Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Latest Episodes:

419: The GK Fund with Michael Benezra Apr 21, 2022

Show notes

Michael Benezra is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the GK Fund: a nonprofit social impact fund to support BIPOC-owned companies in Greater Boston. Michael also serves as the COO of Colette Phillips Communications, helping to lead the All Inclusive Boston tourism campaign, among other projects. Chad talks with Michael about being a BIPOC ally, disparities amongst the VC world, and how the GK Fund looks for the same things in BIPOC-owned companies that they look for in other companies because the innovation is there; it's just that the opportunity isn't. The GK Fund Follow The GK Fund on Twitter or LinkedIn. Colette Phillips Communications All Inclusive Boston Black Owned Bos. Follow Michael on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Michael Benezra, Executive Director and Co-founder of the GK Fund, a non-profit social impact fund to support BIPOC-owned companies in Greater Boston. Michael is also the COO of Colette Phillips Communications, helping to lead the All Inclusive Boston Tourism Campaign, among other projects. Michael, thank you for joining me. MICHAEL: Thanks for having me. CHAD: I'm curious about the GK Fund. When did you start the Fund? MICHAEL: So, at the time, I was working for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and I was working with venture capital firms, private equity firms. And I was representing over 200 Israeli companies in New England, most of them startups. And my wife is Black; my family is Black. I've been close to that community for a long time. And especially in the venture capital world, I started to see some real disparities amongst other disparities in general everyday life, but it was particularly bad in the VC world. And so Colette being a mentor and a friend of mine, Colette Phillips, I approached her, and I said, "Hey, what do you think about starting this fund, this non-profit fund?" And her and Andre Porter, who is our other co-founder who used to be the head of the state's business development agency in Massachusetts, we all decided to band together and start this non-profit. Now, we started the non-profit in December of 2019, so the pandemic hit right as we were creating this organization. And we had a decision to make, do we put this on hold, or do we move forward and accelerate? And we decided to just move forward. CHAD: Well, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you made that decision. Hopefully, you feel the same way. [laughs] MICHAEL: Yeah, I do. CHAD: You're absolutely right. There's a big need here. And I actually have had over the last two months or so a few different guests that are creating VC funds or funds of certain kind that address underrepresented communities, Black, another one was veterans. And there's such a big need. How did you decide what you were going to focus on or focus down into so, for example, focusing on Boston? MICHAEL: For Boston specifically, it had to do mostly with proximity. So I went to Harvard here for grad school. I worked for Governor Patrick. And so, for me, it was natural to stay local, especially during COVID. In my experience, there were a lot of BIPOC, particularly Black-owned startups, that were on paper akin to a lot of other startups in the Israeli world, which were very developed or also in the United States. I'll give you an example; there was a company that I worked with that had a $100 million valuation but had no products, no physical products. They had no revenue, but they had innovation. Now, you and I being very honest, do you think a Black-owned company could get away with that? CHAD: Yeah, no. MICHAEL: There is no way. I knew that; the other entrepreneurs that I've talked to know that. That is a terrible double standard that needs to be fixed. So we look for the same things in BIPOC companies that we look for in other companies because, for the most part, the innovation is there; it's just that the opportunity isn't. CHAD: Yeah. To dig into that a little bit more, I think one might say, well, if they had a founding team that had a proven track record, then maybe. And that's where you get to the fact that it's systemic, too, because if the headwinds are there where they can never get that experience, to begin with, they never get that opportunity, to begin with, then they're not going to have a founding team that has a track record that will be invested in based on just the team. MICHAEL: That is 100% accurate, but it's actually even worse. So we do not ask our founders in the application process for their educational background. But all six of the companies that got grants from us last November they all have their bachelor's, four out of six have masters or higher. And so the cream definitely rose to the top. We had a store owner she owns an online boutique who got an engineering degree from Purdue. And we also have an entrepreneur who was an attorney at State Street, a corporate attorney, and now he's created this startup. And so, in some cases, like in most other areas, these individuals are overqualified. CHAD: So, what is the funding model for GK on both sides of the equation? Where is the money coming from, and then how are you funding the companies? MICHAEL: So we raise money organically like any other non-profit does. So we apply for grants. We take corporate donations. We take individual contributions online. Most of our money so far has come in through corporate contributions. So PNC Bank has been with us since the beginning. They made a very large commitment to supporting racial equity, and they've really stuck to it. The Bar Foundation has been exceptional. And then we've also had a group of individual donors who were actually White women who have started their own non-profit now, and they've also banded together to give us money that we need to re-grant to the companies. We have over 100,000 from the State of Massachusetts to operate a grant program. So money is coming through a number of different avenues. We've issued six micro-grants so far at $10,000 each. We did that in November. We plan to do ten more in the next month. I said in the Boston Business Journal article you can give us money, but you can't park it with us like you could with a donor-advised fund and watch it accumulate interest for 15 years. We're going to take it, and we're going to give it to the people that need it the most. CHAD: And are they grants then? You're using the word grants, so I assume that they are. So you're not doing this in exchange for equity in the companies? MICHAEL: No, no equity in the companies, no convertible notes, just a straight capital grant directly to the company. So I send a message over to our fiscal sponsors at Philanthropy Massachusetts. They send the check directly over to the company. After that, we have the company fill out a survey letting us know what they plan to use it for, but we're not overly prescriptive. And that's actually the way that philanthropy is heading right now is, putting fewer restrictions and barriers in the way. And that's another thing I'll talk about as well is making it easier for companies to gain access. CHAD: So, did you ever consider more of a traditional VC fund model with this? MICHAEL: Yeah, originally, I did. Before the pandemic, actually, I did. So the original purpose or impetus of the fund was to take companies that were coming out of accelerator programs that were underfunded. You have some great accelerators, but you have companies leaving with a business plan and $2,000. In some cases, there are companies that have been through three accelerator programs. They're not getting as much out of it as they should. I wanted us to intervene, find the companies that have the most potential, and make investments. But after COVID hit, it was a crisis. And so, we needed to shift our focus to philanthropy. CHAD: The nice thing about that is then you can do those grants with basically no strings attached for the companies. Whereas if you were taking money from people who expect to get a return on that investment, you wouldn't be able to do that. MICHAEL: That's exactly right. There are organizations out there that say that they're making an impact when in reality they're just making, you know, loans which is not a not a bad thing. But they're issuing loans, or they're taking equity in the companies, that's fine, but it's not what we're doing. CHAD: What are your plans for, like, upcoming? Are you going to be continuing with micro-grants, or do you have bigger plans? MICHAEL: We have bigger plans. So I can't say too much right now because we have an announcement coming up. But I will say issues like legal services have come up. There's a constant need for attorneys for any company, whether it's contracts, or locking down real estate, or copyright and trademark, or IP. We are working with a very large prestigious law firm that's really making a generous commitment to our companies. And this would involve us even adding free legal services for an entire year to our grantees. So that's one thing that we're planning to do. And then the other is, and this another function of the fund, is we speak with organizations like Lyft who's donated like $5,000 in ride credits that we're giving to our grantees or Wix, which has given us like 75% off of websites. We work with partners who can also give us other services that we can provide to these companies to try to get them closer to where there's a gap. Giving them capital is not enough. The disparities are too significant. We also partnered with Berkshire Bank, so I can make direct referrals for loans if they need them. But the idea is to really narrow that gap and give these companies the same opportunities that their White counterparts have. CHAD: That's great. So you, as someone who's White doing this work, how do you find yourself in the community? How do you be an effective ally and advocate? MICHAEL: For me personally, my connection personally through my wife and also through my family and my boss. Colette is a pioneer. She's a Black woman in Boston who moved here not knowing anybody. And 30 years later, she's on The Power of 50 and 100 influential lists, but she did that through hard work. And she's worked much harder, I think, than she would have had to if she weren't a woman from Antigua who came here on her own. But ultimately, as an ally, it's my role; it's our role to step in between situations where there's inequity. So if there is a company, one of our companies, for instance, who's having a problem locking down real estate, (I think I use this in the article.), and they're saying, "Well, the real estate agent is telling us they can eliminate our lease at any time they prefer which I know is basically legal." I'll call them up and say, "Look, I'm with the fund. We're backing this company; we support them. What's the situation?" And unfortunately, most of the time, the outcome actually changes. So it's a matter of almost you got to be proactive, and you got to be intentional. You have to use your privilege in the best way that you can. So I think that's how you do it. And then, when it's time to shed a light on these companies, you take a step back, so it's not my role to go out there and promote myself. If anyone asks me, I'm always promoting the companies. So the best thing we can do is be advocates. You can be out front, but at the end of the day, it's about uplifting them, these companies in this case. CHAD: Yeah, that's great. Speaking of that, I was going to ask you, what are some of the companies that you have given the micro-grants to, and do you know how they use them? MICHAEL: Yeah, so we gave our grants to six companies. One is called MustWatch, and MustWatch is founded by Che, and Che, his family, is from Haiti. They are an app. You can actually find them on the App Store. But what they do is they allow you to log in, select which movies and television shows that you watch, and share them with your friends. And it sounds like a very simple concept, but there is actually nothing on the market that allows you to do this. And the idea is that you're collecting data while you're doing this as MustWatch. So at the end of the day, if you have a sample of like 20,000 users on the platform, you gain a lot of valuable insight and data. And that data can be useful for Nielsen or the television networks or movie production studios. I encourage people to sign up for MustWatch because if you spend as much time as I do looking for good movies, you're probably miserable. CHAD: [laughs] MICHAEL: [laughs] I spend so much time doing that. We also have a few online retailers. So we have B. Royal Boutique and So Zen Spa, both of them have doubled their revenue during COVID. They originally had stores. They pivoted during COVID, went online, and really were excellent when it comes to branding and marketing on social media and on other digital platforms. So they've been very successful. We have a company called Black Owned Bos., which is pretty well known here in Boston. They basically focus on organizing and running pop-up shops. And Jae'da, who's the head of the company, is just, I mean, she's a business mastermind. She's brilliant, always finding new ways to innovate. And then we have Our Village, which is focused on community development and housing. And finally, sySTEMic flow, which is a company that helps school districts, educators support Black women in STEM and STEAM fields. So we looked for companies that could pivot, basically. CHAD: And you mean in the face of the pandemic. MICHAEL: In the face of the pandemic, we looked for companies that had success and had a plan and also knew their audience. The main things that we look for…and I should say this too; our application process takes an average of seven minutes. And the way that I did that was I evaluated over 20 accelerator applications. I did a comparative analysis and identified the questions that were either irrelevant or unhelpful for us. And that gave us a very short application for our companies but one that's really efficient. And basically, what we're looking for is companies that have a good business model, have a very specific customer base and target market, and have a strong founder, and also has been undersupported. There are companies that we've identified for our next cohort that by this point in their development would have been venture funded in my experience, at least, had they not been people of color. Mid-Roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing…

Full show notes at the publisher

418: Aitomatic with Christopher Nguyen Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

Christopher Nguyen is the CEO of Aitomatic, which provides knowledge-first AI for industrial automation. Chad talks with Christopher about why having a physical sciences background matters for this work, if we have artificial intelligence, why we still need people, and working in knowledge-first AI instead of knowledge-second, knowledge-third, or no knowledge at all. Data reflects the world. Aitomatic Follow Aitomatic on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow Christopher on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Christopher Nguyen, CEO of Aitomatic, which provides knowledge-first AI for industrial automation. Christopher, thanks for joining me. CHRISTOPHER: Thank you. CHAD: So I was prepping for this interview, and I noticed something that jumped out at me that we have in common, and that is your first computer was the TI-99C/4A. CHRISTOPHER: No kidding. CHAD: And that was also my first computer. CHRISTOPHER: Oh, okay. CHAD: [laughs] CHRISTOPHER: You got no storage, correct? CHAD: No storage; everything was off of the solid-state disks. And I remember I was a little late to it. My parents actually got it for me. I think I was 9 or 10. And my parents got it for me at a garage sale. And so all I had was the manual and the basic manual that came with it. And because it had no storage, I needed to type in the programs that were in the back of that book from scratch, and there was no way to save them. So you would type them in -- [laughs] CHRISTOPHER: Oh my God. Every single day the same code over and over again. And hopefully, you don't turn it off. CHAD: [laughs] Exactly. There definitely were times where it would just be on in my room because I didn't want to lose what I had spent all day typing in. CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, yeah, I remember my proudest moment was my sister walked into the living room...and there was no monitor, and you connected it directly to the TV. CHAD: To the TV, yeah. CHRISTOPHER: And younger people may not even know the term character graphics, which is you pick in your book the character space, and then you put them together into a graphic image. And I painstakingly, on graph paper, created a car and converted it to hex and then poked it into these characters and put them together. And my sister walked in like, "Oh my God, you made a car." [laughter] CHAD: That was a good time. It was difficult back then. I feel like I learned a lot in an environment where I see people learning. Today it's a lot more of a complicated environment. They're much higher up the stack than we were back then. And, I don't know, I feel like I actually sort of had it easy. CHRISTOPHER: Well, in many ways, that very abstraction to...you see jobs like to talk about higher software abstraction to make you more productive. I think it's absolutely that powerful. And Marc Andreessen, my friend, likes to talk about how software is eating the world. But it turns out there's one perspective where people have gone up the stack a little too far, too fast, and too much. We're still physical in the industry that I work in. You know, our previous company was acquired by Panasonic. And I've been working on industrial AI for the last four and a half years. And it's very hard for us to find people with the right physics or electro engineering background and the right science understanding to help automate and build some of these systems because everybody's in software now. CHAD: Why does physical sciences background matter for this work? CHRISTOPHER: Let me give you a couple of examples. One example is one of our customers is a very large global conglomerate doing marine navigation and marine sensors. And one of the products they do is fish finding so that amateurs like you and me would go hold one of these systems and shoot it down straight to the ocean. A sonar beam goes down, kind of like submarines. But hopefully, an image would come back. And so to build a system to convert all of that into something other than jumbled what they call echograms, maybe convert to a fish image, you have to build a lot of machine intelligence, AI, machine learning, and so on. But just to understand the data and make the right decisions about how to do that, you need to understand the physics of sound wave echoes in the ocean. If you can't do that and you got to work with another engineer to tell you how to do that, it really slows things down a lot. So knowing the equation but also having a physical intuition for how it all works can make or break the success of an engineer working on something like that. Another example is we worked on avionics. Don't blame me for this, but if you have had poor experience with Wi-Fi on a plane, we may be involved in one way or another, Panasonic Avionics. CHAD: [laughs] CHRISTOPHER: But the antenna array that sits on top of the plane to receive satellite signal and sends out a signal, so you can expect there's some kind of optimization involved. It's not just line of sight. If there's a cloud coming nearby, then there's some distortion, and there's some optimization needed to take place. Again, an understanding of...at least if you remember, if not an expert in college physics, about antenna radiation pattern and so on, which help tremendously a data scientist or an engineer working on that problem whereas somebody who's a pure computer scientist would struggle a lot and probably give up with that problem. CHAD: Yeah, this may be a little bit of a facetious question or leading question; I'm not sure which, but if we have artificial intelligence, why do we need people to do this stuff? CHRISTOPHER: [laughs] Well, I have a broader, you know, I've thought about that a lot. And I'll answer it in the broad sense, but I think you can specialize it. The problem with machine learning, at least today and I really think for a very long time for the rest of the century at least, is that it is trained on data. And data is past examples. And when I say past, I include the present. In other words, whatever it is that our algorithms learn, they learn the world as it is. Now, we're always trying to change the world in some way. We're always trying to change the world to what we wish it to be, not what it is. And so it's the humans that express that aspiration. I want my machine to behave better in some way. Or I want my algorithms not to have this built-in bias when it makes a decision that affects someone's life. If it's pure machine learning and data, it will indeed reflect all the decisions that have ever been made, and it'll have all those built-in biases. So there's a big topic there to unpack and who's responsible for doing what. But I think coming back to your question, we'll always need humans to express what it is that is the world that you want in the next minute, the next day, the next week, or the next 50 years. CHAD: So let's talk more about the ethics or the biases that can be baked into AI. How do you prevent that at Aitomatic? CHRISTOPHER: As I said, this is a big topic. But let me begin by saying that actually, most of us don't know what we mean when we say bias, or to put it more broadly, we don't agree on the meaning. The word bias in colloquial conversation always comes with a negative connotation on the one hand. On the other hand, in machine learning, bias is inherent. You cannot have machine work without bias. So clearly, those two words must mean something slightly different even though they reflect the same thing, the same underlying physics, if you will. So first, before people get into what they think is a very well-informed debate, they must first agree on a framework for terms that they're using. Now, of course, I can accommodate and say, okay, I think I know what you mean by that term. And so, let's take the colloquial meaning of bias. And when we say bias, we usually mean some built-in prejudice, it may be implicit, or it may be explicit that causes a human or machine to make a decision that discriminates against someone. And here's the thing, we've got to think about intent versus impact. Is it okay for the effect to be quote, unquote, "biased" if I didn't intend it, or it doesn't matter what my intent was, and it's only the impact that matters? That's another dimension that people have to agree or even agree to disagree on before they start going into these circular arguments. But let's focus on, for now, let's say it's the impact that matters. It doesn't matter what the intent is, particularly because machines, as of present, there is no intent. So, for example, when the Uber vehicle a number of years ago hit and killed a bicyclist, there was no traceable intent, certainly not in the system design to cause that to happen. But yet it happened, and the person did die. So coming back to your question, I know that I've neglected the question because I'm unpacking a lot of things that otherwise an answer would make no sense, or it would not have the sense meant. So coming back, how do we prevent bias as an effect from happening in our system? And an answer that I would propose is to stop thinking about it in terms of point answers; in other words, it's not that...people say...well, myself I even said earlier it's in the data. Well, if it's in the data, does that absolve the people who build the algorithms? And if it's in the algorithms, does that absolve the people who use it? I had a conversation with some friends from Europe, and they said, "In America, you guys are so obsessed with blaming the user." Guns don't kill people; people kill people. But I think to answer your question in a very thoughtful manner; we must first accept the responsibility throughout the entire chain and agree on what it is the outcome that we want to have, at least effect. And then the responsibility falls on all chains, all parts of the chain. And one day, it may be, hey, you got to tune the algorithm a certain way. Another day may be, hey, collect this kind of data. And another day, it might be make sure that when you finally help with the decision, that you tweak it a certain way to affect the outcome that you want. I think what I've described is the most intellectually honest statement. And somebody listening to this is going to have a perspective that disagrees vehemently with one of the things I just said because they don't want that responsibility. CHAD: I like it, though, because it recognizes that we're creating it. It may be a tool, and tools can be used for anything. But as the creators of that tool, we do have responsibility for...well, I think we have responsibility for what that is going to do, and if not us, then who? CHRISTOPHER: That's right. Yeah. But if you follow the debate, you will find that there are absolutists who say, "That's not my problem. That's the user, or the decision-maker, or the data provider. But my algorithms I have to optimize in this way, and it's going to output exactly what the data told it to. The rest is your problem." CHAD: So it strikes me in hearing you describe what's involved, especially at the state that machine learning is at now; it probably varies or what you are going to do specifically varies based on what you're trying to achieve. And maybe even the industry that it's in like avionics and what you need to do there may be different than energy. CHRISTOPHER: Yep, or more broadly, physical industries versus the plane falls out of the air, or a car hits somebody, somebody actually dies. If you get a particular algorithm wrong at Google, maybe you click on the wrong ad. So I really advocate thinking about the impact and not just the basic algorithms. CHAD: Yeah, so tell me more about the actual product or services that Aitomatic provides and also who the customers are. CHRISTOPHER: I think what we discussed is quite relevant to that. I think it does lead in a very real perspective directly into that. We do what's called knowledge-first AI. And that knowledge-first as opposed to knowledge-second and knowledge-third or no knowledge at all, there are very strong schools of thought that say, "With sufficient data, we can create AI to do everything." Data is reflecting the world. As I mentioned, it's in the past as it is, not as what we want it to be. When you apply it to some of the concrete things that we do, let's take a use case like predictive maintenance of equipment, you want to be able to save cost and even to save lives. You want to replace things, service things before they actually fail. Failure is very costly. It's far more costly than the equipment itself. Today, the state of the art is preventive maintenance, not predictive. Preventive means, let’s just every six months, every one year replace all the lights because it's too costly to replace them one by one when they fail. Lots of industries today still do what's called reactive maintenance, you know, fix it when it fails. So predictive maintenance is the state of the art. The challenge is how do you get data and train enough machine intelligence to essentially predict? And the prediction precisely means the following: can you tell me with some probability that this compressor for this HVAC system, this air conditioning system may fail within the next month? And it turns out machine learning cannot do that. CHAD: Oh, that's the twist. CHRISTOPHER: Exactly. [laughter] And I know a lot of people listening are going to sit up and say, "Christopher doesn't know what the hell he's talking about." CHAD: [laughs] CHRISTOPHER: But I really know. I really know what the hell I'm talking about because we've been part of an industrial giant. I'll tell you what machine learning can do and what it cannot do. What it can do is with the data that's available...the main punch line, the main reason here is that there are not enough past examples of actual failures of certain types. There's a lot of data. We're swimming in data, but we're not actually swimming in cleanly recorded failures that are well classified. And machine learning is about learning from past examples, except today, algorithms need a lot of past examples, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of past examples, in order for it to discover those repeating patterns. So we have a lot of data at places like Panasonic, Samsung, Intel, GE, all the physical industries, but these are just sensor data that's recording mostly normal operation. When a failure happens, that tends to be rare. Hopefully, failures are rare, and then they're very specific. So it turns out that what's called the labeled data is insufficient for machine learning. So what machine learning can do is do what's called anomaly detection. And that is look at all the normal patterns, and then when something abnormal appears on the horizon to say, "Hey, something is weird. I haven't seen this before." But it cannot identify what it is, which is only half of predictive maintenance because you have to identify what the problem is so you can replace that compressor or that filter. And it turns out humans are very good. Human experts are very good at that second part. The first improvement might be to say let's get machine learning to detect anomalies and then let's get human experts to actually do fault prediction. And after you…

Full show notes at the publisher

417: Hume AI with Alan Cowen Apr 07, 2022

Show notes

Dr. Alan Cowen is the Executive Director of The Hume Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to the responsible advancement of AI with empathy, and CEO of Hume AI, an AI research lab and empathetic AI company that is hoping to pave the way for AI that improves our emotional well-being. Chad talks with Alan about forming clear ethical guidelines around how this technology should be used because there is a problem in that the public is skeptical about whether technology is used for good or bad. The Hume Initiative is intended to lay out what concrete use cases will be and what use cases shouldn't be supported. Hume AI is built for developers to construct empathic abilities into their applications. The Hume Initiative Hume AI Follow Hume AI on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow Alan on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Dr. Alan Cowen, the Executive Director of The Hume Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to the responsible advancement of AI with empathy, and CEO of Hume AI, an AI research lab and empathetic AI company. Alan, thank you for joining me. DR. COWEN: Thanks for having me on. CHAD: That's a lot of words in that introduction. I'm glad I got through it in one take. Let's take a step back a little bit and talk about the two different things, The Hume Initiative and Hume AI. And what came first? DR. COWEN: So they were conceptualized at the same time. Practically speaking, Hume AI was started first only because it currently is the sole supporter of The Hume Initiative. But they were both conceptualized as this way to adjust two of the main problems that people have faced bringing empathic abilities to technology. Technology needs to have empathic abilities. If AI is going to get smart enough to make decisions on our behalf, it should understand whether those decisions are good or bad for our well-being. And a big part of that is understanding people's emotions because emotions are really what determine our well-being. The Hume Initiative addresses one of the challenges, which is the formation of clear ethical guidelines around how this technology should be used. And it's not because the companies pursuing this have bad intents; that's not the point at all. The problem is that the public is probably justifiably skeptical of whether this technology will be used for them or against them. And The Hume Initiative is intended as a way of laying out what the concrete use cases will be and what use cases shouldn't be supported. Hume AI is introducing solutions to the problem of how we build empathic AI algorithms. And the challenge there has been the data. So there have been a lot of attempts at building empathic AI or emotion AI, whatever you call it, basically ways of reading facial expression, emotion in the voice, and language. And there's been a few challenges, but most of them come down to the fact that the data tends to be based on outdated theories of emotion and/or it tends to be based on people's perceptual ratings of images largely from the internet or videos that are collected in more of an observational way without experimental control. And within those perceptual judgments, you see gender biases, sometimes racial biases, biases by what people are wearing, whether they're wearing sunglasses, for example, because people with sunglasses for some reason are perceived as being proud. [laughter] And the algorithms will always label people with sunglasses as being proud if you're training the algorithm that way. What you need basically is some way to control for people's identity, what they're wearing, get people's own self-reports as to what they're feeling or what they're expressing, and do it in a way that's somewhat randomized so that different people express a wide range of emotional behaviors in a wide range of contexts. And the contexts are somewhat randomized. So that's what we're doing with Hume AI is we're gathering that data, and it requires large-scale experiments to be run around the world. CHAD: In terms of the actual product that Hume AI is going to do, is it a standalone product? Or is it something that people building products will use? DR. COWEN: It's a developer product. It's built for developers to build empathic abilities into their applications. And so we are about to launch a developer portal, and we have a waitlist on our website on hume.ai for that. In the meantime, we've been licensing out the models that we're training and the data that we're using to train those models, which I actually kind of view as somewhat interchangeable. Models are basically descriptions of data. Some people have the resources to train those models on-premise; some people don't. But we're providing the solution to any developer who wants to build the ability to understand, for example, vocal expression into, say, a digital assistant. So can the digital assistant understand when you're frustrated and be able to change its response based on that information? And even potentially update the actual network, the neural network that's being used to generate that response, actually, backpropagate the fact that this was an unsatisfactory response and make the algorithm better. Is this something that you could use for health tech? So people are building out telehealth solutions that incorporate AI in various ways, one of which is can we get an objective classification of emotional behavior that can be used to help triage patients, send them to the right place, put them in touch with the right help? Can it be used to sub-diagnose disorders, diagnose disorders with more statistical power? Because you can incorporate more data and develop better treatments for those disorders, and that can be done in a wide range of contexts. CHAD: So you mentioned training AI models. I don't want to make the assumption that everyone knows what that means or looks like. Maybe if we could take a step back, if you don't mind, talk about what that maybe traditionally looks like and how Hume is actually different. DR. COWEN: Yeah, totally. When it comes to empathic AI, so this is an area where you're trying to train an algorithm to measure facial movements insofar as they have distinct meanings or measure inflections of the voice while people are speaking to understand the non-verbal indications of emotion in the voice. When you are training an algorithm to do that, you're taking in images, video, audio, and you're predicting people as attributions of emotion to themselves or to others and what people are feeling or what people say they're expressing or what other people say they hear in an expression. You need a lot of data for that. Traditionally, people have used smaller datasets and assumed that emotion can be reduced to a few categories. That's been one solution to this problem. And so basically, you'll have people pose facial expressions of anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise, which are called the basic six emotions. And that was introduced by Paul Ekman in the 1970s. And there are whole datasets of people posing those six expressions or perhaps combinations of them. And usually, those facial expressions are front-lit and front-facing and meet certain constraints. And when you train a model on that data, it doesn't tend to generalize very well to naturalistic expressions that you encounter from day-to-day for a lot of different reasons; one is that the six basic emotions only capture about 30% of what people perceive in an expression. Another is that people in everyday situations have a wide range of lighting conditions, viewpoints, et cetera. And there's more diversity in age, gender than you see in these datasets and in ethnicity and so forth. And so, these algorithms don't generalize. Another approach is to get ratings of data from the internet. So there, you're not creating the dataset for this specific purpose. You're just scraping as many facial expressions or recordings of voices as you possibly can, maybe from YouTube. That's one way to scale up. That's one way to capture a much greater variety of naturalistic expressions. But then you're gathering ratings of these images. And those ratings are influenced not just by what somebody is expressing but also by somebody's gender, ethnicity, age, and what they're wearing, and so forth. CHAD: Well, in those scenarios, a person has also classified the image, to begin with, right? DR. COWEN: Yeah. CHAD: So someone is labeling that image as angry, for example. DR. COWEN: So typically, you're scraping a bunch of videos. You're giving them to raters typically from one country. And those raters are categorizing those images based on what they perceive to be the expression, and there are a lot of influences on that. If somebody is wearing a sporting outfit, and this is a hard bit of context to cut out, you can generally infer this person is likely to be expressing triumph or disappointments or all the different things people express when they're playing sports. And it's very different if somebody's wearing a suit. And so, these different biases seep into the algorithm. We did train probably the best version of this kind of algorithm when I was at Google. And we used it to study people's expressions in other videos from around the world, mostly home videos. And we found that people form expressions in characteristic contexts around the world. And the relationship between context and expression was largely preserved. We were looking at 16 facial expressions we were able to label accurately. And this was probably with the best version of an algorithm trained in this way. But we still only captured about half of the information people take away from expressions because we had to throw away a lot of the predictions due to these biases. So that's how algorithms are traditionally trained. Another way that you could go about it is by training a large model, like a large language model, if you're looking at an emotional language and query it in a special way. So let's say you take a GPT-3 kind of model, and you say, "Hey, what are the emotions associated with this sentence?" And there, you see exactly the same kind of biases as you'd see in perceptual ratings because typically, it's saying what is likely to be in that data. So it might say, "Well, pigeons are disgusting, and doves are beautiful," or something like that. And that's the kind of bias we don't care about. But you can imagine there are a lot of biases that we do care about in that data too. [laughs] And so, what's needed is experimental control. And I think this is actually when it comes to the things we really care about, something that people should consider more often in machine learning. What are the confounds that exist in the data that you're training an algorithm on? And if you really care about those confounds and you want to be scientific about it, about removing them, what's the solution? Well, the solution is to somehow randomize what somebody is expressing, for example. And that's what we do at Hume. We actually gather data with people reacting, for example, to very strongly evocative stimuli, which could be images, videos, paintings, et cetera, music. And we have balanced the set of stimuli in a way that makes it richly evocative of as many emotions as possible. And then what somebody is likely to be experiencing in a given setting is randomized relative to who they are since they see a random set of these stimuli or they undergo a random set of tasks. And so, to the extent possible, we've removed some of the relationships between ethnicity, gender, age, and what somebody is experiencing, or what they're expressing. And so we do this in a lot of different ways. And one thing you do is you can train on basically what is the stimulus that somebody was looking at instead of training on somebody's perception of an expression. CHAD: Hopefully, talking through this a little bit has helped people, one, I guess, understand why this is difficult. And that's where the need for a product by a company that specializes in it is important because it would be pretty difficult for a company just getting started to be able to do this in a scientifically controlled way. And in a sense, it's sort of like pooling the resources behind one product to do it well, and that can really do it well. You recently raised money pre-seed from investors. How obvious was the need to them, and how easy or hard was it for you to raise money? DR. COWEN: I had been basically in this world for a long time before I started Hume AI and The Hume Initiative. So during grad school, while I was publishing a lot of this science that was showing people's expressions were much more nuanced than a lot of these datasets and algorithms had considered before, I was getting inbounds from tech companies. And so, I worked a little bit with some startups. I worked with Facebook. I worked with Google. And I had seen this problem from a lot of different perspectives and viewpoints already. The need for data was very clear. The need for algorithms was clear because people literally had reached out to me and asked, "What are the best algorithms?" And I had to say, "Look, there are a few things, but all of them have problems. And they're mostly focused on the face, and you won't see much for the voice. And you won't see much for language." And what I had trained at Google was not something that was publicly available for facial expression. What is available for language probably the best one is another dataset that I helped put together at Google and algorithms trained on that called the GoEmotions dataset, which is used by Hugging Faces emotional language algorithm. And so I knew that there was this need, and a lot of people were looking for this kind of data, and so that's where it started. So talking to investors, it wasn't too hard to show them all the evidence that there was a need for this, a big market. And we raised a $5 million pre-seed. What we have spent a lot of that so far is in data collection. And that's made a huge difference in training algorithms for facial expression, voice, language, and so forth. And then what turns out to be more of a challenge is delivering those algorithms to people. And we're actually building a platform, an API platform, for that that will be really helpful in getting people started. CHAD: As you took on investors who, you know, they're trying to build a business. They want to create a business that gives them a return. And as you move towards a product in the marketplace, what are the things that you've encountered that are the biggest concerns in terms of the success? DR. COWEN: There's a scientific and sort of almost educational challenge. I think people have been fixated on a few ideas about emotion for a long time; these really sticky ideas like you can reduce emotion to six categories or two dimensions. So even when people take these really nuanced and accurate models that we've trained to distinguish 28 different kinds of facial expression, much broader array of facial expressions or 24 different kinds of vocal expression in vocal utterances like laughs, and cries, and screams, and sighs, and 16 different kinds of speech prosody, typically, people will take these, and they'll take out a few emo…

Full show notes at the publisher

416: The ParentPreneur Foundation with James Oliver Jr. Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

James Oliver Jr. is the Founder and CEO of The ParentPreneur Foundation, which empowers Black ParentPreneurs so they can leave a legacy for their beautiful Black children. Chad talks with James about inspiring, encouraging, and supporting ParentPreneurs to lobby to try to close wealth inequality gaps, shoot their shot and send cold emails, and engage in a community that supports one another. Parents Making Profits The ParentPreneur Foundation Follow The ParentPreneur Foundation on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Follow James on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is James Oliver Jr., Founder, and CEO of the ParentPreneur Foundation, which empowers Black ParentPreneurs so they can leave a legacy for their beautiful Black children. James, thanks for joining me. JAMES: I'm super excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. CHAD: So I just said, in a nutshell, the tagline for ParentPreneur Foundation. I know it's a community that brings people together, Black ParentPreneurs together. How did you get started and see the need for this, and how did you actually then make it happen? JAMES: Oh boy, that's a great question with a semi-long answer, so just hang in with me, but I think it's a really compelling story. So back in 2013, (I'm from Brooklyn, New York) at the time, I was living in Northeast Wisconsin. It started in 2011. I was trying to build a startup called WeMontage, which was the world's only website to let you turn your digital images into removable photo wallpaper. CHAD: If you haven't seen it, by the way, you should look at it. That description that you gave, even though it describes it perfectly, I didn't realize until I went to the website and looked at the pictures exactly what it is and how remarkable of a product it is. JAMES: Well, I'm delighted that you say that. Thank you so much. And that's part of the reason why [laughter] it failed. I mean, it's still around. And I know we have a bunch of designers in the community. So look, the website still works. The underlying collage editing software is still brilliant, but the UI UX needs a lot of love. It's a bit of a zombie with about $10,000-$15,000 of technical debt floating around over there. [laughs] But the product still works. And we still print, ship them sometimes. And we have tons of repeat customers. It's just one of those things. You build a great product, and they will always come. But the product is still brilliant still today. So back then, I was a non-technical founder. I was out of money. I cleaned out my savings and living in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't exactly a bastion of technology startups or diversity, even for that matter. And I was fortunate to get into Gener8tor's...I think we were the second cohort. Back then, it was super early. We went to Madison. And right now, Gener8tor is killing it. But I was out of money. I was thankful to get into their Madison cohort, which was a two-hour drive away. My ex-wife now was pregnant with our twins. The kids were supposed to be born end of March. Gener8tor ended early April. So I was like, okay, this timing works out brilliantly. But a day or two before the program started, I had to deliver, and we had to deliver the twins prematurely. Otherwise, my son would have died. CHAD: Wow. JAMES: His blood just started to circulate backwards. It was crazy. So we had to take them out. They weighed two pounds apiece. Every time I tell this story, it gives me agita, man. The accelerator was a two-hour drive each way back and forth to the NICU, waking up at 2:00 a.m. every morning because I couldn't sleep. I cried every day. I had a really talented developer on my team, but he had his personal demons. So he was really unreliable. But he was a brilliant guy. He was so smart, really talented. But anyway, I got through the accelerator. Right before I was going on stage for demo day, I got a call from this angel that we pitched. We were raising $250,000 at the time, which really, in retrospect, was not nearly enough money. But I got a call. He said, "Hey, we're going to fill your round." I don't know. What does that mean? I don't take anything for granted. [laughs] What do you mean? "We're going to give you $250,000." And then I just dropped to my knees. I thanked God. And I cried because I had sacrificed so much to get to that point. Thankfully, my daughter came home after six weeks, and my son came home after ten weeks. The kids are doing fine. They drive me crazy, but they're beautiful. CHAD: [laughs] How old are they now? JAMES: They just turned 9 in January. So after I launched WeMontage, I hired just a really remarkable technical co-founder and just a great guy. We still have a wonderful relationship. We got in there, and when I started out, I was like, well, I'm going to start a blog. I started a blog, and I was like, one of these days, I'm going to use the content from this blog to write a book. CHAD: Before you move on, so in those early days, you had just gotten into the accelerator. You had this thing you needed to deal with with your family and delivering the twins. And did you ever consider dropping out of the accelerator at that point? JAMES: I wasn't going to go, but I knew with that decision, WeMontage never would have come to light because I just didn't have the resources to make it happen. But as a family, we decided that I need to go do that and crush that, and so I made that choice. We raised money. In retrospect, we raised just enough money to fail because, look, the software was cute. We were running around pitching angels. It was cute to show look at what we can do, look at what we could do. When we turned the thing on, it was so unsustainable. It was a black box. And I was on the phone literally with customers holding their hand to get them to place an order, and that was clearly unsustainable. So we made the decision that we need to fix this thing. We need to pull it apart, make it modular, stabilize the code, build on it. And by the time we got done with that, we only had a couple of months' cash left. And I remember...man, if anybody has never told you this to your face, I promise you it's a hard thing to hear. They were like, "We're not going to throw good money after bad." I'm like, well, damn. Like, thanks. We have our first Today Show appearance coming up here next month. So thank you for that. Thanks. [laughs] Man. CHAD: So you actually did go on the Today Show. JAMES: Yeah, we got featured three times on the Today Show. I mean, on my own without a publicist, I got Today Show three times, Good Morning America, Money Magazine, DIY, Martha Stewart, on and on. CHAD: I'm curious, after making an appearance like that, do your sales go up? JAMES: They do. They did with the Today Show. So it was funny, like that first appearance, they didn't even put the graphic on the bottom with the name of the business. When Mario mentioned it, he said, "wemontage.com." Man, our freaking website went crazy. It crashed the website. [laughs] But we were kind of already prepared for it to crash. We had a little splash screen up and information. We got it back up in; I don't know, it was less than an hour. But I spent literally all day getting back to those people. We gave them a coupon code. And we did about $15,000 that month from that one segment, which was great. That was our best month to date. I mean, all total, I've probably done $75,000 to $80,000 in sales from the three times we appeared on The Today Show. CHAD: That's great. We've had clients, or I've known people who have done appearances like that, and it seems a little bit hit or miss. Sometimes it won't even result in a blip, and other times it's huge. And I'm not sure what the trend is when it matters and when it doesn't. JAMES: This is the point: we all love these vanity things. We want to get exposure, exposure. So I have a really great relationship with Seth Godin, and he's a big supporter of the work I'm doing at ParentPreneur Foundation. He gives us scholarships to his marketing seminar, and he comes to visit with us sometime. The last time he talked about...he said, "Stop trying to do things to get attention. Spend your time getting your customers to tell their friends about your business." And that's a whole fact. We love the vanity, but at the end of the day, PR does not necessarily equal cash flow. I had some hits. I got on Good Morning America, and that was not nearly as good as the Today Show. But that was by virtue of the last-minute change that they made in terms of how they were producing the segment. When they introduced my product, they had the camera on somebody else's product. They had people calling me about somebody else's stuff which is like, are you serious? But what are you going to do? You can't control that. So yeah, those things are good. I will say that having that stuff on the landing page is good for credibility. People feel more comfortable, especially if they can see it. So that stuff matters to a point, but I wouldn't be spending a lot of time. I certainly would not be wasting a penny on a PR professional if I was a founder. I just wouldn't do it. All that stuff I rattled off I did on my own. CHAD: Awesome. So you started to build a blog. [laughs] JAMES: Yes. So the intention of that was to use that content to write a book to inspire ParentPreneurs around the world because it's hard being a parent and entrepreneur, especially if you're like early-stage scraping to get some revenue. You can't even talk about product-market fit yet. Can we make some money? [laughs] Can we make a buck? CHAD: So I've done a few things in my life. Writing books is one of them, and I can't say that it's easy. I don't know how you found it. I was doing it with a traditional publisher the first few times around, and it was pretty difficult. How did you find it? JAMES: So I self-published that book. And because of the way I approached it, I already had a bunch of content on my blog. It's funny; I was actually out of town. I was in Midland, Texas, because I got flown out there. I was on CNBC's version of Shark Tank, West Texas Investors Club, horrible experience, by the way. I swear if I ever go on another one of those shows, I'm going to bring the drama. CHAD: [laughs] JAMES: Piece of advice, for any of you guys listening, if you go on Shark Tank or any of those shows, do not leave it up to the creative people to tell a story about you. This is just me; I'm a little crazy, crazy like a fox. But you give them the story. So this is me and you talking, just the two of us. [laughs] If I go on Shark Tank or something like that, I'm not taking those people's money. They're going to be like, "Oh, well, you're just here clearly for the exposure." I'm like, well, so are you. You're doing it too. Why should I give you 20% equity in my company for $200,000 or whatever it is? How much time are you actually going to spend helping me build my company? And by the way, the people who came before you from an investment standpoint already took a ton of risk off the table. So why should you get that money? And how many companies are in your portfolio? 50? So, okay, so are you really going to be helping me or nah? Nah? Right. No, I'm good. CHAD: That'll definitely air. The producers will love that drama. JAMES: That will air, right? See what I'm saying? And the people watching will be like, "Hell yeah, you tell them. Let me Google that real quick." [laughter] CHAD: That's funny. JAMES: But that's just me. But I have no intention of going back on any of those shows again because, at the end of the day, it was a bad experience for me. I only got about $6,000 in sales, but that's because nobody was watching that show. It was canceled. But at the end of the day, if you have a customer acquisition problem which is what we had at WeMontage, those things don't solve your problems. They just don't. Not necessarily. They could; you could get lucky. But it's probably not going to solve your problem. CHAD: So I'm curious. So you wrote the book, and you focused on the concept of ParentPreneurs, Black ParentPreneurs specifically. JAMES: No, actually, so the book was just for everybody who's a ParentPreneur. So the book's called The More You Hustle, The Luckier You Get: You CAN Be a Successful ParentPreneur. So Mario Armstrong, who's my guy from the Today Show, wrote the foreword to my book. We're really good friends. And it's on Amazon. Some people have regarded it as the realest book of entrepreneurship they've ever read. It's unlike anything you ever read. It's the story of my journey, some of those things I just told you, and the up and down the back and forth. It will make you laugh, make you cry, make you wonder. You put it down, come back to it. There are some hard questions that I ask myself, and people read the book. It's a superfast read too. CHAD: Awesome. At what point did you decide to focus on empowering Black ParentPreneurs? JAMES: So that's a great question. So after I wrote the book, I had this idea. I said one day I'm going to sell WeMontage. And maybe it will happen. I don't know; if God can intervene, something could happen. Who knows? [laughter] It's just not likely at this point, and that's okay. But I was like, I'm going to sell this business. I'm going to take a million dollars of my own money and start a foundation for parents who are entrepreneurs because it's really freaking hard. It's so hard. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how hard that is. It's really hard. So then, in early 2020, the whole world falls apart with George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor. I had my own Karen experience here in my backyard. I live in a really nice neighborhood in the suburbs of Atlanta. And I had to call the police on her. After the second experience, I filed a trespass warrant. Then I started looking at all the Federal Reserve wealth inequality data. And I was like, I'm starting this foundation for Black ParentPreneurs because we need the help the most. We have got to try to close this wealth inequality gap. It's a big problem. I'm doing that. So now to answer your question, prior to that decision, so when I was going to Gener8tor, I met David Cohen and Brad Feld. They just popped up on a Google Meet to meet us. And these guys are co-founders of Techstars, which is one of the preeminent global startup accelerators. And I just stayed in touch with them through their blogs. I didn't want anything from them. I remember I got an email from Brad a couple years back. And he's a voracious reader. He's a prolific writer. He sent me an email out of the blue. He said, "I just read your book. I effing loved it." [chuckles] He said, "I got to feature it on my blog." I was like, wow, okay, dope. So he did that. And we sold some books, which was great. But so I reached out to Brad and David. I was like, "Hey, guys, I'm thinking about starting this foundation for ParentPreneurs in general." And they were like, "Yeah, I'm game. We can go back and forth with you about it," and which is amazing at that level those guys would be willing to do tha…

Full show notes at the publisher

415: Promenade with JT Liddell Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

JT Lidell is the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. Chad talks with JT about being a mission-driven, bootstrapped organization, the problems that he's encountered and hopes that Promenade solves, and aggregating people, tools, resources, and funding to make it happen. Promenade Follow JT on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel and with me today is JT Liddell, the Founder of Promenade, which seamlessly matches and connects military veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. JT, thank you so much for joining me. JT: No, thank you for having me. Excited to talk to you about what we're building over here and having this conversation. So thank you so much for having me on today. CHAD: I love mission-driven organizations, and Promenade falls right into that. How did it come about for you? JT: Yeah, this has been...the inception of it really truly began many, many years ago when I first joined the military straight out of high school. So I went to The Naval Academy, actually, started there then went to the army. Fast forward 7, 8, 9, 10 years, and as I was getting out of the military and trying to join the civilian workforce, the civilian world, that's where a lot of the problems and challenges that I'm trying to solve through Promenade started. And then, working in the technology space in corporate America really allowed me to identify some of the solutions and tools that I'm working with now. But to answer your original question, the beginning of Promenade or the inception of Promenade really began with my entry into the military. CHAD: What were some of the problems that you encountered and that you hope that Promenade solves? JT: Back in 2000...I left the military officially in 2010 but went straight into defense contracting work from there and worked there for a few years. And it was, as I was leaving, I went literally from Afghanistan, and 30 days later, I was sitting in an MBA classroom. And leaving Afghanistan, I thought there was literally no problem, no challenge...after going through three deployments to Afghanistan and being deployed to other parts of the world, I was like, there's nothing that I'm going to come against that I won't be able to tackle. That was the furthest from the truth. So there are a number of issues when it came to relationships, when it came to navigating the workforce, when it came to just understanding how drastically different the civilian world was from being in the military and the defense industry. So those problems are umbrellas, and there are many, many things underneath those that I came up against. CHAD: What are some of the ways that, you know, I speak as someone not having served in the military. What are some of the big ways in which civilian employment is different? JT: It wasn't even necessarily...well, obviously, there are huge differences obviously from the military and civilian employment. But it was really even like, how do you get entry into the civilian workforce just from the very beginning? So, how do you craft a resume? It seems like a minor thing at this point in my life, but it's a huge one. When you leave the military, you have these 9, 10, 11-page resumes. And that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to put literally every single piece of experience that you have on this resume. But when you come to the civilian world, you have to somehow condense all of that down to one page, and there's a science to doing that, and that was one of the first huge hurdles. Because a resume is just your ticket into the door, it's a ticket to that interview. That's just literally the first step. And that was something that I didn't realize was something I was going to have to hone my skill at. CHAD: Do you think that a lot of companies overlook the value of military service? JT: Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So it's hard to say overlook when as a military veteran just taking myself, for instance, you know, in a lot of ways, I was not communicating effectively what my experience was in relation to the value I could provide to that organization. So as a recruiter or a headhunter, whoever is doing that initial review, they're simply looking...for a large part, they don't have experience in the military. So they don't understand the jargon and what some of these different jobs really mean with the impact they had on their organization. So there's still a lot of meat in the middle here. So that individual needs to do a better job of communicating the exact value through a corporate sense how that value could contribute to corporate America or whatever type of organization they're trying to join. And organizations need to do a much better job of understanding that there's this untapped value in the military community and teaching and training their organizations or whoever is doing the intake process to look for the value that the military community can bring. So I don't think it's a one-sided thing. I think both sides need to come together and do a better job. CHAD: So I said in the intro that Promenade matches and connects veterans to the resources, people, and organizations that matter to them. What exactly does that look like in terms of the product today and what you're doing? JT: Yeah, absolutely. So this really began as a grassroots operation through my own ecosystem. Many, many years ago, when I was first getting in the military, and I was starting to get traction and understanding how to navigate the civilian world, I started to reach back. People would reach out to me, and I would reach back. And they would ask me, "How did you get here? How did you do that?" And I would just help people, review their resumes for them, get them connected to different jobs and career pathways. And then I started to do that a little bit more officially, if you will. And then, I realized this is not just a problem within my own ecosystem; this is a problem across the military community. So as I was working in technology, as I mentioned before, I started to identify tools, one of them being artificial intelligence, that could help me scale the work that I was doing. So the pathway that I started to set out on was how do I take this grassroots work that I'm doing, and then how do I scale that work to millions of people rather than just dozens of people? So that's the journey that I'm on right now. I don't know if that answered your question or not. CHAD: So if someone is listening and they're a veteran, what is the product going to offer them now? JT: So they'll come on, and they'll onboard to the platform. So essentially, we're just taking the process that we've been doing offline, and we're bringing it online. So they'll come on. They'll fill out some demographic information. They'll answer a few questions about where they are in their current post-military journey. They could even be thinking about getting out. The product will still help them as they're on their way out, thinking about getting out. They could have been out for a month, a year, an entire decade doesn't really matter. We'll help assess where they are in their post-military journey. After they go through that intake process, we'll give them the option to talk to one of our coaches, which can make this experience a little bit more personalized. And that's one of the huge things that I learned as I've been building Promenade is when I first started tackling this, thinking about tackling this issue through technology, I was like, okay, this technology these tools that I've identified and I've researched these are going to be the things that solve this problem. That's what's going to do this. No, that's what's going to fix this. [chuckles] And what I quickly realized is you can't remove that human component from this process. There are just things that technology doesn't understand about the military experience. So having a coach, having an individual or human to talk to at the very beginning of this process, or whatever that individual needs is extremely crucial and hugely beneficial to this process. So we put that coach in front of them. That's completely optional because we do want to allow this to be self-service and self-guided. So if they choose to get in front of that coach, they'll be able to talk one on one and augment this process. If they don't, they'll go straight to our dashboard. And what the dashboard will do is it's going to help that individual identify different areas within their post-military journey where they can improve and get better. And, Chad, we haven't talked about this, but we've got this social impact-driven product that we're building. But the lens that we're really thinking about this is through a healthcare lens. So what that means is there's this term called social determinants of health. And what that means is...the very simple version is a super simple concept. Every part of your life impacts your overall health. The health care system, like when you go to the hospital, only impacts 20%-30% of your overall health. The things that truly impact your health are things like, do you have a job? Have you talked to a therapist in the last six months? Do you have food, you know, the right type of food? Do you have access to the right type of food? Not just food. Are you ordering Burger King every day, McDonald's every day? But are you eating healthy food? And do you have consistent access? Those are the things that affect your overall health. So we look at all of these different factors about the veteran and how they're going through their post-military journey. And we give them a score on all these different verticals. So essentially, through that score, we're helping them identify what those gaps are, and then we're pushing them resources to help fill those gaps. So they'll get a couple of things through our platform. They'll get that dashboard and that score and personally recommended or personalized recommended resources to them, and that's where the artificial intelligence component comes into it. And then they'll have sort of a search field where they can just go and keyword for things just like they would go into Google and search for something. And then the third component to this is the community that we're building, and that won't be rolled out initially. But once we've got critical mass, we've got a community that we're building where they'll get connected to people within our community, maybe people with the same skills and interest, people that they were deployed with, people that they were stationed with, or people that they just came across. And we've got a method to do that. But that's really what it's about is bringing this community together, helping them assess where they are in their post-military journey, and then putting the right resources in front of them at the right time based on who they are. So that's the experience they'll get, to answer your question. CHAD: Awesome. Who pays for Promenade? JT: So it's going to be twofold. So there'll be a freemium model for the military veteran, so all those things that I just mentioned, minus one or two. They'll get free access to the platform. So they'll be able to log on. They'll be able to see where they're at in their journey. And they'll be able to navigate the platform and get those personalized recommendations. On the organizational side, they will also pay to access the platform. And then there's some other work...back when I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that organizations need to do a better job of understanding the military community, we help organizations better understand the military community, attract and retain military veteran talent if that's something that they're in the business of doing. So there are multiple ways to do it. CHAD: And organizations would pay for that. JT: That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. CHAD: Is that a significant or a fundamental part of the business model? JT: Which part? CHAD: The organizations paying. JT: Yeah, it is. So it depends on which part of interacting with the organization that we're talking about. So there are two ways we can do that. There's A, giving them access to the platform so just, for example, on the jobs portion, careers portion, recruiters. We'd give them access to the platform to get access to the talent. But on the let's help this organization think about how they're even reaching out to the veteran community, how they're recruiting them, the process that veterans are going through in order to apply to these organizations, once veterans are in these organizations, how are they supporting the veteran community? And maybe even after they've left, depending on which organization you're talking about, how are you supporting that veteran community once they've left so they can be...you want them to be ambassadors for your organization. How are you supporting the veteran community even after they've left? So that's two completely different ways that we can interact with the organization. The fundamental one would be those organizations getting access to our platform and interacting with the veteran community. That for sure would be fundamental to what we're building. CHAD: So who's funding Promenade right now? JT: [laughs] Yeah, that's a great question. So this is definitely up until maybe a year or so ago; it's definitely been bootstrap built for sure completely out of my pocket. But thanks to some of the visibility we were able to get, in the work we were able to do, organizations were able to get in touch. We've gotten a couple of grants, one huge one from Google for Startups last year. That was $100,000 from Google for Startups. That's been obviously huge for the work and the momentum. And what I always tell people is, you know, Chad, you've been doing this a while. [laughs] You know that $100,000 can get run through pretty quickly in the tech startup space. That was huge, and I don't want to downplay that by any means. But that wasn't even the biggest impact to what we're doing. It's just the visibility that it created for our organization. We've had just the veterans that we work with; we've had so many reach out just because they heard about us but organizations as well that have reached out to us. They want to work with us. They want to support us. That was huge. But to answer your question, it's a combination of grant money, cash awards from different organizations, and bootstrapping it from me JT here. CHAD: Well, thanks for doing that [laughs] and bringing this really important service to life. What are some of the barriers to achieving the success that you want to achieve with Promenade? JT: What we're doing is essentially we're aggregating information. We're aggregating people. We're aggregating tools and resources. We're bringing all this together. I didn't think it would be easy by any means. But it's definitely much harder than I imagined it would be when I set out in this journey a couple of years ago. One of the…

Full show notes at the publisher

414: Sagewell Financial with Sam Zimmerman Mar 10, 2022

Show notes

Sam Zimmerman is CEO and Co-founder of Sagewell Financial. Sagewell is building a banking platform for the needs of folks who are trying to retire and live off their savings and income as intelligently and as well as possible. Chad talks with Sam about deciding what their first product should be and what they would be bringing to market, finding the right partners, and minimizing risk to make a business and a product that works. Sagewell Financial Follow Sam on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Sam Zimmerman, CEO and Co-founder of Sagewell Financial. Sam, thanks for joining me. SAM: Thanks so much for having me, Chad. CHAD: I've been following along with Sagewell Financial for a little while now, given our cross-histories and the fact that we worked with a few companies that you've worked at in the past. So I'm aware of what Sagewell Financial is, but I'm not sure that all of our audience is. So I think a good place to start would be by giving folks a little bit of an intro into what Sagewell Financial is, and then we'll touch on the founding story and go from there. SAM: Awesome. So, in a sentence, Sagewell is building the digital banking that our parents deserve. To expand on that even more, America's retirees are a really interesting and important and powerful demo in American culture at large. There are 56 million Americans on a fixed income. And last year in venture capital, nearly $100 billion went to fund financial technology companies rewriting all of finance. And of that 100 billion or a little under, less than a fraction of a percent went to America's seniors. And so we are trying to build banking from the ground up for the needs of folks who are living on a fixed income who are in their golden years and aren't thinking about that new job or making new money. We're building a bank for folks who are trying to retire and live off their savings and their income as intelligently and as well as possible. And that looks really different than the bank that a millennial or a Gen Z user might have. CHAD: So that's really interesting. Right or wrong, what are the reasons that this historically hasn't been a target demographic for investment? SAM: So the prevailing assumption among venture capitalists was (We're changing that and hopefully changing that quite quickly.) was that retirees aren't open to changing. Beyond that, they're also not technically sophisticated. These folks don't know how to use a phone or aren't open to a bank that might not have any physical branch. They are set in their ways. They're not going to move branch, or they're barely going to watch a new TV show. A lot of folks who are trying to talk...imagining a grandma or a grandpa was really what the venture capitalists are drawing on often when they're thinking about why a senior wouldn't expect to have a bank with all the new features that the millennial might. CHAD: Well, that one is certainly changing, especially as the venture capitalists get older themselves. They probably realize that that's an outdated notion in terms of the technical aptitude or familiarity of that audience, right? SAM: Exactly. And it's a fascinating moment. There are 10,000 boomers who turn 65 each day in America, about 4 million folks each year. And those folks were about 40 whenever the.com boom passed. They've been using email. They have XE and PayPal. And importantly, why we're building this company now is that COVID changed seniors' digital lives more than anyone else. ARP reports how 70% of all American retirees know how to use Zoom and video conferencing software nowadays. Across the stack of digital goods and services, seniors were actually the group that was most moved online. And so, from where we sit as entrepreneurs, we saw a massive market, an exogenous effect creating a disproportionate opportunity. And so we began designing and iterating on and understanding our user to build a product that met those needs with this massive and growing market. CHAD: Banking is a highly regulated complex space. And I imagine from day one you're looking at that and saying, "Well, we might want to do everything eventually, but doing everything is going to be difficult." So what was the process you and your co-founder and the team around you used to decide what the first product should be and what you were going to bring to market? SAM: Our founding team spent almost nine months in user interviews and user research across what one director of finance at Capital One called geriatric finance. We talked to hundreds of folks, and a lot of our assumptions about what the simplest or most low-trust or quickest to use service might be were actually totally turned on their head in a really interesting way. Another reason why venture capitalists aren't so confident you can reach this demo is a couple of companies have come before us, and a lot of them followed, in financial technology, a Mint-like model where you log in, and you share your various bank credentials. They pull your credit card transactions and bank transactions. And one of the really surprising things in our hours of user interviews was that that model was really unpalatable to this demo. They actually thought it was a lot higher trust to share bank credentials than it was to actually open an account. And so we began thinking, what's the highest engagement, most common accessible feature that our demo is familiar with? And that's already broadly online. And let's start there. And the original insight came with a woman she was from Pennsylvania, and we were talking. We built this kind of mint.com-type prototype to try to help imagine banking for her needs without this high trust checking account. And she was like, "Oh." She was aghast that we were even considering asking for her bank credentials. We heard that, and then we said, "All right, no worries, no need to do this product demo." And then she was like, "But I really love Chime, and I really love Chime's checking account." And we were like, "Wait, you have a digital bank account?" And she's like, "Yeah, I love Chime." And it was this moment where thinking about our user, what trust meant to them, what was familiar to them, and what being online meant to them opened the floodgates and helped us really understand this user and what that first product needed to be. And so our initial product is a checking account. It's got a variety of senior-specific features around and enabling it. And it's built incredibly excessively to be available to folks who use technology in all sorts of ways. But we started with the basics because that's what our members are most familiar to and most expect. CHAD: So you say in the fine print on the website that Sagewell is a financial technology company and not a bank, and your banking services are provided by a partner. What was involved in actually bringing that online, finding the right partner, implementing the features? What did that look like? SAM: Yeah, it is an incredible time to be building any sort of banking in America around the world. So to that point earlier, $100 billion was pumped into financial technology companies. And so as a result, there are so many companies and so much innovation happening in banking and fintech broadly. And so starting and figuring out what vendor to work with was actually what our strategy from a banking and regulatory perspective was. And in turn, what vendors and in-house technology we needed to build was one of the hardest initial challenges that I've ever had to face in building a company. It is still, despite what many...you'll see a lot of ads, you know, "Have a card online in minutes." It is still in today's day and age quite an achievement to build banking and get it online, and servicing your customers in a scalable and sustainable way. And so we spent a lot of time early on in the architecture and vendor selection process and product strategy process thinking about what vendors to go with; what we were going to build in-house. And before ultimately breaking ground about three months after we began, we set the product itself, which was going to be a checking account for retirees. CHAD: What were the factors that went into choosing the partner that you ultimately chose? SAM: Beyond your standard enterprise vendor selection, we wanted to make sure that it was secure, and we wanted a specific set of features. In our space, there are about six different companies that provide what's called Banking as a Service technology. And so that was one of our key vendors is the technology company that works with the bank to allow us to open checking accounts, fund accounts. And most of those companies have been around for only a few years. And so their products themselves are hardening and being built. And about $200 million I would say has been invested in those companies last year. And so we wanted one that was well-capitalized. We wanted one that had not had any IT security issues. We wanted the underlying bank to be aligned in our mission. Retirees have a variety of specific financial needs. A lot of our product development involves working very closely with the bank. And so, we needed to make sure that the bank itself that they worked with was on board. And lastly, we talked to other customers, and that was ultimately the most valuable thing in our experience and not just the customers that they refer you to but the customers who have left for one reason or another. Those were the major factors that we chose in our Banking as a Service provider. And then, beyond that, that's one piece of the puzzle. In our bank tech stack, we're looking at around 15 different partners across all parts of banking. And that's the largest and most important one. And those were the criteria we used to select. CHAD: I often say when I'm looking at building a product or service, and we look at those integration points with external vendors, it is one of the riskiest parts of building a product because you're not in control of it. So from a business perspective, it's risky. But also, from a technology perspective, that's where estimates can get out of whack. And things can work not like you're expecting or like the documentation said or just surprises crop up along the way. Or when something goes down, your product is broken. And your entire product [laughs] basically is built on those vendor relationships. So, how do you minimize that risk and work in that environment to make a business that works and a product that works? SAM: [chuckles] I suppose the answer is with a lot of prudence, thoughtfulness, and care at a high level. CHAD: [laughs] SAM: I was actually just talking with a CTO friend of mine just talking about how in a lot of startups, one of the skills that I most ask of engineers and engineering leaders early on is vendor selection and how I hadn't seen an interview process that really helped get at that. It's a core part of a lot of technologists' jobs and particularly a lot of engineering folks' jobs. The API docs looked good but did he test it or evaluate it? Was there a third-party tool you could have used instead of building in-house? Those are the sort of questions that a lot of times early-stage startups are answering all the time. And I had yet to see an interview that got at that. So it's a really shrewd point and one that I hope that as technologists and particularly early-stage startups become more about really going deep in one area and then leveraging third parties elsewhere, I hope that we start actually hiring and developing criteria to do that with the people that we assemble. I think the first part what I would say is we described a little bit about the risks. We went through a risk mitigation exercise, which smells very enterprise-y. It's kind of the sort of thing that you would expect exists in some massive waterfall with a Jira board mainframe computer but just listing like, here's this integration. If this were to happen, what would we do? If the API went down, what control do we have, or how could we minimize the impact on our customers? That exercise across some of our biggest integrations helped us select and take on the risks we wanted and avoid the ones we couldn't. So there was a lot of conversation about the sorts of failures we could put up with and how we could put up with them, and the sorts of failures we couldn't. And then really testing for the ones we couldn't to make sure that we were making as good a choice as possible. Despite that thoughtful answer, it was the best we could do. I would say that, particularly in a space that's as fast-moving as Banking as a Service, I would say that a lot of it is still that soft skill, that relational conversations with other teams and folks and whether you trust the team that you're trusting to execute and build what they said they're going to build and that hiring skill but also a good bit of luck as well. CHAD: So correct me if I'm wrong, but up until Sagewell, where you're CEO, you had been CTO of the other companies that you founded and worked at. Is that right? SAM: Yeah, that's correct. CHAD: So, what has the change to being CEO instead of CTO been like for you personally? And was that choice clear from the beginning with Sagewell? SAM: So far, it's been incredibly rewarding. I would say in between startups; I actually volunteered at an organization called PathCheck. And while my title was CTO, the scope of that included partnerships, vendor negotiations, CISO exercises, product. It was a pretty expansive CTO role. And I found myself really energized by the breadth and the ability to work with even more really talented, thoughtful experts in their own domain and empower them to do more. And so I knew in my next role, I wanted more of that breadth. There's an essay that classifies folks as foxes who can do a little bit of everything or hedgehogs who can do one thing really well. And I'm a super fox. [laughter] I love doing lots of things. And so CEO to me is just like an opportunity to...it's maximizing breadth and maximizing difference of experience. And I transitioned, I'd say, from a normal CTO role to a beefy CTO role to making CEO a pretty natural step from there. CHAD: And your co-founder is named Jeff Wright, and he's the COO. How did you meet him and get started with Sagewell? SAM: Jeff and I, it's been wonderful. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get engaged in pandemic work in April of 2020 after leaving my last startup while it was being sold to Capital One. And I was talking with a founder friend of mine, a guy named Ty Harris, who is the CEO of an Insurtech company called Openly. And he was previously the CTO at Liberty Mutual. And Ty and I had a couple of lunches and conversations, and I was talking to him about how it is getting involved in COVID stuff and how I was ultimately my species as an entrepreneur, and I was going to be building something again. And he connected me with Jeff, and Jeff and I touched base quickly in April. And it was a little bit like a frog in the pot sort of situation where it started like, yeah, maybe we could build a company. Let's riff on some ideas and see what's out there. And it was a really, really natural progression from August to a couple of evenings, maybe…

Full show notes at the publisher

413: The Takeoff Institute with Brian Hollins Mar 03, 2022

Show notes

Brian Hollins is the Founder of the Takeoff Institute and Founding Managing Partner of Collide Capital. The Takeoff Institute is focused on equipping Black undergrads with the resources and mentorship they need to build a young professional career. Chad talks with Brian about providing students with necessary skills like etiquette and polish to break into Tesla and McKinsey-level companies and facilitating facetime, communication, and mentorship with other Black people within those companies who are at executive levels. The Takeoff Institute Follow Brian on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Brian Hollins, Founder of the Takeoff Institute and Founding Managing Partner of Collide Capital. Brian, thanks for joining me. BRIAN: Chad, I'm pumped to do this. Thanks for having me. CHAD: So you are obviously the Founder of the Takeoff Institute. So let's start there. Why don't we give folks a brief overview of what the Takeoff Institute is, and then we'll dive right in? BRIAN: Absolutely. Happy Black History Month. Let's start there. I'm a Black undergraduate student in the past, and I'm building something for Black undergraduate students today. So Takeoff Institute is focused on equipping Black undergrads with the resources and mentorship they need to build a young professional career. I was lucky enough to go to Stanford for undergrad and almost get thrown over the wall, if you will, by mentors and people that could advise me as I broke into my young professional career. And I, unfortunately, noticed that that wasn't the same for a lot of other folks. I ran diversity recruiting at Goldman Sachs for a few years and just saw some of the mistakes and little things that people who don't have advisors, people who don't have mentors, people who don't have an older brother in private equity. I saw the mistakes they were making and knew I wanted to build something to help bridge that gap. So we focus on providing the types of things that I think you need to break into a Goldman Sachs or a Tesla or a Facebook or a McKinsey today that might not have been true five years ago. And unfortunately, I think a lot of career development offices and programs out there are helping students break into a job that doesn't exist anymore, and that's more focused on some of the skills that we've tried to tap into. CHAD: And what are those skills? BRIAN: I'll point to a few off the top of my head. One is just polish. If you've never had an internship, you don't know cadencing on scheduling or sending an email to a direct report or really focusing on your LinkedIn, and your resume, and your social media being clean and disciplined. And so we bring to light a lot of the things that I think employers are looking for today. I'll use a good example with our students. If you don't have 500 connections on LinkedIn, the number of connections you have shows. But if you have more than 500 connections, it just shows 500+. And as a recruiter, when you really think about it, at the top of the funnel, they use these little things to guide a lot of their decision-making. For better or worse, I'm not sure it's a great way to decide who should be a good candidate for your company. But when you get 5,000 applications, and you need to get it down to 100 in a couple of days, there are little things like sending your resume in a Word Doc instead of a PDF or having spelling errors in your application, or not filling out some of the boxes that matter. And so we really train them on that etiquette and polish. Another bucket that I think is super important we built a speaker series at the Takeoff Institute called You Can't Be What You Can't See. And I think for a lot of Black undergraduate students, you go through a Superday at some of these places. You might meet 10, 15 people. Most of the time, you're not going to meet anyone Black. And you're definitely not going to meet Black people that are at the executive level. And so we really pride ourselves on bringing in managing directors from banks, and founders and CEOs from growing companies, and leading venture capitalist investors and just help our students see that there are people out there doing what they did. There are people that come from their backgrounds that also weren't sure who they were going to be when they were a sophomore or a junior in college. And so, building confidence is another key pillar of the program that we really pride ourselves on. And we're very lucky we have students at Tesla, at Apple, at Facebook, at Goldman, at NBC Universal. These students have broken into really exciting roles. And as we think about building the full flywheel around Takeoff, now those students become advocates. Now those students become mentors and advisors. And we build proximity for our students to help them realize there are people that very recently went through a very similar program and are now doing the things that they aspire to do. CHAD: That's great. It sounds to me like it really is a combination of things that they might not have the opportunity to have done before or gain the experience and because they're marginalized, historically. And also just things that are good to have that, in general, aren't taught in school regardless of your opportunity. BRIAN: That's right. CHAD: And sometimes people who have more opportunity are getting that exposure in the jobs that they have along the way and that kind of thing. That makes it certainly easier for them to succeed later on, let alone what they look like when they show up to the interview. BRIAN: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think the anecdotal use there is most of the things that I'm teaching these kids you can find on Google. The problem is they don't know what to look for. And when we think about fast-tracking these students or getting them into these rooms quicker, getting them through those interviews more effectively, it's almost like bringing all of these resources right in front of their face and allowing them to soak and absorb them in a very efficient manner. So there's a guide somewhere on the internet of how to break into consulting, and there's a guide on how to crush a product interview. And there's a guide on how to build a perfect resume or a perfect LinkedIn. But we find that most of our students, one, don't know that they should be looking for that stuff, and two, don't know how to go get it all when it matters. And that's really what we focus on, bringing all that stuff in front of them at a more efficient clip and help them build that confidence so that when they do get in front of that interview, they're armed with all the things they need to succeed. CHAD: Well, I know you're already solving a big problem. But is there anything in particular that you do to then make sure that once these people are in the workforce, in the workplace, they're going to companies that are going to treat them right where they're not going to face bias as much as possible and those kinds of things? Or are you mostly focused on getting them ready right now? BRIAN: No, it's a great question. I'd put that in a 2.0 Takeoff University, Takeoff Institute, but it's absolutely critical. It's super important. And we have a long way to go. Chad, I don't want to pretend like the world is ten times better than it was five years ago. But the transparency through which some of this data is being recorded, the accountability that's being held in rooms that matter, so C-suite, executive suite, board meetings, it is changing. And I'm very excited about that because I think for the students that can, and this is in every student, and I don't want to pretend like it is, but for the students that can choose where they go, they're going to choose to go to those companies. They're going to choose to go to the companies where there is active, positive feedback from underrepresented people, so Black, Latin, female, people that don't look like the rich, white guy that runs the company. They're going to look for that feedback. And they're going to look for companies that very, very clearly advocate for supporting those types of communities. And, again, I think we're in the early innings of that. But I think that we're definitely on a path towards that being more and more important and that tailors who we partner with and who we spend time with. And if you look at a lot of our partners, they are people that care about that stuff, and they are people that are actively working on doing something about it, which we certainly appreciate. CHAD: So the core of the Takeoff Institute is the fellowship. Is that right? BRIAN: Yeah, that's right. CHAD: What exactly is that? BRIAN: The Takeoff Institute Summer Fellowship is an eight-week program, again, designed to advance and equip Black undergraduates with the resources and mentorship they need to launch a young professional career. So the first thing that I think about is what we had talked about earlier, just aggregation of resources. So we have a partnership with Wall Street Prep, and so our students have to do an Excel and PowerPoint tutorial within the first two weeks of the program. And that's in after hours, and they have to do it on their own. And we track their progress, and they have to submit it. Because I cannot think of a single role in a post-undergraduate career where it is not important to be literate in both of those platforms and also, maybe more importantly, where top performers are not very good in both of those platforms. So the first piece is resource aggregation. CHAD: And this is happening remotely? BRIAN: This is all remote. This is all remote. I started the Takeoff Institute in 2020. Chad, I hope there's a day where I say that none of it is remote, but it's the world we live in. CHAD: [laughs] BRIAN: And it's what allowed us to scale it the way we did. We had over 500 kids apply for our first fellowship two years ago. We took 50 and had a little over 600 apply for the second year and took 50 again last summer and have some really exciting things coming up for this summer. So we can talk about the goal and where we're headed later. But the second piece is the speaker series that I told you about. And so, bringing in folks during our weekly meetings and allowing them to ask questions and be vulnerable and share that experience. The third piece is mentorship. And so, I wanted to recreate the feeling of having a direct report. I think too many Black undergrads get to their first job without any real internship experience. And I think in an internship, one of the things you do is you make a bunch of dumb mistakes where your direct report tells you they were dumb because you're an intern. And you check that box, like, whoops, I did that I'm never going to do it again. And unfortunately, when you get to your first job, and that's some of the stuff you're doing early on, it just doesn't go well. It doesn't lead to you being ranked highly. It doesn't lead to you getting an offer a year later. It doesn't lead to you getting the advocacy and support of people internally to say that you're a top performer. So we almost try to recreate that direct report internship experience and allow them to make some of those mistakes. And so every student is paired up with a one on one advisor. And so, for folks that are listening, if you want to be an advisor, I'd call it anywhere from 25 to 50-year-olds with a desire to help undergraduate students succeed. We have a variety of different types of advisors. And again, it's really about challenging our students to make sure they send the email to check-in. They send the email to let them know that they need to meet. They send a calendar invite. And if it's in ET, they remember, oh wow, I need to send that in PT. So just giving them that experience. So resources, access to people that look like them in seats that matter, and mentorship and guidance are the three main pillars of the Takeoff Institute. CHAD: I love that idea of learning from experiencing failure. One of the things as someone speaking for myself coming from a place of opportunity and privilege and being a white male, I might approach certain circumstances where I'm just not as afraid of failure. I'm a big believer in learning through failure, and so because of that, I'm less afraid of that. Someone who hasn't had that opportunity and is underrepresented might be much more scared of what might happen if they fail, and that's just missing the opportunity to do that. BRIAN: I think you're absolutely right. And I want to, if you're open to it, have a little fun here. I'd love to flip that question on you and just think about what are some of the things that you would be sharing or guiding to underrepresented ecosystems to help them bridge that gap, to help them kind of get that confidence to know that they do have the right, they do have the skills; they do have the knowledge to break into those places? And it's about quieting that imposter syndrome and going after some of those opportunities. CHAD: Yeah, I've always believed it's really difficult to tell people not to feel something that they're feeling. [laughs] It's really hard to change someone's feelings. And so I would put it on the mentors that they need to work to create the environment where people understand that it's okay to make mistakes. That's certainly the experience that I had in my internship when I was just getting started out. I saw my manager making mistakes, and they owned up to them. And we talked about them. And we were doing a lot of the same work. We were working alongside of each other. And so that close working relationship is one thing. I don't know if you're aware, but at thoughtbot, we have an apprentice program where new people are paired with an experienced mentor, and it's almost entirely working together on work. So creating that opportunity. So assuming you have a mentor that's supportive and wants to work with you, great. And if not, I would say try to circumvent that as much as possible and get yourself working with them as much as possible so that you can get close to them and see them working, and see them failing, and really gain that first-hand experience, which in and of itself can be uncomfortable to force that. I totally recognize that. BRIAN: Totally. Part of the program is they do a research report with their mentor. And so it's sort of this guided I'm here to answer questions, but I am not here to do this for you. And I'm very intentional with our mentors about that. I think a lot of these students, especially the ones who have never had a direct report, they wait until they're told what to do. And they don't know how to turn on that proactive brain. And I think it's a super important muscle to flex, especially at that age. How do you teach a kid to do the thing that he thinks his boss is going to ask for as opposed to the thing that his boss asked for? CHAD: Well, this is sort of a pet peeve of mine because I think that, in some ways, there is a flaw in our educational system. It's centered around people telling people what to do. BRIAN: Do what you're told, yeah, absolutely. CHAD: Right. And so, I was very fortunate that I had some te…

Full show notes at the publisher

412: Diversity-X with Kevin Withane Feb 24, 2022

Show notes

Kevin Withane is the founder of Diversity-X: a community to help underrepresented founders who are trying to make a positive impact in the world thrive, scale, and grow. Chad talks with Kevin about giving underestimated founders connections and access, creating a venture fund, and creating a platform via DiversityX. Follow City DiversityX on Twitter. Follow Kevin on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Kevin Withane, founder of Diversity-X. Kevin, thanks for joining me. KEVIN: Chad, thank you so much for having me on this show. CHAD: Kevin, I know you have deep expertise and background in law and ethics and compliance, particularly when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. And that has led you to create Diversity-X. And so what is Diversity-X? KEVIN: Diversity-X is a community for underestimated founders trying to make a positive impact in the world. We're working on creating a VC fund for it. And also, it's an ecosystem to support those underestimated founders and help them thrive and scale, and grow. CHAD: That's great. What kind of support and community are underestimated founders lacking, and how does Diversity-X fill in that gap? KEVIN: I think it's a mix of connections and access. I use the term underestimated rather than what many people term as underrepresented because there are plenty of people of color founders, plenty of LGBTQ+ founders, plenty of female founders, disabled founders, veteran founders. There are lots of them in the world, so they are represented. They're just underrepresented in the equitable allocation of capital and particularly venture capital at early stage, which sees many of these founders not necessarily succeed or have to work that little bit harder just to get a starting place where many others get funding a lot earlier and a lot easier in their journey. And I'm not saying raising capital is easy at all for anybody, but it's easier for certain groups of people than it is for others. CHAD: What makes it easier? KEVIN: I'm going to be candid in my views. I think it makes it easier if you're a white male; nothing against white males, but it's easier. There's that privilege. But also, you look, sound, probably have a lot of similar backgrounds to the people who are allocating the money who have control over whether they invest or don't invest in the startups. And I think; also, they tend to have better connections or better ins. It is a generalized statement, but data shows that 93% of VC money typically goes to white male founders. So it's backed up by data to an extent. CHAD: Right. And it doesn't even need to be ill intent. In some cases, there might be, but it doesn't need to be. So much of the VC world is about connections, and what you've done previously, and who you know, and the intro you're able to get. And then, when you finally get the meeting, if you're out pitching something that just isn't even on the radar of the typical VC, they're not going to connect with your idea in the same way that you do. When we're building products, having a diverse team of people allows us to see all the different aspects of that product and have people saying, "Well, what about this? From my background or my perspective, I understand that this is a particular concern for women around the safety of this," or something. And people say, "Oh yeah, I didn't even realize that." KEVIN: Yeah, that's a great point. Within the Diversity-X community, very early on, I realized one of the probable flaws for VC is, let's be honest, it's a very male-dominated industry. I think they are making real strides to change it, make it more open, more accessible to females and people of color. But essentially, for the most part, it is people who look and sound the same and typically are a white male. And there's no disrespect, but sometimes you can get a pitch about femtech. And while she may go, "Yeah, I can see that this could be a problem," you don't know because the fact is you're not a woman. You just don't know. And I experienced that very early on speaking to a female founder who's part of the community, and she's really trying to do some amazing stuff. But at first, I was like, "I can empathize with the issues you're trying to address here and the problem, but that's as far as my knowledge goes." And it made me wonder if VCs who are getting this sort of pitch will probably turn them down. They can't understand the problem. So, therefore, they can't understand what the solution that the founder is trying to come up with is really trying to address. And so pushes it by because they don't have that expertise, and that's not their fault; it's just there's a lack of diversity in the VCs themselves to be able to address that. But then you hear these stories about male founders coming with a femtech solution almost on the back of a cigarette packet. And they're getting X amount of dollars to go and do some research and try and start building a product around what their idea is. And yet many of the female founders are scratching their head; well, we didn't have an in to that VC, so we never got in. And yep, so we don't get funding for what is a problem that we actually experience ourselves, and we're trying to address. CHAD: This conversation reminds me of a conversation that I had in 2018 in Episode 279 with Alex Friedman, the co-founder of LOLA, which is a feminine products company. And she talked about how it was clearly uncomfortable for the people that they were talking to to talk about these kinds of things. So even that can have an aspect to it where like...and then men may be more comfortable talking with men about feminine products than they are to women about them. And it just permeates the whole conversation when you're trying to launch a product that you need money for if it's uncomfortable, or it's foreign, or all of those things. KEVIN: Absolutely. The industry needs to change in a couple of ways, I see. There needs to be greater emphasis on VCs building networks and connections into the communities and to the founders that are underestimated people of color, female from different socioeconomic backgrounds that may not have been able to afford to go to MIT or Harvard but super-smart people solving real-life and real-world problems. And VCs themselves need to look at their own diversity, like, it is not diversity just for the sake of well, we need X number of women now with investing power, or we need more people of color to invest. It's because those people bring their lived experiences, which is the same for any business. It's no different if you're a big corporate. The reason for diversity is the same. It's to get that cognitive diversity, that cognitive difference of lived experience, which in the end, bring into your field. It's something as human beings we can't detach ourselves from. We can't detach ourselves from our lived experience. We take that everywhere we go. CHAD: So what's involved in creating a venture fund? KEVIN: A lot more work than I thought. CHAD: [laughs] KEVIN: I don't have a venture background, so I'm already 700 steps behind everybody else that is doing it. Even the good guys who are trying to actually address this problem, many of them actually come from a venture background. But I'm looking out there, and I'm seeing people like Matt the VC, Arlan Hamilton, and they inspire me that I can do this. Because, ultimately, I had a soft conversation with a family office just to try and explain what I'm doing and see if there'd be interest. And they actually liked the idea. But they said to me, "Who are your competitors out there?" And I said, "Look, you can think of me as naive, but the reality is I don't think I have any competitors." And the reason is because we have a mission. Our vision is a world where you don't have underestimated founders. Our mission is to grow the world's biggest community of underestimated founders and support those that are VC-ready and the right fit for funding that are going to be successful with capital. And whilst there are other companies and funds doing this, they have niches where they focus on certain areas. We're much broader. But ultimately, no matter how much I raised in the fund, it's never going to be enough. It's never going to be enough to meet the gap that there is right now and the opportunity. So when you say competitor, every time an underestimated founder gets funded and gets given the opportunity to really address the problem that they're trying to tackle, that's a win for me because it's helping my mission and the vision. So that's the way I look at it. And yes, that is a little bit naive, maybe. But you look at Elon Musk, and you look at founders who are trying to do amazing things. And you don't really knock them down for their grand visions. You have to aim high, and that's what we're trying to do at Diversity-X. CHAD: So I noticed that you are particularly focused on the UK and Europe. And in my experience, the investment community tends to be different between the United States and Europe. How have you found that, and has that been adding a challenge on top of a challenge? KEVIN: Yeah, it is adding a challenge on top of a challenge. It is different. I think the U.S., in some senses, is much more progressive, much more open. It's funny, I was talking to a friend, and I was saying...I can't really talk numbers because I don't want to get in trouble with the FCA. But I said to him, "This is the sort of size of the fund I'm looking to raise." And he is an American. And he just looked at me and said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, you need sort of skin in the game. You need this, this, and this." He looked at me and said, "You are the skin in the game. Your passion comes through." Guys in America, people will be looking at you, saying, "You're way too small. You need to go much bigger than this." And I said, "But skin in the game, skin in the game, skin in the game." He said, "Don't tell me about that. Go big and see if people will buy into it." And that's I think much more of the view across the pond. There's much more appetite. And I think for European VCs and particularly those probably starting out trying to address some of the issues that Diversity-X hopes to address, we've got to move probably and work hopefully in tandem with the more progressive, more open, more solution-oriented VC funds that are coming from the U.S. Because quite frankly, they are coming here now. They're coming to UK and Europe. But the reason I wanted to start in the UK and focus on the UK and Europe is that's where I'm based. That's where the best part of my knowledge is. Although interestingly, I guess my network is probably from the LP side, probably stronger in the U.S. So we'll see how that pans out. CHAD: I assume that there are some legal requirements to starting a venture fund. Or can anybody do it, I guess is the...[laughs] KEVIN: Maybe this is part of the problem as well as, the bar for entry just to start a fund is high, and it's expensive. So I guess I'm blessed that I've had the opportunities I've had in the past to be able to build something to be able to start this. But yeah, it's a myriad. And as a lawyer and someone who's even done transactional work on private equity and even helping some startups on fundraising and seeing how it works, it is very difficult. And you could be dealing with multiple jurisdictions depending on where your limited partners are. So there's a lot to factor in. And then it's not just the legal fees; it's the fund administration and the fund management. For instance, in the UK, are you going to be regulated if your fund doesn't need to be regulated? Or are you going to be authorized on your own, or are you going to use an umbrella? What does that mean? So it's a real steep learning curve. And I've got to admit, in my personal journey, there have been too few who have responded to my request just for help and advice, including what I would consider...I use this as the good guys, but the people trying to address the same problems that I am either focused on female. You reach out, but there's no return call. But there is one person who's a traditional fund; he is a white male VC. But honestly, he came back. We had a call. We talked about stuff. He said, "Keep in contact. Let me know how it's going," and he's tried to help me. A couple of weeks later, I didn't hear from him, and then all of a sudden, an email popped up, or a message popped up saying, "Oh yeah, sorry it's taken me a couple of weeks to get back to you. But I just wanted to make sure that here's an introduction. This could be the partner you're looking for blah, blah, blah." I was blown away by that, that kind gesture. Somebody who just literally could have had a call with me said, "Yeah, not interested in this, never going to go anywhere. Why exert any effort?" CHAD: That's great. You mentioned it is difficult. It's always difficult to start something new. But you're doing it alone. You don't have a partner. KEVIN: No. I'm on the hunt for a partner. It's like dating, I guess. You keep trying to kiss a lot of frogs to find that person. Ultimately, knowing that I'm going to get challenged, rightly so, on track record, I would like to find a partner who has VC experience, who buys in deeply to the concept, and the mission, and the vision that we have and is looking to build a VC firm, not a fund, i.e., this is not a one and done exercise. This is about creating over multiple funds and, hopefully, generationally growing this to something really special. CHAD: Well, if you're listening, and that describes you, get in touch with Kevin. [laughs] KEVIN: Absolutely. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: In the meantime, while you're working on building this venture fund, you said, okay, I'm going to start building a community right away, right? KEVIN: Yep. CHAD: And when it comes to platform, how are you doing that? Are you usi…

Full show notes at the publisher

411: Civic Innovation with Jay Nath Feb 17, 2022

Show notes

Jay Nath is the Co-CEO of City Innovate, a govtech company streamlining procurement through enterprise software and innovative frameworks. He talks with Chad about how he focuses on helping governments be more effective, responsive, and zeroed in on helping their constituents whether on a small city or a big state scale. City Innovate Follow City Innovate on Twitter or LinkedIn Follow Jay on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel, and with me today is Jay Nath, Co-CEO of City Innovate and former Chief Innovation Officer of San Francisco. Jay, thanks for joining me. JAY: Yeah, Chad, thank you for having me. CHAD: I assume based on the name and the fact that I've done my research...but I assume based on the name of City Innovate and the fact that you're a former Chief Innovation Officer of San Francisco that what City Innovate might be. But why don't you give everybody an overview of what it is? JAY: Thank you, Chad. So City Innovate is focused on helping governments be more effective, responsive, and focused on helping their constituents, whether it's a small city government or a big state. And the way that we've been doing this is really sort of an interesting; I'd say wonky place. We found that there's a pressure point in government around documents and specifically on procurement. And why is that interesting? Because what I've seen is if you want to work with government and collaborate, whether it's even volunteering or you're a startup, and you want to work, procurement is often that channel. And it's not really a channel; it's more of a barrier, a byzantine process. You can think of this from a technical frame, creating an API, a read/write API to make that process much more streamlined on both sides, helping governments be able to find the best partners to solve their big challenges. And on the other side, folks from all walks of life, whether you're a massive company or you're a founder in a garage, how do you actually connect those two? So we're really working at that intersection, and it's something that I find a lot of value in and importance in. And surprisingly and maybe not surprisingly, there's a lot of need for technology to help connect those dots. And ultimately, I think what I can do is make that process more inclusive and lower the barriers of entry so that people from different communities can participate and help make their communities better. CHAD: So your clients at City Innovate are cities and governmental organizations. Are you just delivering a product to them, or are you often helping them work better too? JAY: It's a bit of both. From a product standpoint, we're really in the B2B space and very much enterprise, if you will. And part of that standard enterprise SaaS offering is also support services, and that can be training, that can be professional services to help them in thought leadership in different ways. And that's exactly what we do. So we not only have our product, but we help them through something called agile procurement. So it's really borrowing from the software development methodology and applying the same principles and approaches to developing and finding the right partner and being more agile and iterative through that process. And historically, it's been very waterfall and very stilted and overly structured. So really being more focused on outcomes, really being focused on getting data into the process so that you can actually do, let's say, a bake-off and get more information before we make that decision. And it's surprising, Chad, folks in government are often buying multimillion dollars, tens of millions of dollars technology systems without actually trying it out. And think about your personal life. You test drive a car. You look through a home. You make these big decisions with a lot of data and evidence. And in government historically, they've been using paper documents to make that decision, RFPs responses, and marketing material. And it's hard to sift through and say, "Hey, what's real and what's not?" So we've been really helping them think through a more agile evidence-based approach, and our software supports that. And so yeah, it's really leading a movement about changing how they think about partnering with the vendor community or contractors. CHAD: So one of the things that is probably interesting about this and maybe a little bit meta is that this is what you help them do. And so you have to go through that process with them of being procured. [laughs] JAY: It is meta. You're absolutely right. [laughs] CHAD: In order to become the vendor that they use. JAY: That's right. CHAD: What are the challenges inherent in that, and does it ever get in the way? And how do people, either your clients, come to you, or how do you find them? And how do you work through that challenging process of government procurement? JAY: Well, the thing is, since we know this space really well, we know how to navigate those different channels, the byzantine processes I mentioned before. I think one of the things I worked on when I was in the City of San Francisco was a program that brought startups and governments together, and we had an educational component. We'd help founders better understand that exact question. How do you actually get contracts with government? And there are no books that are out there. There's no real knowledge out there. And so, we help them talk about the ten different pathways to doing that. So it's a bit of a hidden art, if you will. And I think there needs to be more conversation and more resources for founders if they're looking to go into the public sector to be able to navigate that. So we know that really well. And we're trying to really help broaden access to that knowledge. CHAD: I assume that the clients you end up getting are people who are...or are governments who want to be better. Otherwise, they wouldn't choose your solution. [laughs] JAY: That's right. Well, I think their motivations are multifold. Some of the governments want a process that's more efficient. They know that they can be more productive. They have maybe staffing constraints, and they have a lot of work, so we can help them on the productivity side. There are other governments that are really focused on hey; we need to get better partners out there. We've been working with the same folks over and over again. How do we work with those innovators in our community? So there's that crowd. And then there's, I think, another group of folks who are saying, "Hey, we wanted to make sure that this process is more inclusive. We want to work with folks who are from different backgrounds who may be underrepresented. How do we make this process more streamlined, more efficient so that they're able to participate more effectively?" So I think the motivations can be different, but it's really at the end of the day centered around this idea of digital transformation and service design that allows these two different worlds to be able to communicate and work together more effectively. CHAD: How long is the typical sales cycle for a client? JAY: Man, yeah, [laughs] it can range from weeks, I would say to months and going over 12 months. It can be 12 to 18 months, trying to get in, doing a trial maybe, giving them that certainty, and then securing budget and that annual process of waiting for that budget approval to happen. So it is not for the faint of heart, especially enterprise software within government is really something that requires a lot of different approaches. So partnerships with bigger companies that have the distribution channel, that might have those relationships, that might have those contracts, how do you actually work with them to shortcut the long procurement process? How do you leverage folks like AWS and other cloud providers that may already have a relationship so that you can, again, piggyback off of that? So I think there are a number of different ways to try to compress that timeframe. But it's not a walk in the park, Chad. CHAD: So, in that environment, how did you get started with City Innovate? How long was it until you were able to get your first real customer? And how did you bridge the gap between founding and being in the market? JAY: That's a great question. So being in the public sector, I knew that procurement is a huge challenge and also a pressure point and a leverage point to unlocking a lot of value. And so the work that we had done with startups and government the first experience that we had was amazing. We had a startup that came in and helped blind people navigate through the airport here in San Francisco SFO in four months and truly a collaboration with the startup and the airport staff. And unfortunately, when it came to procurement, it took two years for them to actually get into contract. CHAD: Wow. JAY: For a startup, that's like dog years. That's like an eternity. And so we really knew that we had to tackle that. So we introduced a methodology called challenge-based procurement that, as I spoke to earlier, is more agile, evidence-based, and outcomes-based. And that really leveled the playing field for these young companies to show that hey, we can actually go in here and help you solve that problem. You don't have to work with a big publicly-traded company to do this work and spend a lot of money. We can be more nimble and agile. And so that's really where I started to dig in deeper into procurement. And that work got federally funded because it created a lot of jobs. And we've had hundreds of startups all across the U.S. It's an international program called STIR, Startup In Residence, and really proud of that work. Our mayor, unfortunately, died unexpectedly. So we looked at hey, where do we move this program? And it did make sense for a city to manage a multi-city program, and so City Innovate came to mind. At the time, they were a non-profit. I'd been working with my co-CEO co-executive director at the time. It was a nice, beautiful transition into that. And at that time, I said for myself personally, where do I see impact, and what can I do? And for me, the idea of entrepreneurship, the idea of products making impact in government, I saw how much impact was being made. And so City Innovate has really become that vehicle for myself and the organization to really scale that idea out. CHAD: You mentioned you have a co-CEO. How did that come about? And how do you split the responsibilities between the two of you? JAY: Well, the good thing is we're really great complements. So his focus is really on go-to-market and focusing on how do we get this in the hands of our customers or prospective customers? And I've always been very interested on the product side. I was formerly a VP of product at a startup before my time in government, and so that scenario I find keen interest. And I deeply understand the personas and the use cases of government, having spent a lot of time there. And so that empathy and understanding and building a product around that and having somebody who can help get that product in the hands of government navigating through those difficult processes. It really does take that. You can have a great product, but without that ability to get it in the hands of your customers, especially with governments, it's really challenging. CHAD: Is there any in particular...like, why Co-CEO and not two other C-level roles, one of you CEO, one of you CIO? JAY: I don't think we've spent too much time debating that. And that might change, I think to your point to better describe our focus areas. Maybe my role changes to chief product officer and his to a different role title. I think if you're starting a company, you've got a lot of things to worry about. And it just seemed like a...yeah, I don't think there was much thought in it. CHAD: Yeah. That's interesting, though. You alluded to what you were doing before the City of San Francisco. Well, let's dive into that a little bit more. And specifically, what were you doing, and then why did you join the public sector? JAY: So I was VP of Product at a company called SquareTrade. It was a wonderful journey. We were working with, again, something kind of wonky and a space that was anti-consumer. It was around warranties, specifically electronic warranties. And we were in the eBay marketplace and expanded way beyond that in later years. But when I was there, we really took a contrarian perspective and being inspired by Zappos and many companies that are really focused on the consumer. We changed that value proposition to say, hey, can we build a product that people love, a warranty that actually works? And so we did crazy things like we would actually give you the money before you returned the product. We would have the shipping label. And we wouldn't ask any questions. We did amazing things. But that wasn't just because we were focused on the user experience. We also had data to back it up. We knew that, hey, there are a certain percentage of people who are going to return rocks. And there's a certain percentage of people who are going to do certain things. So we had a lot of information going in. The other thing we knew is that we could own the whole stack, the underwriting, the retailing. And we also knew the business. So that was a great experience. But I really was missing this connection to the public good and doing something that was having impact in a really tangible way. That's when I saw why don't I work for a city I love deeply and care about? And that really drove me into thinking about public service. I had some friends who were in it, and they convinced me that I should take a look at that. And I definitely have found the work that I had been doing in public service to be extremely rewarding and just a unique opportunity. Especially if you're a technologist or a product mindset or an engineering mindset, that is such a rare perspective in government, and being able to bring that in, you can do amazing things. We all know the healthcare.gov and how that was imploding and exploding. It almost brought down a presidency and administration, and it was saved. I think many people know the story, especially in your audience. That was really folks in Silicon Valley saying, "Hey, I'm going to raise my hand and volunteer my time. I might be working at a big company and making a lot of money, but I will take my time out and try to help." And they did. They turned it around. And I think that ethos and that mindset of giving back is something that's animated my interests in public sector and the fact that there's so much need, especially from the tech community, in helping the government out. CHAD: Now, you didn't get started as the City Innovation Officer. [chuckles] So you got started as the Manager of Enterprise CRM for the City of San Francisco. JAY: That's right. Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah, definitely. CHAD: I think that public sector work is maybe a little bit of a black box for people. I know it is for me. You mentioned you knew some people, but I assume that was not a political appointment job. JAY: It was not. CHAD: So, how does one get into that, find it, and get that job and that kind of thing? JAY: I think I took a very rare and uncommon path. So as you noted, I came in helping stand up a call center. So a 311 one call center…

Full show notes at the publisher

410: Ada Developers Academy with Alexandra Holien Feb 10, 2022

Show notes

Alexandra Holien is the Vice President of Revenue and Strategy and Deputy Director of Ada Developers Academy. She talks with Chad about working for a nonprofit that prioritizes teaching Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and low-income folks software development for free. Ada Developers Academy Follow Alexandra on Twitter or LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Alexandra Holien, Vice President of Revenue and Strategy and Deputy Director of Ada Developers Academy. Alexandra, thank you for joining me. ALEXANDRA: Thank you for having me. I'm excited. CHAD: Let's start right off the bat with giving folks a brief overview of what Ada actually is. ALEXANDRA: Yeah, I'd love to. Ada Developers Academy we are a super unique non-profit, and I think, well-functioning business. We're a tuition-free 11-month software developing bootcamp academy for women and gender-expansive people. That may sound like some of the other bootcamps you've seen out there, but we're completely different. We have this really cool intersection of education, social justice, equity, bringing money to the people that need money sort of drive about us. We prioritize serving Black, Latine, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander folks, and low-income folks. And we prioritize them because they've been left out of this capitalistic system the most. And we think if we can really put money in the hands of these gorgeous, resilient communities through the career of software development and one of the hugest wealth engines of our time, then we're going to change the world. We're crazy because it's like we're free for our students. CHAD: [chuckles] ALEXANDRA: There are wraparound services, ridiculous, not even ridiculous, just like, natural. And it seems unique, and it seems crazy. But these things that we're doing to support our students are actually just human and basic needs, providing comprehensive support for our students financially, childcare, mental health care, free laptops, just making sure that they're set up for success, unlike I think other more traditional education systems. So they can go and be really amazing software developers. And it's proven time and time again if you just set people up, open the door, give them the opportunity, make sure that you're creating equity, then 92% of those folks what we're seeing is our numbers are going to go out there and get full-time software development jobs. So that's Ada in the smallest nutshell and believe me, I'm going to tell you way more. CHAD: Well, we're going to dig into each of those things and more. I interview a lot of people who graduate from bootcamps. We have a pretty wide-reaching apprentice program. And I'm pretty familiar with what it looks like when people are graduating from those programs. And you can graduate from a three-month program and be successful, and I don't mean to imply that you can't be. But I do see folks who go to slightly longer programs, up to 11 months, a year like at Ada, and those people are often much more well-rounded developers not only with the technical skills but with all of the other skills that are important to development. How intentional was the length of the curriculum? And was there pressure early on to get people into the market faster? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, great question. I think that so many...let me answer your first question, which is how intentional was it? It had to be at the forefront of what we wanted to do. And the reason why it had to be is that we were taking a group of people that had already been left out of the system. And we already knew that there were going to be steps that they had to take to get into...like, once they got into the tech industry, getting in and staying in was going to be harder than their counterparts, harder than the white dude who took apart a computer or a Nintendo when they were in the 80s and growing up because their dads were software engineers. And then went on to college and knew they were going to be software engineers. So our founders, Scott Case and Elise Worthy, were so intentional in making sure that the technical bar and the technical merit of our students going into the industry was not what they were going to have to worry about. That was not going to be the thing that kept them up at night thinking like, oh, man, I don't know if I can do this because I don't understand it. That was not going to be it because we knew there were going to be other things. We knew there were going to be people mistaking you for the secretary. And these are examples that are all true. It's mistaking you for the secretary or the person that's the assistant or the executive assistant when they walk into the room or that person that constantly misgenders you. We knew there were going to be other really big obstacles that they're going to have to overcome when walking into a very homogenous industry like the software development industry of the United States. We knew that that was going to be the big thing. So being intentional about the programming that we were going to offer our students that five and a half months of nine-to-five intense programming that also concentrates on what I don't think a lot of bootcamps really concentrate on, that CS fundamentals part of it, showing people that that is a part of the world. It's not the part of the world of the most entry-level software engineers, but it is there, so showing them that that's there. And then giving them that internship, giving them that on-the-job training that Ada does that no other bootcamp does like we do. That sort of on-the-job training where you go in, and you see what does that practice of what you learned in code look like in real-time when you put it next to one of our sponsoring companies' tech stack? So it had to be really intentional. I don't know if it was like, yes, this has to be perfectly like this. I think we definitely iterated and made it better over the years. But making sure that the technical bar of our students was at the technical bar of everyone else was something that we really wanted to make sure that we hit on. So they didn't have to worry about...so retention was not that they couldn't quote, "hack it" like everyone else like the people say, or they didn't have the aptitude. The retention was all about is the company creating a good enough environment for these folks to want to stay at that point? CHAD: What is the tech stack that you're teaching now? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, we just switched. We talked about this for a little bit. We just switched from our beloved Ruby on Rails. We were Ruby on Rails for a very long time. But we just switched to Python, React, JavaScript. HTML and CSS is part of our curriculum. And yeah, that's it, Python, React, JavaScript. CHAD: I don't take the switch away from Rails personally. [laughs] ALEXANDRA: People did. We had companies being like, "What are you doing? We love Ruby." And we were like, "Yes, we do too, but we had to move forward and on." [laughs] Ada started at the same time Ruby was in the spotlight, too, eight years ago. CHAD: So is that what you're seeing in the industry now, is Python, React are in more development, in more demand? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, we're seeing that definitely come up. We put together a steering committee for our curriculum when we made this switch. We basically just brought in our partners to help us like, okay, what is the thing because, you know, our partners range...every cohort, we have a company that sponsors the education of one of our students, and then they take that student on as an intern. So we can't please everyone. We knew we couldn't please everyone here. But we wanted to find a good middle, and Python seemed like a really good middle. Python, React was a good middle for us to go towards for just the future. Eight years from now, again, we'll probably be in the same place we are right now. But we say it's like teaching Spanish. We're not teaching you building out a bunch of Python engineers. We're building out people that know how to be agile, know how to learn different curriculums, know how to be flexible and all that, and know that the industry is changing, and you have to be a lifelong learner, right? CHAD: Yeah. ALEXANDRA: You know this to be a part of this industry. CHAD: Well, beyond the tech, what are some of the other things that students in Ada learn or focus on over the course of the program? ALEXANDRA: I would say our curriculum is broken out into three distinctive pieces that are all a part of our everyday classroom. So that first part being that technical part that our students really are just getting the chops of what it means to be a software engineer, understanding a full tech stack, understanding the frontend, backend, the APIs that all connect the stuff, just making someone that sort of bare bones of what I think is a good software engineer. The next step is that social justice piece, which is held up by our equity and policy team. They're really teaching students once you get in the door, it's not just about getting in the door; it's about staying in the room. And it's about not just diversity; it's about inclusion. And we're seeing that we cannot just expect just because someone's decided to sponsor an Ada student, we can't expect someone knowing how to support someone that is outside of what they've supported in the past, and we know what that looks like. So we have to really create students who know what allyship looks like, know what advocacy for themselves looks like. So they can really manage up in this process, bring people in. We do not want to say someone did something or said something to me, so we're just going to push these people away because we found that when you push those people away, especially in the tech software engineering space, you're really just left out of it. You're just out of the system. So we have to figure out how to change the system from within. So really teaching students how they can talk about gender expression, how they can talk about racial expression, how they can advocate for themselves while they're on the job. And the goal of all of this is actually to keep people on tech. We don't want our students having to talk about these things all the time. We want them to be talking about the tech that they're doing just like they want. And so we want to just keep things as much on tech as possible. The third part is our professional development part. How do you manager up, take yourself in that first block to that SE2 SE3? And that's just helping folks with career development. CHAD: When it comes to the inclusion piece, I imagine it's a little bit of a fine line to walk because you don't necessarily want to put all of the work of creating an inclusive environment on the people who have been historically marginalized. But at the same time, you want to set those people up for success coming out of your program. How directly do you provide training to the companies that are sponsoring? ALEXANDRA: Completely directly. [laughter] We know that if we can get a whole...I would say I sign people at the CTO level and the senior manager level. They have the budget. They're the ones pulling the purse strings. But once we figure out, once you sign on as a company, your manager and mentor are going through our corporate accountability training. While our students are learning the technical part of it, our managers and mentors are going through a monthly training with our team to make sure they are ready to receive these interns. So when that intern comes on-site, they're speaking the same language. We're not only teaching the students how to be allies and advocates. We're teaching the managers how to be. So many times, they're like, "Someone on my team keeps misgendering someone, and I don't know what to do." We had enough of those calls, so we decided to teach them what to do. And not only do we teach them, but we also put them in peer learning groups together so they can teach each other what to do because that's where they really start listening to each other. When two folks coming from the same background are having a conversation on how to be a better manager, we love that. CHAD: Yeah, that's great. And I think that's really likely a very important component to overall success. Well, let's talk economics a little bit because I've gotten up on my soapbox before around how companies have traditionally been way too comfortable saying, "Well, we have this position open, and we're using recruiters." And the position has been vacant for months. And in the meantime, they're willing to pay recruiters tens of thousands of dollars trying to fill the position. And I've always made the case like, tech and the way the economics work it would be better to invest that money that you're willing to give a recruiter into training people. When I learned about Ada, it really resonated with me. So what is the complete picture of how students afford to attend Ada, where the funding comes from, and how that all works out for them? ALEXANDRA: Oh, you're speaking to the choir. [laughs] When I talk about this with companies, I am oftentimes like, "How much did you spend on recruiting last year?" And then they tell me the number, and I'm like, wow, okay. We work with companies we call them our company partners because they are partnering with us to complete this mission of Ada that we have, which is to educate more women and gender-expansive people to be software engineers. Our business model is simple, but it works. We wanted to remove all barriers for entry for people that wanted to become software engineers within that group. So we wanted the program to be free. We knew that was always the case. We knew that there was this hole with bootcamps that was out there. This was seven, eight years ago where it was like people were going through these bootcamps and then not getting full-time jobs. And so we knew we didn't want to fall victim to that. So what we did was put an internship on the backend and really got companies to not just put their money where their mouth is but put their time and resources where their mouth is. That's more money. So they pay $55,000, and that $55,000 educates the student while they're in class with us, keeps the program completely free for our students. And then the other part of their buy into this whole shebang is you have to now make this person a hireable junior engineer because they're going to do an internship with you. And then everyone's always like, okay, the return on investment. To me, the return on investment is you did good, company. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: But also, the return on investment for a lot of our company partners, I call it the icing on the cake because it is not a part of our model. It is 70% of them convert their students to full-time jobs, full-time FTE offers from these internships. We had a company give...they sponsored six interns, gave six offers, and then went on to do a hiring loop with our graduating cohort and gave another 23 offers. CHAD: Wow. ALEXANDRA: And this happens every six months. So these companies that are out there saying it's a pipeline problem or I'm just going to spend money on thi…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected