Enlarge

I'm not the first blonde to find herself standing with eyes closed in an office in Beverly Hills, eager to be manipulated by a Hollywood executive. "Hold out your hands," says Jeff Skoll, founder of Participant Productions, the film company behind Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana, and An Inconvenient Truth. "Now, imagine that your right hand is holding a heavy book. Your left hand is attached to a helium balloon." When I open my eyes, my hands are about six inches apart--a hypnosis test indicating some, but not extreme, suggestibility.

Former eBay president, Forbes's 114th richest man, and an internationally lauded philanthropist, Skoll has also been an amateur hypnotist for almost 20 years. He first picked up an old paperback on the subject while backpacking around the world after college; his first subject was a girl in an Australian youth hostel. The hobby turns out to be unexpectedly revealing of the man: Defiant of cynics and skeptics, a little goofy, mysteriously focused, and possessed of undeniable influence, Jeff Skoll wants to change your mind.

If Skoll's life ever becomes an inspirational biopic a la Gandhi, one of his favorite films, the opening credits will roll over a montage like this: Toronto boy with his nose stuck in The Fountainhead and Brave New World, young man strolling under the oaks at Stanford business school, 31-year-old sitting in the living room of a group house writing the first business plan for eBay, 36-year-old retiring in 2001 with a personal fortune now estimated at $5 billion. His short tech career was followed by an equally brilliant entry into philanthropy. The $600 million Skoll Foundation, with its Skoll World Forum and Skoll Centre at Oxford's Said Business School, stands at the heart of the social-entrepreneurship movement, which combines the best of the business and nonprofit worlds. The foundation's mission is to fund innovators who are tackling the world's biggest problems--from housing AIDS orphans in Africa to developing new drugs for infectious diseases--with a self-sustaining approach.

For the past few years, though, Skoll has yielded control of the foundation's day-to-day operations as he pulled up stakes from Silicon Valley to Southern California to conquer yet another industry. "When I started this, I kept hearing the same phrase over and over: 'The streets of Hollywood are littered with the corpses of people like you who think they're going to come to this town and make movies,'" Skoll recalls with a crooked grin. "It was almost like, Is that written somewhere? Because it was literally word for word."

Participant Productions is the first film company to be founded on a mission of social impact through storytelling. But it's no charity. It's a pro-social commercial operation, a hybrid emblematic of the social-entrepreneurship movement. "Ultimately, the goal here is to build a brand around social relevance in media," Skoll says. He staked the company $100 million for its first three years; every script is evaluated equally on its creative and commercial potential and its ability to boost awareness of one of six issues: the environment, health, human rights, institutional responsibility, peace and tolerance, and social and economic equity. For each project, Participant execs with nonprofit backgrounds reach out to public-sector partners, from the ACLU to the Sierra Club, for their opinions. If those partners don't think they can build an effective action campaign around the film, it's a no-go. At the same time, "It can't be good-for-you spinach, or it's not going to work," says Participant's president, Ricky Strauss, a former production and advertising exec at Columbia and Sony Pictures Entertainment. "The more mainstream the story, the more opportunity to make an impact."