April-May 2021 Update

Good morning, afternoon, or evening! Here is my update for the months of April and May 2021, with the June 2021 update coming soon.

Bentley Design Thinking Speaker Series

The TeenTechSF x Bentley DTE Tech & Entrepreneurship Speaker Series concluded on April 3rd, 2021, with Nohbo (former teen) Founder and Shark Tank entrepreneur Benjamin Stern. Stern was inspired by a documentary he watched in high school biology to do something about plastic waste; Nohbo created the world’s first water-soluble shampoo pods that eliminate the need for single-use shampoo bottles.

Courtesy of Nohbo, Florida Today

During the session, he discussed what it was like pitching on Shark Tank, working with Mark Cuban, balancing high school and his company, and how his company went from the initial vision to a real, tangible product (and the nightmares with pre-orders he faced along the way).

Other speakers included SwingVision CEO and UC Berkeley Data 8 Instructor Swupnil Sahai, CEO and Co-Founder of Shasha Network Farai Munjoma, and teen startup founder of Munch (accepted into Y Combinator) Chloe Chia.

2021 TeenTechSF STEM Inclusivity Forum & PPE Initiative

Next, I helped to facilitate the 2021 TeenTechSF STEM Inclusivity Forum on April 10th. Starting with a special keynote from CEO of Lensational Bonnie Chiu, joining us from London on “Pursuing entrepreneurship at the Intersection of Social Impact and Technology”, the event later featured a STEM Opportunities Panel and networking breakout sessions -with organizations including Salesforce Racial Equity Task Force, Youth Funding Youth Ideas, Technovation, Feminist AI, and NASA — offering opportunities, resources, and internships to teens interested in the STEM field. This was followed by youth-led technical and professional skill-building workshops on 3D printing and mask sewing showcasing our PPE initiative, and app development, game design, and website development to help attendees build a digital portfolio.

And speaking of the PPE Initiative, we made our second delivery this month — consisting of 1500 masks and 230 face shields — through the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to the most vulnerable populations in San Francisco.

Pitching for Grants

In April and May, I led the teams at TeenTechSF pitching for two grant opportunities in the city: Youth Funding Youth Ideas (YFYI) and Building Leaders in Innovative New Giving (BLING) in order to support our programs for the upcoming year. Our teams heard back from both organizations in late May confirming our acceptance. In total, this means our organization will have at least $8000 (YFYI) + $5000 (BLING) = $13000 for the upcoming year.

Talks & Lectures

Here are some of the talks and lectures I listened in these two months.

Blitzscaling 12: Nirav Tolia on Growing Nextdoor

One way Nirav Tolia networked with people in Silicon Valley looking to start companies was by having dinner with 4–5 friends, bouncing entrepreneurial ideas back and forth. After having dozens, then hundreds more dinners, he realized “a need for not an organization, but just a table to sit down at for entrepreneurs to come together”. When the company he was working at was at an all-time high, he left the company to build a marketplace & platform where people with expertise and experience with products could write reviews, a company that ended up being bought & sold several times, before being bought for $600m by EBay in 2016.

Eventually, another idea came to his mind, due to experiences that came even before he set up these conversations. Tolia grew up in a small town where everyone was connected to each other, and was surprised to find that “28% of American’s can’t name a nextdoor neighbor, and there was no social network for this”. Thus, his team decided to create what has become Nextdoor, the social network for neighborhood communication and interaction.

“When we started Nextdoor, we were probably a lot less ambitious with our long-term vision, because we’d just come out from failure. What we were very focused on was, can we just make this thing work in a small set of neighborhoods, so we can get a proof of concept, what people commonly refer to as product/market fit”. When they received initial support from users by having “ambassadors” have 9+ friends join in their neighborhood, they thought, “oh, anything would work in Menlo Park”, when as they expanded, “it works well in Menlo Park and Portola Valley, happy coincidence”, until they reach 125 neighborhoods, where they began to see posts such as “have you seen my lost cow?” coming from communities set up in rural New York, which is the point when the team realized their product had passed its proof of concept. By passing the toothbrush test — receiving daily usage of the product amongst most of its users — the team had realized that this platform was more than scalable.

“There are all these things we did…, where we rolled up our sleeves,…and it was never going to be scalable, and we knew it. But we were just looking for signal in the noise. And then, systematically, since then, we have made these unscalable things scalable with technology. And that’s what has enabled that growth”.

Two aspects make Nextdoor incredibly unique. One is its focus on maintaining its “early-days” environment by setting up smaller project groups with a designer, product person, analyst together in a room working on a new feature. Another is the core growth bottleneck that it faced: in most social networks, you send a connection request because you want to be connected to other people on the platform. Americans didn’t know their neighbors, and didn’t have mechanisms to invite their neighbor if they had no idea what the names of their neighbors even are. However, this was the entire reason for Nextdoor’s existence (if everyone knew their neighbors well, the platform would be useless). Thus, without people establishing connections with people they wanted to meet in a public environment, Nextdoor had “systematic, slower growth” due to the execution path it took of getting organic growth as more and more neighbors began to meet each other on the platform, although this did mean less competition with other social networks.

“There’s a time to actually step on the gas, and that time is when you’re sure of where you’re going, and you can be sure of where you’re going when your users tell you that they love the product”.

The story of how Nextdoor started and acquired users by having “ambassadors” have their friends join from neighborhood to neighborhood was very inspiring, although what spoke to me the most was the ideas behind leadership and organization that came with this lecture:

• Framework for managing companies — at any given time, you have 5 objectives: growth, engagement, monetization, infrastructure, and people. You should figure out what portions of the pie charts your company needs to spend in each category
• As you start to scale the organization, you need to spend more of your resources thinking about how to take care of your people, how to create career paths for them, how to think about organizational structures that maximize the talent that you have in the organization.
• What: In these five areas, here’s an OKR (role of the team)
  Why: Why is this important? (role of the CEO)
  How: What we want everyone in the company to participate in
• The other role of the CEO/visionary, from Tolia’s coach: “Getting talented people in a room, making sure they’re aligned, getting the team together, and then pointing…at the [same] mountain and taking the mountain together”

Blitzscaling 11: Patrick Collison on Working at Stripe

Patrick Collison is the Co-Founder and CEO at Stripe. After building many iPhone apps and using the revenue to pay for school, he realized how easy it is to charge for items online through apps, but wished there were better options online that would make hosting easier for payments. As someone who leveraged the programming communities he was in (“putting [himself] around people doing interesting things”), he stressed the importance of being in a room with others who have similar interests, but not completely aligned with you in terms of the way of thinking so you are able to receive critical, constructive feedback. In addition, he talked about the importance in aligning other employees with your vision, as the founder is ultimately the one who holds the “long-term perspective of how the pieces fit together, and how the product ought to evolve”. Thus, it is the founder’s job to “understand all divisions in the company and their role to optimize for better judgement” so others can see and create the vision of the company a few years out.

Marc Andressen on Change, Constraints, and Curiosity

During this talk with Marc Andressen at Andreessen Horowitz, he talked about the future of automation and jobs with optimism, which he pointed out, is in stark contrast to how the future of work is portrayed in many media. To back his claims, he mentioned that the critics of technology either use the argument that technology creates no innovation or productivity, or that it creates so much innovation that it’s going to destroy all jobs, pointing out that these arguments are diabolically opposed and can’t both be true. Then, he pointed out that although 21 million jobs in the US are taken away annually, 24.5 million are created, meaning a net increase of 3.5 million jobs in a regular year.

• “So then it’s saying okay, the world is going to change, the jobs are going to change. How do we set people up to be able to take advantage of the change? How do we have to change work for people? How do we expand opportunities? This is why [changing the face of] education is so important”.
• “Through most of recorded history, you had those problems and you wouldn’t be able to find an answer to them. So we’ve got the money, we can fund the answers. We’ve got the problems, we know what we have to go and do”, and by no coincidence at all, “90% of the scientists that have ever existed live right now”.

Funding the Next Unicorn: Building Initialized with Jen Wolf

Jen Wolf is the upcoming President of Initialized Capital, although she started her career as a UX designer. At one of her first jobs, Wolf believed that the environment “was special because it was a confirmation of a lot of very talented people focused on a vision, and it had that feeling of momentum and excitement”. Now, she carries that with her to try and create a team that “moves quickly in a thoughtful and purposeful way”, working to understand “how design thinking, conscious leadership, and diversity all work together to help us get to that next level” at Initialized.

Some notes on structuring teams that I found helpful:

• “It’s better to have a lot of micro conflicts, which are just ways to get ideas out there and understand where differences are, and collaborate to get to a good solution so that doesn’t blow up into a very large-scale actual conflict between co-founders of founders that end up having a very large impact on a business and can negatively impact teams and customers”
• “There is actually a relationship of a circular cycle. If you start with more diversity, you’re going to have more micro conflicts and in order to come into the right or most beneficial resolution to that conflict, you need more empathy. So more design thinking, more empathy [is necessary]”.
• “To get exponential value out of teams, you have to put effort in early. Calibrate the tool, and once it’s calibrated well, it works ten times better. Plus, “a lot of magic happens [once you pass the early stage] after experience with many different approaches”.

PCV Ventures: Dennis Woodside, Impossible Foods President

In this keynote address during a joint event from Penn Climate Ventures and Spark Teen, Woodside talked about his career, his role Impossible Foods is playing in disrupting the traditional meat industry, and his tips on creating enterprises that have a societal impact. Originally starting out in tech & climate, and was empowered to do more by the ability of tech to have an impact to save people’s lives. He provided the example of a neighbor in LA whose life was literally saved, as the neighbor was able to find a specialized doctor who would treat his exact condition in Boston through Google.

“The best founders are thinking…20–30 years into the future, and how to shape that world”. Impossible Foods started with a vision to eliminate the need for any animal-based proteins due what Woodside described as our reliance on an “inefficient system”, where most crops are grown to be fed to animals, during a time when no such solutions were on the market. However, they believed “taking the middleman out” — the animals — there “will be numerous environmental benefits”, including more space efficiency (with less space taken up by crops for animals & and a greater ability to feed a quickly growing population), and a reduced impact of the agricultural sector in climate change.

Woodside then talked about the benefits of being a disruptor from the outside of the industry, and how being from within the industry can work against you, as “you can’t see from first principles because you are stuck in the current system mentality”. At the same time, it was important for their team to spend time learning about the industry, how manufacturing facilities worked, and the regulations behind it all, and the company did have many advisors who came from the food industry. They learned enough to share that massive farm bills of the US government subsidizes crops given to cows, which is the reason why the price of meat isn’t much higher than the cost of vegetables in American grocery stores, which I did not know before. The important part of all of this, however, is “just not worry about getting each decision right”.

Aside from providing an alternative to conventional meat, Impossible is “building a brand that stands for quality and trust where meat is mostly unbranded”. What they’ve learned in their entrepreneurial journey is that it takes time & salesmanship going back and forth, getting lots of no’s but persisting (how they were able to get positions on the menu at Burger King and Starbucks, a major marketing boost). Then, it’s important to continuously hire the right people, and people you’re looking for at different stages of growth may be different.

This concludes my update for April and May 2021 update, although my update for June is just around the corner!