberg headquarters in New York.

Schatz: Why did you go to Nepal?

Wood: I'd been at Microsoft from 1991 to 1998 and I hadn't had a real vacation in years and years. One day I went to an adventure trekking company slide show and they showed these shots of these 28,000-foot Himalayan peaks, and I thought, I need to get out there. I need to take three weeks off from work and get out to the mountains. A friend joked, if I got high enough in the Himalayas, I could probably not hear Steve Ballmer yelling at me anymore.

So I headed off to Nepal. I thought it would just be a short vacation but it turned into a very life-changing experience for me.

Schatz: How so?

Wood: Nepal is a land of spectacular beauty but also a land of crushing poverty. The illiteracy rate is 70 percent and people live on a dollar a day. What I saw in Nepal was third-world, perhaps even fourth-world conditions, where kids had so few opportunities. They didn't have access to schools, they didn't have access to libraries.

`In Name Only'

Schatz: What prompted you to take action?

Wood: A headmaster I met invited me to see his school. The school had about 450 students. This was two days walk from the nearest road. We were literally walking on donkey paths and yak paths thru the mountains to get to this school. He showed me the school's library. It was a library in name only. It was an empty room with no shelving, no desks and most importantly, no books. And I talked to the headmaster and said, ``What can I do to help?'' Chapter one of my book is titled ``Perhaps, Sir, You'll Someday Come Back With Books.''

In my mind I got this image of coming back to this village, and I wanted to come back with a yak, with thousands of books.

Plea From Katmandu

Schatz: Did you ever do that?

Wood: Yes, I went to a cyber cafe in Katmandu and went to my Hotmail address. The first thing I did is I sent mail off to everybody I knew and said, not please help, I said, but you must help these kids get access to books. We did a book drive over the Internet. My father helped me out, he was retired at the time. I kind of tricked him. I told him we'd get 100 or 200 books the first month, we got 3,000 books the first month.

Schatz: Cynics are going to say, sure he could quit his job and start a foundation; he was rich. What were the real risks for you?

Wood: The risks for me were twofold. Without sounding shallow, there's a social status risk. I was going from saying I was an executive at Microsoft to saying I'm delivering books on the back of yaks to rural Himalayan villages.

The second risk for me was financial. I walked away from a lot of money at Microsoft. Unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, I could not actually underwrite everything I wanted to do. I had to go out immediately and start fundraising.

Ballmer's Wisdom

Schatz: You say in your book that you learned valuable lessons from Microsoft's chief executive, Steven Ballmer.

Wood: Steve lives, eats, sleeps, breathes results, results, results. I've tried to take that same mentality into the charity world. I want to build the Microsoft of the nonprofit world and be very results-focused. We literally report our results to our investors on a quarterly basis, much like a public company does. We literally list out for our investors the number of schools we've built, the number of libraries we've established, the number of books we've donated, the number of girls we have on scholarship.

Schatz: Catch us up. How big is Room to Read now and what have you accomplished?

Wood: We have worked with over 3,000 villages to date across seven countries. We have done 3,000 libraries, we've built 210 schools and will be almost at 300 by the end of this year, We've put two million books in the hands of kids and we have 2,000 girls on long-term scholarship through our scholarship program, which recognizes that in the developing world, two-thirds of the illiterate people are women.

Schatz: How do you fundraise?

Wood: We get a lot of corporate support. We get support from a lot of the major banks, including ING, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS; we get a lot of support from big technology companies -- Accenture, Microsoft; Google gives us free advertising; Starbucks is a big supporter of ours. We are not the least bit shy in knocking on corporate doors.

``Leaving Microsoft to Change the World'' is published by Collins (266 pages, $25.95).

(Robin D. Schatz is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Robin D. Schatz at rschatz@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 6, 2006 00:05 EDT