Tech Forward

Hello, listeners, and welcome back to Tech Forward! On this week's episode, I spoke with Gina Gutierrez, co-founder and CEO of Dipsea. Through Dipsea, Gina is focused on helping women feel sexually, mentally, and emotionally empowered. Currently available on IOS (with Android coming soon), the Dipsea app features hundreds of audio stories that help women tap into their sexuality on their own terms, unlock confidence, and develop a more holistic sense of wellbeing. Today on the show, Gina will share her story of launching the business, how she raised over $5 million from investors, and the motivation behind creating this new category of audio-based sexual empowerment for women.

Gina and her co-founder, Faye, aren't necessarily the type of people you'd expect to launch a company like Dipsea. With backgrounds in psychology and economics, respectively, rather than audio engineering or production, they embarked on this entrepreneurial journey together simply because they saw a real need for what Dipsea has to offer. They founded the company less than two years ago after many late-night conversations at Faye's kitchen table, and have been growing ever since. "A strength of mine [is that] navigating ambiguity doesn't make me anxious, and I think that's highly aligned with being an entrepreneur."

While the idea of pitching an erotic storytelling app to a room full of mostly-male investors might seem daunting to some, Gina's comfort level with the topics helped her to navigate the fundraising process comfortably. "It's about choosing the language that makes other people feel safe, and positions you as an entrepreneur." They did face pushback during the investing phase — one potential investor deemed Dipsea as "not venture backable," while another cancelled the pitch meeting only an hour before it was scheduled to start — but ultimately raised $5.5 million for the business. She credits their success in the face of these setbacks to her co-founder, Faye, as well as to the strength of their idea. "[Venture capital] is highly network-based, so even if someone doesn't invest in you, you can reframe the 'no' and get connected to their network."

Inspired by the Headspace meditation app, Dipsea allows subscribers access to hundreds of short, erotic audio stories, created by women, for women. Though the stories on Dipsea are not specifically meant to be educational, the characters model an aspirational view of sexuality, consent, communication, and safer sex. Despite the evolution of hardware and education in the sexuality space, technological developments to address the psychology of sexuality have lagged behind. "Sex isn't just about your body! It's about your mind, too … And audio isn't just a way to tell a story, it's a way to make you feel something."

Gina, thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing the story of Dipsea with our listeners. Thank you, also, to everyone out there listening, sharing, and reviewing the show. Over the summer, we will take a break and feature some of our earlier episodes so that new listeners can take advantage of those fascinating conversations. We'll be back in the fall with brand-new episodes of Tech Forward. Have a wonderful summer!

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Welcome back to Tech Forward, and happy Fourth of July to my US listeners! On this week's episode, we are rebroadcasting my conversation with Julie Pitt, director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix. Her team's goal is to scale Data Science while increasing innovation. Prior to that role, she built the streaming infrastructure behind the "play" button while Netflix was transitioning from domestic DVD-by-mail service to international streaming service. Julie also co-founded Order of Magnitude Labs, with a mission to build AI capable of doing things like exploration, communication, and accomplishing long-range goals — in other words, tasks that humans find easy, but today's machines find hard. Today, we'll talk about Netflix's unique culture and how Julie supports the other female engineers on her team.

Julie's work with machine learning at Netflix ties back to solving two problems: offering members the best choices, and ensuring they have as much control as possible over their personal experience. This requires answering a lot of questions, from where to find content creators, to predicting where that content will be popular, and even down to launch dates. Luckily, many of those questions can be answered through data science and machine learning. Software engineers have already experienced the progression from rigid to continuous deployment schedules, and witnessed firsthand the power of collaboration. That power, however, is not common in data science — which is where Julie's team comes in. They're building a workshop for data scientists that allows a higher degree of collaboration, more efficiency, and higher productivity. Netflix's data scientists have already used these workshops to solve a variety of problems, from determining the quality of the video streamed to the viewer, to optimizing a schedule for launching multiple titles in the same genre.

One unique aspect of Netflix's culture, according to Julie, is that "We're building a default platform, but not a mandated platform." This is a direct result of two main tenets of the Netflix culture: freedom and responsibility. While engineers have the freedom to make choices about the tech they use to solve problems, they're also expected to be aware of how those choices might affect other teams. Julie also champions the concept of leadership through context, not control. "As a leader, if someone on my team makes a poor decision, my first instinct is to determine what context they lacked. We can increase relevant context that enables better decisions."

When it comes to diversity initiatives at Netflix, Julie has personally focused on meetups for underrepresented groups, as well as rethinking the interview process from start to finish. She gives candidates a choice as to how they prefer to be interviewed: some people feel more comfortable with a technical whiteboard question, while others prefer to work independently on a project and discuss it afterwards. Once people are in the door, having a network is key — "I only ever had one job where I didn't already know someone. I cannot under-emphasize the importance of having a professional network." She also has some words of advice for anyone struggling with impostor syndrome: "Fundamentally, in tech, we operate in an environment of uncertainty because we're doing things that have never been done before. Everyone else is making it up as they go along, too. It's okay, and you're not alone."

Julie, thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing your stories and insights this week. I'd also like to thank all of you out there listening, reviewing, and sharing the show. See you next week with a brand new episode!

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Hello listeners, and welcome back to Tech Forward! This week, I've reissued my conversation with Maria Salamanca, a venture capitalist at Unshackled Ventures. She was named 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital. Unshackled Ventures fills a unique space in the entrepreneurial ecosystem by funding teams with immigrant founders.

Maria's own journey — she immigrated from Colombia at age 7 and became a citizen at 18 — has motivated her to uplift others by eliminating barriers to entrepreneurship and education. Due in part to her history, Maria has a deep understanding of the challenges immigrants face when starting a business in the United States. She and Unshackled Ventures have identified the barriers that immigrant entrepreneurs face:

• Access to capital
• Office space
• Lack of support network
• Immigration support

These barriers are what led them to specifically support immigrant founders. "It's hard to be an immigrant entrepreneur and jump into that full time while also juggling concerns about who will sponsor your visa." As 45% of Fortune 500 companies have immigrant founders, there's clearly a high level of entrepreneurship among immigrants despite the significant barriers to the tools and resources which would enable them to fully execute that entrepreneurial spirit.

When it comes to the immigration process, Maria says, "Usually immigrants have to figure all of this out on their own, and most of them do. But that really takes away from the time they could be spending on their projects. They have to keep on top of deadlines and court dates, and struggle with the instability of,Will I be here in 3 months? What about my family? That stress puts a burden on founders." That's why some of the funding at Unshackled Ventures supports an in house counsel, allowing entrepreneurs to work closely with an immigration lawyer. "We fund only a small percentage of immigrant founders, but we want them to focus on their product as much as possible."

Research has shown that cross cultural experiences lead to innovation. "As an immigrant, you come into a new country where there's a different context for a variety of things. Many times, that means you can see a gap where a need isn't being met." To really foster those cross cultural experiences, Unshackled Ventures has created an ecosystem of universities, mentors, advisors, and investors who really believe in the value that immigrant entrepreneurs bring to the table.

Maria and I also discussed the possible future of immigrant entrepreneurs in the current political climate, as well as the advice she would offer to immigrant founders in search of funding. Thank you so much to Maria for joining me, and to all of you out there for listening. See you next week!

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Hello listeners, and welcome back to Tech Forward! On this week's episode, I spoke with D'ontra Hughes, serial entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of fintech platform SPARE. By turning any cash register into an ATM, SPARE helps merchants increase foot traffic and underbanked consumers avoid costly fees. If that sounds familiar, you may have caught his appearance on Shark Tank earlier this year. D'ontra is also a motivational speaker who shares valuable lessons for entrepreneurs about resilience, team building, and finding the right business partners. Today on the show, he'll share the story of how he built several businesses from the ground up, as well as his advice for other entrepreneurs.

While employed at JP Morgan, D'ontra witnessed firsthand how influential financial services are in our everyday lives, as well as how certain consumers could be disenfranchised by these services. For the 20% of the population who are underbanked, the average ATM fee of $4.69 per transaction can make a significant impact on their financial wellbeing. With SPARE, one of D'ontra's goals was to reduce or eliminate the fees consumers pay simply to access their cash. "It became clear as we did our troubleshooting that the perfect partners [for these consumers] were small businesses in the community. Those small businesses wanted to increase foot traffic into their stores, and they wanted a cheaper, more secure alternative to ATMs." Merchants on SPARE tell the network how much cash they want to offload, which brings in nearby consumers in need of that cash.

Though SPARE is gaining traction in the West Hollywood neighborhoods where it has been implemented so far, D'ontra is very forthcoming about how the popular narrative behind entrepreneurship often obscures the true nature of the journey. "To be called an entrepreneur is a badge you earn. It's a journey and it's tough." D'ontra's work developing SPARE — as well as his previous companies — taught him valuable lessons about resilience and the importance of partnerships rooted in a passionate vision. From couch surfing to debt to the struggles of making grandiose ideas work within the limitations of reality, D'ontra has certainly put in the work to earn the badge of entrepreneur.

When it comes to resilience, D'ontra describes himself as "naive to a fault," a relentless optimist even in dire situations. A core of resilience nurtures a fearlessness which he says is one of the determining factors for entrepreneurial success. His advice for anyone looking to build their own resilience muscle: schedule time to break away from the vision. "Whether you set an alarm on your phone, or have someone come to your house and physically take your tech out of your hands, do it. Because there are things in your life you might miss that you can't get back if you didn't take that breath… Your subconscious mind puts the pieces together and sends you an a-ha moment while you're focused on something else."

D'ontra, thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing your entrepreneurial expertise and the work you're doing with SPARE. Thank you, also, to everyone out there listening, sharing, and reviewing the show. See you next week!

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Hello, listeners! Welcome back to another exciting episode of Tech Forward. This week, I hope you'll enjoy our rebroadcast of my conversation from last summer with Omari Edwards. In addition to serving as a board member at leading technology proficiency non-profit Mouse and founding K-12 STEM enrichment program Technology for {You}th, Omari is also the founder of image-based analytics platform Beak. We discussed his different experiences as a black man at both Morehouse College and the University of Pennsylvania, and the unconventional journey of Beak from inception to present day.

Omari spoke highly of the mentors in his early life, both in his family and in school. These role models instilled in him the confidence to seek out schools he might not have otherwise considered. He attended historically black Morehouse College for his undergraduate studies, and UPenn for his M.S. in Systems Engineering. While he loved both schools, the largest difference between the two was a top tier but purely academic experience, versus a more holistic one. UPenn had all the benefits of an endowment in the billions — state of the art classroom tech and up-to-date facilities — but at Morehouse, "there was a different type of learning that went beyond the academic. Seeing the historical names of Black people on the campus buildings, as a minority, you knew you were standing on the shoulders of giants."

Omari got the idea for Beak while writing tracking software for an email marketing platform. This small, proprietary bit of code allows companies to track user activity online and show appropriate advertising. To Omari, the idea of being able to personally track his own emails was enticing, and so he released the first iteration of Beak with little fanfare. Much to his surprise, a few years later he discovered emails from large organizations who were using the platform in a way Omari hadn't anticipated: tracking internal company memos.

Beak, in its current form, is a SaaS platform that allows companies to track and analyze content they share online: images, emails, web posts, ads, and more. What sets Beak apart from other analytics platforms is that it is image-based, rather than Javascript based. Since many sites such as Craigslist don't allow Javascript, but do permit images, this gives Beak a competitive edge. Users select their tracker type and can get started in 3 steps or less. After collecting data, they can view analytics and download reports from Beak.

Between its inception and now, Beak has grown piecemeal but, as Omari says, "Every piece worked. Over time you develop a sense for what your users want." This unconventional journey happened in part because Omari insisted on bootstrapping the business so as not to diminish creative control. "We were able to make decisions that investors might have opposed, but which worked out long term. We knew we could make it to the point of self-sustainability."

Having witnessed firsthand the lack of racial and gender diversity in the STEM fields, Omari is also passionate about giving back to his community in the form of youth outreach. Through Technology for {You}th, he has created a curriculum for K-12 students to learn how to code. Currently, 7th and 8th grade students in the program are learning at a level that surpasses college equivalent Advanced Placement high school programs. "It's been an interesting ride, and we're in it for the long haul."

Omari, thank you so much for coming onto the show. I'm excited to see how Beak and all of your other ventures continue to grow, change, and serve their respective communities. Thank you also to all of my listeners for tuning in. See you next week with a brand new episode!

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Welcome back to Tech Forward, listeners! This week, I spoke with Oklahoma City-based software developer Carmen Bourlon. As her career as a developer progressed, Carmen began to explore her passion for offline technology, which allows people without Internet access to utilize resources that are generally only available online. Using US census data, she created Margiemap, which plots income against library access. She's also in the process of finishing her first book, Let's Take This Offline. Today we'll be discussing her career journey as a developer, what inspired her interest in offline technology, and how she is using her wealth of knowledge about the Internet access disparity affecting millions of Americans.

As a self-taught developer, Carmen learned to program from a book while living in a rural area without Internet access in her home. This not only shaped her learning process — letting problems stack up until she was able to go somewhere with Internet access — but also fostered her interest in offline technology. Realizing that Internet connections are fickle and users have no true control over it, she emphasizes that the responsibility is with developers to understand this issue and consider it while designing web based apps. While offline technology has universal applications, Carmen's particular interest lies with populations without Internet access.

Though many of us living in cities may not realize it, Internet access disparity affects millions of Americans. According to studies conducted by Pew Research, the percentage of households in the US that are considered "smartphone dependent" has increased from 12% in 2015 to roughly 20% in 2018. Studies have also shown a clear link between Internet access and access to higher paying jobs in the developing world. Put simply: "Internet access is opportunity access." Armed with this knowledge, Carmen created Margiemap as a way to visually display income against library access in the United States. Controlling for population, she found that lower income areas, where people are less likely to have a home Internet connection, have significantly less access to libraries.

Carmen's current plan is to dive deeper into the data and begin to blog about her discoveries, though she does hope that other people will take an interest in her work and begin their own research. Her work with Margiemap has informed her interest in a type of offline technology called "service workers," which she will cover in depth in her upcoming book, Let's Take This Offline. If you'd like to learn more about service workers, sign up for the mailing list to stay informed and see some sneak peaks.

Carmen, thank you so much for coming onto the show to share your process and everything you've learned about offline technology and why it's so important. I look forward to learning more when your book comes out. Thank you, also, to everyone out there listening, sharing, and reviewing the show. See you next week!

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Welcome back to Tech Forward, listeners! This week, I hope you'll enjoy our rebroadcast of my conversation with Katie Macc, Chief Commercial Officer and Cofounder of Juntos Global. At a time when customers have low trust in their financial institutions, Juntos provides those institutions with a mobile-based conversation platform that increases consumer confidence. Prior to working at Juntos, Katie worked in microfinance, both in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, later, in the US. On today's episode, we discussed her journey as an entrepreneur, and how Juntos is breaking down barriers to financial inclusion for many people around the world.

As someone who has always relished the opportunity to build something, Katie's transition from established jobs to true entrepreneurship was a natural one. Katie wears many hats at Juntos, balancing client-facing teams such as sales client services along with finance and HR internally. Despite the fact that their foreign markets — including Egypt, Paraguay, and Uganda — can make funding a challenge, Katie contends that "great investors make for enjoyable fundraising." As Juntos continues to grow and enter new markets, they remain committed to diversity: "As a global company, it matters to us to have employees from all over the world." Katie and her two co-founders, Ben and Dante, recognize the potential for technology to transform customer interactions in the financial services industry. With its roots in a graduate school project at the Stanford d.school, Juntos — now in 15 countries spread across 4 continents — aims to do just that.

While the rapid digitization of most financial transactions has been incredibly convenient, it has also had the unintended consequence of fewer face-to-face conversations at the bank. These conversations have historically served dual purposes: both allowing the bank to learn more about the customer, and providing the customer with an opportunity to alert the bank to their issues. The loss of these interactions has played a significant role in the loss of consumer trust in financial institutions. Juntos provides a bridge between the banks and their customers which, while still entirely digital, emulates the conversations customers used to have with their tellers. Not only does this help banks uncover reasons why customers might not utilize certain services, it also measurably increases account usage.

The barriers that prevent people from opening bank accounts, and keeping those accounts active, usually fall into 3 categories of trust. Consumers need to first trust the institution itself, then trust that the product will behave as expected, and finally feel confident that they themselves are able to competently use the product. Juntos works with customers on all of these facets of trust, helping them to realize that financial institutions do want them to succeed, or identifying next steps to take when the product does not perform as needed. Through these conversations, they're uncovering a wealth of knowledge about user experience.

Katie, thank you so much for coming onto the show this week and sharing the story of Juntos, as well as all of your valuable advice. Thank you, as always, to my listeners for tuning in. See you next week with a brand new episode!

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Hello listeners! Welcome back to a new episode of Tech Forward. This week, I'm thrilled to share my conversation with Fatima Dicko, Founder and CEO of the on demand delivery service, Jetpack. Prior to starting the company, while completing her MBA at Stanford, Fatima served as the youngest senior engineer on an upstream technology innovation team at Procter & Gamble. Today on the show, we'll discuss her journey as an entrepreneur, some of the challenges she has faced building her business as a young woman of color, and advice she would give to other founders looking to follow in her footsteps.

Having immigrated to the United States from Mali at the age of 6, Fatima's inquisitive nature set her down the engineering path fairly early in life. At Procter & Gamble, she was part of a team working on products 3-10 years away from going to market. While in that role, she attributes a huge confidence boost to the words of a mentor: "Great ideas happen when two old ideas come together for the first time." When you have an idea, it may be tempting to immediately scour the internet to see if someone else has built or done something similar — but Fatima came to realize "you don't have to be first, you just have to be different and better." She stresses the validity of past attempts, and the value in being able to pinpoint why those attempts didn't reach a certain level of success. From there, you can work to make something incrementally better than what came before.

The path from idea to launch was a tough one for Jetpack, mainly due to fundraising hurdles. While the value of Jetpack's decentralized convenience network was immediately clear to college students, it was less clear to traditional VC investors. "They have to invest in you. There are so many challenges as an African American woman founder where, if pattern matching comes into play, if their implicit bias comes into play, it's much harder to have them invest in the vision alone. So your traction needs to be there, your product needs to be there, you need a rockstar team. That ends up being an unfair burden on underrepresented founders."

Beyond fundraising wisdom, Fatima offers a wealth of powerful advice for anyone considering becoming a founder themselves. First and foremost, she urges people to think differently about growth. "We hear about companies going from 0 users to millions of users… I think shedding more light on the trajectory of growth can help people feel more confident about their ability to [do the same]." Then, she suggests 3 questions to ask yourself before starting a company: what problem do you want to solve, are you the right person to solve that problem, and what truly makes you come alive? While those answers might lead people away from becoming founders, Fatima says they might push people towards something more suited to them — such as joining an early stage startup.

Fatima, I cannot thank you enough for coming onto the show this week to share your journey, vision, and advice with our listeners. Thank you, also, to everyone out there listening, sharing, and reviewing the show. See you next week!

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Hello listeners, and welcome back to Tech Forward! This week, we're featuring my conversation with Angela Belt, Senior 3D Visual Stylist at Wayfair, from last September. Having graduated from Howard University with a degree in Fine Arts, Angela has over ten years of interior design experience including extensive experience styling for print, online publications, and video. With a keen eye for what is on trend and a passion for interior design, she has styled shoots for ElleDecor, HGTV, AphroChic, and Maison et Objet in Paris. We discussed her transition into the world of tech through her role at Wayfair, and the initiatives she has championed to support the company's diversity recruiting efforts.

Though she initially saw herself forging a career in politics, Angela took a hard pivot into the world of art and design during her sophomore year of college. After graduation, she took a position with the furniture company Room and Board, which essentially served as a ten-year crash course on not only floor planning and drafting, but also everything required in terms of building codes and permits, and how to design a room with an eye for profit margins. Angela also spent 8 of those 10 years freelancing at her sister's company, Aphrochic, where she became the creative director and interior stylist. During that time, she worked on REMIX: Decorating with Culture, Objects and Soul, released by Penguin Random House in 2013.

Voted a top tech company by the online community Built in Boston, Wayfair is, in Angela's words, "on the cutting edge of where things are going" in the world of interior design and home furnishings. Angela works with a team of 3D artists and stylists who use models and talented graphic designers to enhance the photo studio process. These models give the stylists much more creative freedom than a traditional 2D photoshoot, which can be expensive and time consuming. While Angela says entering the tech sector has required her to "learn an entirely new language… I have the background knowledge to know what makes sense in an image, aside from just looking good." There are cultural differences as well: interior design is a sphere that values the longevity of a career, and expects people to cultivate their skills over a longer time period, whereas tech jobs focus more on the skills people learn in school and apply right away.

Within 3 months of joining the company, Angela had the opportunity to champion diversity initiatives for Wayfair, when she was asked to recruit at her alma mater. "It was exciting to me to know that Wayfair wanted talent from a historically black college [...] It's part of a larger push, not just a one time thing." Internally, Angela is an active member of a group for African American employees to network and build a community. She stresses the importance of having members of underrepresented groups in leadership roles: "It meant a lot to me at Room and Board that I had an African American mentor, and two African American bosses. Seeing those people advance to leadership positions let me know I had a place in the company."

If you'd like to get in touch with Angela you can find her on Instagram, or see examples of her work on her website. Angela, thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing your story. Thank you also to all of my listeners for tuning in, sharing the show, and leaving reviews. See you next week!

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Hello listeners, and welcome back to Tech Forward! On this week's episode, I spoke with CEO and Founder of The Zone Lab LLC, Sheryl Kline. Sheryl is a Mental Toughness and Certified High Performance Coach™ who works with business professionals, world-class athletes, and students. She is also a speaker and best-selling author, and her newest book, ZONED IN: The Mental Toughness Required for a World-Class YOU, came out in February of this year. Today on the show, we'll be talking about her personal journey to becoming a high performance coach and entrepreneur, and her incredible advice for achieving success.

Sheryl's work began from a place of curiosity: she wanted to understand how world-class athletes persevered through failure and setbacks. She identifies two key components of mental toughness: the clarity to dream big, and attaining a thorough understanding of your own inner dialogue. Through her work as a coach, she helps her clients develop these components, teaching ordinary people to be extraordinary by mastering their mindset. To do this, she draws on a meticulously curated body of research from the past 4 decades which proves "that we are enough. We are all good enough. [...] We all have something special within us, and we have a limited amount of time to bring it to life."

In addition to her work with individuals, Sheryl also leads workshops and works with major global corporations such as Google Ventures, VMware, and Microsoft. In her mind, across all the work she does, the true problem is a lack of understanding of how to unleash human potential. This results in less productivity, creativity, and innovation — as well as an annual loss of $550 billion in revenue for US companies. "Having us unleash what we're capable of and be happy in the workplace is good for us — but it's good for business, too."

Sheryl also shared some advice for anyone looking to get ahead, and to develop their own resilience. She recommends creating a support group of people who are genuinely interested and invested in your success and growth, and to be able to speak up when something isn't working out. When it comes to career setbacks, she has this to say: "We must embrace failure, welcome it, take it head on. [...] Our emotions demand to be acknowledged and validated. So when we experience a setback, we have to honor that emotion and give ourselves the space to acknowledge that we're hurting. Then, you can take control and make the decision to move forwards."

Sheryl, thank you so much for coming onto the show to give our listeners this fascinating glimpse into the work that you do. If any of our listeners would like to learn more, simply visit sherylkline.com/tf for 1 month free in her mental toughness community! I'd also like to thank everyone out there listening, sharing, and reviewing the show. See you next week!

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