Chief Change Officer
#369 Chris Schrader: From Rainy-Day Idea to Global Movement—The 24 Hour Race Story–Part Two
Wed, 14 May 2025
After launching a global anti-trafficking movement in his teens, Chris Schrader didn’t settle down—he leveled up.In Part Two, the founder of the 24 Hour Race draws parallels between navigating the Gobi Desert and leading high-growth businesses across continents. From dropping out of Harvard to leading expeditions and scaling software companies, Chris shares why building teams isn’t about maximizing your strongest players—it’s about supporting your weakest. And why sometimes, real leadership means being the “secretary of the team,” not the star.This episode goes beyond business tactics and into the mindset behind meaningful leadership. It’s a deep dive into servant leadership, self-doubt, ruthless decision-making, and how to chase your personal North Star—even if you never reach it.Key Highlights of Our Interview:When ISIS Threats and Identity Crises Collide“Some challenges are existential—like not knowing what we are. Others are urgent—like whether to cancel an event after a terror threat.”The Expedition Analogy: Climbing Unmapped Peaks“Trying to grow an organization is like summiting a mountain no one’s climbed before—you’ll miss things, reroute, and sometimes have to turn back.”The Gobi Desert and the North Star“You navigate by stars knowing you’ll never touch them. That’s what great goals are—worth chasing even if you never arrive.”The Secret to Team Performance“You’re not defined by your best players. You’re defined by your weakest. Great leaders either lift them—or make hard calls.”Servant Leadership Isn’t Just Humility—It’s Precision“As a leader, I’m the expedition secretary. My job is to clear the path so my team can outperform me in every way.”When to Cut Loose and When to Coach“Too many leaders let low performers drag down morale. In expeditions, that mistake can get someone killed. In business, it just slowly kills momentum.”The Myth-Building Side of Leadership“Sometimes leadership means becoming something aspirational—a myth people can believe in. But you still serve the mission, not yourself.”Between What You Want to Be and What You Need to Be“I want to be the first man to circumnavigate the moon. But I need to be a good son, a great partner, a reliable chairman—and pay my sous-vide-powered electricity bill.”The Hardest Impact Isn’t Global—It’s Personal“It’s easy to romanticize Musk or Zuckerberg. Harder? Being the friend who actually shows up. That’s the real Paragon of humanity.”_____________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Chris Schrader --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Chris Schrader and what is the 24 Hour Race movement?
Today's guest is Chris Schrader, founder and executive chairman of 24 Hour Race, which is a global movement against human trafficking that has raised over 20 million US dollars in the last decade. I've known Chris for almost 10 years. Our first encounter was back in 2016 when I invited him to be a panelist at an event I hosted on education technology.
Chris is sharp, well-read, and definitely unconventional. He took a leave of absence from Harvard Spent an extended period of time away and eventually finished his studies in neuroscience while also building and growing tech businesses around the world. Along the way, he founded a charity based on his love for expeditions.
And it's safe to say he sees life and business leadership as a journey too. We have talked for about an hour, split into two parts. In the last episode, part one, we touched upon the genesis and evolution of 24-hour race. What started as a casual suggestion on a rainy day turned into a life-changing journey for a teenager.
The walk across England raised five-figure in US dollars and sparked an eight-figure US dollar global movement at the end. Today's episode, part two, will focus on Chris' approach to leadership and team building, drawing parallels between leading an expedition and managing a business team.
Here, we'll highlight how lessons learned from life or death situations in the wilderness translate into effective leadership strategies in the corporate world. Chris also offers his genuine advice for young, ambitious talents on balancing life goals, family expectations, and career direction. Let's get started.
As you walk us through this journey, from the humble beginnings all the way to raising 20 million US dollars over the years, it almost sounds like magic, but I know it's not magic. There must have been plenty of challenges along the way, not just in the beginning when teachers were dismissive of your idea, but throughout the whole process.
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Chapter 2: What early challenges did Chris face while building the 24 Hour Race?
Could you tell us more about some of the difficulties or obstacles that you and your team faced? And how did you eventually figure things out? Maybe you can share some specific examples?
yeah that's a great question look we've honestly had hundreds of thousands of challenges and they can really span from existential through to incidental so existential for example was just identifying our purpose what are we we're not quite a grassroots organization we put these races together we raised quite a bit of Are we in a grassroots NGO? Are we an events provider?
Chapter 3: How does Chris Schrader use the mountain climbing analogy to explain leadership challenges?
Are we an anti-slavery charity? Just figuring that out in the early days was really tough. We've had other stuff since. For example, we had one event that was literally received a threat from ISIS at the peak of the ISIS terror wave in the 2010s. And we had to make a spot decision whether to cancel our event or to continue it.
So you have these sort of momentary hurdles and you have the existential ones. The way I always think about it is like climbing a mountain. When you climb a mountain, and let's say it's a totally novel new mountain that hasn't really been climbed before, you identify an approach from where the perspective that you have, you'll of course miss things.
And then you attempt to summit or wherever you attempt an approach. And often there are obstacles and maybe you get about halfway and then there's an ice field and... It's insurpassable, and so you turn around and you reevaluate your approach. But fundamentally, the goal is the same, which is to summit that mountain.
And sometimes you get really close, and you're so close that it's very tempting to carry on. But again, there's some kind of threat, a big crevasse or whatever, that just isn't worth the risk. And of course, if you're very lucky and if you're very good at it, you do summit the mountain.
But as any mountaineer will tell you, when you get to the top of a peak, what's the first thing you see another peak that you want to find? There's this sort of aspect to a charity where I would describe, for example, an ISIS threat to a group of students in a particular city trying to fight slavery.
as a similar situation to a crevasse on that mountain analogy versus what is the actual mountain we're climbing is more existential and more akin to what is the 24-hour race what's its role in the world if that makes sense i really like the analogy used is actually quite philosophical it reminds me of a chinese saying
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Chris learn from his Gobi Desert expedition?
which is, however high the mountain is, there's always another one higher. That idea of always seeing a higher peak resonates with what you are saying. This philosophy seems not apply only to how you've built this charity, but also to your approach in many of the business ventures you've been involved in.
Yeah, let me expand a little bit on that analogy by going into the realm of the absurd. So in 2011, I took a gap year after graduating high school. And while all my friends were heading on trips to Phuket and various destinations in Asia. I got on a train and then a plane and arrived in the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, where I met a team of 14 in total seasoned explorers.
And then we went all the way out to the west of Mongolia and we began to attempt to walk across the Gobi desert. And I was young. I think I just hadn't turned 18 yet. I was 17. And as we began this journey, the Gobi desert itself, sometimes for whatever reason back then, the GPS signal wouldn't work. Now navigation was a little bit
more simple in the early days because you basically had a series of mountains to your north and you had a series of mountains to your south. The sun rose and you just followed the sun and you kept the mountains between, you'd more or less be on track.
But as that mountain range, the Altai mountains subsided into the flatness of the Gobi, you know, we struggle with navigation to the point where we'd have to double check where we thought we were with stars. And what I think is interesting about cellular navigation, this millennia-long way of getting around the world, is you follow stars, but you never really expect to set foot on them.
So you can follow the north star, which is the one everyone talks about, or you can navigate by it, and it can guide you to incredible destinations. It can get you to exactly where you want to be at various points of your journey. But by following this thing, you're not going to ever reach it. And I think in some way, good goals are like that.
Good goals guide your day-to-day decision-making, whether they're immediate, random threats to whatever it is you're building or doing in your personal life or in your business life, or totally big decisions to make. You can always refer to your so-called North Star or whatever star it is that you navigate by. I think about that analogy a lot. What's a goal worth pursuing?
were you to spend your whole life pursuing it and you were to never reach it and you're in your old frail years you could still say to yourself that was a hell of a shot and it was totally worth it You know, what are goals that are so important that failure is expected and not a disappointment because the goal itself is just too important for that.
And that just, that was a thought process I had back on the Adobe expedition some time ago.
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Chapter 5: How does Chris apply expedition leadership principles to business and team building?
And in that time, I transitioned from being a charity founder to a software founder. And I have a lot of thoughts about the evolution of software since I started working in the industry in 2014 till today. As a matter of fact, my background, I started at Harvard studying a very generically named field, East Asian Studies.
mainly focused on China, and in particular, Ming Dynasty Chinese history onwards. And I transitioned to the field of computational neuroscience, which is eventually where I got my degree. So I was always attracted to the field of technology. And anyone who was alive in 2013 or 2014 could see it was really early days for adopting and deploying technology into various industries.
So I made that transition. That being said, everything, every success I've had, and for that matter, every failure I've had while working in the full profit technology and software sector, I can basically trace to an analogy from an expedition that I've partaken on. So
Talking about, for example, team building, there's an expression that I first heard when I was rowing in high school, at boarding school, which was the first boat is only as fast as the second boat. And I think what was meant, I was on the second boat, by the way, I wasn't on the first.
I think what was meant by this is that you define, your performance is not defined by your best players, it's defined by your weakest players. And in business, this can be a little bit of a trope because our attitude often in the business world is to give people chances and to make sure they perform. But the expedition world, there are no such, there's no such forgiveness.
So I can think of one expedition that I was on, for example. where the expedition leader, who wasn't me, was himself an accomplished explorer, but was not very good at understanding that distinction between your top players and your, I wouldn't say bottom players, but your weaker links.
As an expedition leader, you need to make sure that your top players are humbled and understand that they're only as strongest as their weakest player. And so as an expedition leader, you have really two choices. You can either get rid of your weakest link or you can rein in your top performers. That's really what happens. And by the way,
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Chapter 6: Why does Chris believe a team's performance is defined by its weakest members?
To be quite honest, by the time that an expedition actually takes place, it's really too late to be making these decisions. They should be made well before you do the expedition itself. And this particular person didn't really understand this concept very well.
And the result was that small discrepancies in the abilities between team members were not managed properly, led to huge discrepancies in morale and expedition success. And on this particular expedition, I think over 70% of the participants ended up dropping out. And they dropped out for health reasons. There were some very close calls. And when I say close call, I mean near death, okay?
This doesn't happen in the business world, but in the expedition world, it definitely does. And just due to low morale, we lost some really great team players. So... There's a sort of like a motto in the startup world, fire fast, hire slow kind of thing. With expeditions, it's very much like this.
If there's an issue, you almost immediately have to try and address it, but you have to address it in a way where you're not just benchmarking everyone against your most capable person. And moreover, what I'll add is I've been on plenty of expeditions where I've You have to be extremely wary of the type of person who is extremely physically confident, mentally competent.
Often these people end up being quite weak in the expedition environments where you operate absolutely as a team. So I guess what I'm saying is that a business is a watered down, in my opinion, a watered down version of an expedition. An expedition is a hyperbolic version of a business. And especially when it comes to thinking about team dynamics. Who's your weakest? Who's your strongest?
How do you get those two? How do you bridge that gap between the two? And because I experienced a few failures in expeditions very early in my life, I think I was able to see the crisis of building a team and how that can win or lose a goal in a sort of high stakes way.
boiler environment and translate that to work i think more recently yeah so in summary when i think about the successes i've had all failures in the world of software it basically comes down to the team
And the realization that, yes, I'm supposed to be really good at what I do, whatever it is that I do in that particular company, but I'm never supposed to be better than any individual who works with me. And as an expedition leader or as a business leader, I'm effectively the secretary for the team.
My job is to check in on everyone, make sure that they're aligned and get rid of any obstacles in their way so that they can do the best jobs possible. which I think is a very different attitude to the sort of gung-ho, lead from the front attitude. Don't get me wrong. I think that's important.
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Chapter 7: What mindset does Chris adopt as a leader to support his team?
It's about being a servant for a team that where each team member in their respective domains is a much better performer than you are and enabling them by guiding the direction of the whole.
You are a servant leader. You are the type who wants to make others shine. If you can help your team members grow to become better people, better leaders, better managers, then you are the silent force behind their success.
Look, I have ego and I failed more than I've succeeded. So I think it's a goal. I don't know if I'm a good leader, but I'm trying to be and introspective about it. I don't think the factor of being a leader is being a servant. There are many cases where you as a leader have to build a kind of myth around yourself. You have to be something that people aspire to be toward or to be like.
You have to demonstrate qualities, the best qualities that maybe they see in themselves. You have to exemplify that. But those qualities don't necessarily mean obviously beating everyone else at their own game. Those qualities could be patience, wisdom, experience, humility, strength, ruthlessness. This is an underrated one, I think.
Every one of your team members trusts you not to make the best decisions for each of them individually, but to make the best decision for the expedition as a whole, right? This is a typical lesson you learn as an expedition leader. You're not there to make everybody individually happy. You're not an adventure tour guide, let alone just a regular tour guide.
You're there to achieve a particular goal. That's what expeditions, that's what sets expeditions apart from tourist holidays, right? They have specific goals, typically scientific goals.
or attainment goals, you try to do something for the first time, and everybody should walk into this experience understanding that they're walking into the unknown, and that ultimately, they're going to have to trust one person who will make decisions, perhaps against your own interests, maybe with you, but incidentally, but overall, contributing to the final goal.
And I think this analogy is particularly important when it comes to low performers in the business world, by the way. Which is that too often I've seen great leaders in every other sense who go this particular person's maybe dragging their feet a bit or is lagging a bit. But you know what?
The team performance overall is so strong that we can just basically mask that and I can avoid an awkward conversation. The expedition world has taught me that you nip that in the bud as soon as you sense that, right? Whether it's with a particular plan or just understanding what's going on, you need to address that almost immediately.
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