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That’s what makes Michael Dell and the United Nations Foundation such a strange but compelling pairing.

Starting this month, Dell, the billionaire CEO who founded his namesake company with $1,000 at age 19, will serve as the Global Advocate for Entrepreneurship for the UN Foundation, the nonprofit organization that raises money for and works closely with the UN on its priorities. It’s part of both group’s efforts to encourage more entrepreneurship around the world in order to create jobs, foster local economies, and mobilize ambitious people to tackle society’s biggest challenges.

“Part of what we’re trying to do is sort of raise entrepreneurship to the level of the public policy agenda,” says Dell. “If you look at what’s going on in the world today, in terms of where jobs are being created, all of the technological change that’s out there, the pace of advancement, we need more entrepreneurs. We need more risk-taking,” he says.

The role came about as the United Nations works to complete the Millennium Development Goals–which are supposed to be completed in 2015–and then agree upon new international development priorities for the coming decade. In the first-ever global citizen survey conducted by the UN to gather citizen input on these questions, the goal of “job creation” ranked among the top four priorities from respondents around the world, says Elizabeth Gore, the UN Foundation’s current resident entrepreneur.