Diversity + Inclusion at Early Stage Startups Video Lecture | Startup School Online by Y Combinator - Entrepreneurship

I started at YC in 2013 as YC's
first Director of Outreach.
And that meant outreach to
potential applicants, so
people who were starting companies,
so basically people like you.
And when I started at YC, we'd grown
totally organically up until that point.
So that meant that most of the people
applying to YC had heard about YC
through Paul Graham's essays, through
reading Jessica Livingston's book or
because they were Hacker News readers.
So, Hacker News started out as
a Reddit for tech and startup news.
But if you've ever read the comments,
it might not shock you to realize that
most of the Hacker News community is male.
And if I had to guess, even though we
don't have those specific demographics,
I would guess white male.
So, basically, I realized, and
I think Paul and Jessica realized also,
that there are smart,
hardworking people all over the world,
who should be starting startups,
who weren't users of Hacker News.
So I was tasked with figuring
out where are these smart and
hardworking people, and how do we
get them to consider applying to YC?
How do we get them to consider starting
a company, if they hadn't started already?
And so, one of the things I end up working
a lot on at YC, is finding ways to recruit
founders from what is typically
underrepresented communities in tech.
And then I also think a lot about what do
we do to support those communities once
they're here, once they're starting
companies, once they're in Silicon Valley?
So, to be honest, I was not supper
aware of the particular challenges that
a lot of women and people of color
face in tech when I started in 2013.
So in 2012, I know, the big mantra,
the big thing everyone
said is tech is a meritocracy,
and I wanted to believe that.
I wanted to believe.
And I have been personally very,
very lucky to work
in an environment that is
very supportive of me.
So working at YC for example with Paul and
Jessica at first, then with Sam and
the other partners, I was really
lucky that they took a chance on me.
That they gave me a lot of autonomy and
a lot of opportunity to do great work.
But, even in a place where I think I
have had a pretty great experience,
I've had moments and I've had experiences
that make me wonder whether my life,
whether my job, would've been
easier if I were a man, right?
I've struggled with a lot of anxiety
about, am I meant to be here,
am I qualified for this job?
And there are certain experiences, for
example, not so long ago, there was a
founder, for example, who had a meltdown.
He had a meltdown about something that
frankly I or none of the partners had
any control over, and frankly he didn't
have any control over it either.
But what does he do,
he calls me and he yells.
He starts yelling, uncontrollably.
And as I'm on the phone with this founder,
I'm thinking why am I the target for this?
I don't see him yelling at other partners.
I don't see him yelling at other male
partners and it just really bothered me,
and it really set me back for
a little while.
And so, frankly in the work that
I do with the founders, that
is what sort of really makes me realize
that we have such a long way to go.
So for example, just in the last batch,
I had founders tell me stories about
being asked out on dates by customers or
by investors.
We had one woman who was told by an
investor that she needed to find a white
male co-founder to pitch for her.
We had one woman at demo day, she was a
non-profit founder who an investor came up
and said hey I'll give you
$2000 if you babysit my kids.
And I'm like, what the ****?
[LAUGH] I think what strikes me
is that we are living in 2017.
We are living in one of
the most liberal places,
most progressive places,
in the United States, if not the world.
So what I believe is that we have
an opportunity here to do better.
And I'm excited for you, because I think
that one of the things that's most
exciting is that you have this opportunity
to build a culture from scratch.
Companies are basically like
their own countries, and
you've the opportunity to build
the world that you want to live in.
So some of the best founders
I worked with are ambitious,
they're idealistic,
they sign up to solve these big problems.
Because they see that they're unsatisfied
with something they see in the world and
they think like, hey, I have
the opportunity here to make real change.
So you end up creating an ecosystem with
its own rules, its own structure, and
its own culture.
And that will be modeled based on your
personality and your beliefs as founders.
So when Sam asked me
to host this workshop,
I realized that YC
doesn't have a playbook.
We don't have a playbook that we just
go to that walks early-stage companies
through how to think about D&I issues.
But if you've paid any attention to the
tech news in the past few years, you've
realized that there's a momentum building
up around the conversations around D&I.
And basically, I think you all
realize at this point, as I have,
that most companies really feel and
wish that they had
thought about this stuff earlier on
in the life cycles of their company.
So what I decided to do was I decided to
talk to as many YC companies as possible.
I wanted to find out how they thought
about D&I at their companies,
why it was important to them.
I want to figure out what was working,
what was exciting them about the space?
And I think most importantly perhaps,
what is not working?
And so I brought six of the people here
today that I thought I had the most
interesting and
thoughtful conversations with.
And they're going to share their
stories and observations with you.
So the folks up here, I believe,
will have basically enough knowledge
in the space to fill a book.
But for today we have pretty simple goals.
So first, we want to better define
what diversity and inclusion are.
So I think the words are sort of so
overused these days,
especially in the media,
that they become a little empty.
And so we'll talk briefly about how
we define each of these terms in this
context.
Next, we'll talk about
why D&I was important for
these companies to think about and
when they started thinking about it.
And a little bit about why you
should think about it right now,
even at the very earliest stages.
And then finally,
we want to talk about how to build a
culture that embraces hard conversations.
So diversity and inclusion even for
me as a woman and
as a person of color can feel like
really scary and awkward topics.
And I have a lot of anxiety about
offending or angering other people,
that's what scares and
kind of like stresses me out the most.
But I also realize that having these hard
conversations with your co-founders and
with the folks that work with you,
these are some of the most
important conversations to have.
So many of you today, and many of you
watching, are pre-hiring, so we're
not going to get into the nitty-gritty of
things like writing job descriptions or
how to conduct interviews.
But I will share a page of resources for
you that you can reference when
you're are ready for that stage.
But today I think we'll talk about things
that you can bake into your culture from
day one, that will help you lay
the foundation of building a company
where everyone is set up
to do their best work.
So hopefully you'll leave here today
with at least one thing that you
feel excited and like prepared
to try to implement or try out.
So really quickly, diversity and
inclusion, these are broad concepts and
they're going to mean different things to
different companies and different people.
So one of my favorite definitions
that I've heard is by Verna Myers,
who is a lawyer who does a lot of
D&I consulting for the legal world.
She describes diversity as
being invited to the party,
whereas, inclusion is
being asked to dance.
And so diversity in this context,
I think, will relate to finding and
hiring people from a range of backgrounds.
What diversity is not,
is a code word for gender or race.
And so diversity, I think,
can mean a lot of things.
It can mean different
academic backgrounds.
It can mean different ages, national
origins, religions, work experiences,
perspectives.
And it's going to be up to you to decide
what diversity means for your company,
and what you'd like to focus on first.
And what you decide to focus on first,
is going to change.
It's going to change,
depending on certain factors.
It might depend on where
your company is based, and
what the demographics
are like in that region.
It might depend on your product,
what is going to be important.
And so
if you want to build the diverse team,
you have to think about it deliberately.
Because one trap that happens is that
people focus on hiring individuals.
So what happens is you come up with
a template in your mind for what
an ideal employee would look like and then
suddenly you have an homogeneous team.
So many of the alumni I've talked
to who are doing this really well
have said they have had
to stretch themselves.
They've had to think about hiring a team.
So basically a great team won't all
have the same strengths and weaknesses.
The individuals won't have
the same strengths and weaknesses.
They will have skills that
complement each other.
And if you think about it in some of your
contexts, if you're trying to choose
a co-founder for example, you wouldn't
want to work with a clone of yourself.
You would ideally want to work with
someone who had complimentary skills.
And so here let's see, moving on to
inclusion, let's see, sorry.
Most founders I talked to say that
after fundraising sort of the ongoing
hardest part of their jobs is hiring,
it's hiring great talent.
But one thing that a people related
challenge that is kind of less talked
about is retaining.
How do you get great talent
to stay at your company?
So you can to the work to recruit talent,
but if your culture is garbage,
they're probably not going to stay for
very long.
So the Kapor Center just
released a tech leavers survey,
which talks about why people
voluntarily leave their jobs in tech.
And I recommend you read the whole thing,
its really interesting and
it's not incredibly long.
These are are just four main takeaways.
As the Kapor center has
laid out in their study,
this is a huge problem and
it is a very expensive problem for tech.
And they have seen that D&I initiatives,
if done right,
can improve culture and
really reduce turnover.
And so Jen from Leaver,
who you'll meet soon,
was talking about what does
the flip side look like?
There's a lot of these terrible cases of
what happens when you don't think about
culture early.
But if you do build a culture,
that is great what do you get?
You get a place where people have strong,
personal bonds they
are loyal to your mission.
They stay a long time.
And so Lever I've been specifically
really impressed with.
They are at about 100 employees and
they have a 50-50% gender split.
And I hope when Jen gets up here today she
talks a little bit more about the positive
benefits that she has seen at Lever as
a result of them having thought about
culture and inclusion from a very,
very early stage.
So in all my conversations with YC alumni,
the thing I heard repeated over and over
again is that inclusion is just one aspect
of building a great culture from scratch.
Inclusion is really about building
a culture where everyone can feel safe.
And where people don't have to shy away
from having these really tough and
awkward, sometimes, conversations.
So we'll talk about some of those ways
that companies are tackling that challenge
on the panel, but first let's talk really
briefly about why you might even want to
start thinking about this right now.
So there's a great McKinsey
study that came out in
2015 that I included in the resources
doc that I suggest you read.
But here are some thoughts from YC alumni.
So Porter Braswell is the founder
of a company called Jopwell and
they connect Black and Latin-accent and
Native American people with jobs.
And he described why it's
important in this way.
How can you build world changing
products or services if you don't have
a complete understanding of the different
perspective that exists in the world?
The founders of ExVivo though another
YC company learned this the hard way
they said.
We figured out early that if we hired
people who came from the same academic
background, they approached
problems in the same way.
ExVivo brought up a really great
example to illustrate that point.
And I want to kind of do
a quick experiment here.
So how many of you keep your ketchup
in the fridge, in the refrigerator?
How many of you keep your
ketchup in the cupboard?
Whoa!
[LAUGH] So there's a great episode of
the podcast Reply All where they interview
Scott Page, who's a professor at the
University of Michigan who studies teams.
So Scott says that language,
age, geography,
personal hardship, that is all going
to influence how we solve problems.
And he gave this example of
where you keep your ketchup.
So it turns out after he did
this study if you are British or
African American from the South,
there's a strong probability that you
will keep your ketchup in the cupboard.
And if you are not either of those things,
there's a strong probability that you
will keep your ketchup in the fridge.
So you might think why does this matter?
This seems like a really trivial point.
But what happens if you
run out of ketchup?
So if you are a ketchup in the fridge
person, you open the fridge and
you might replace it with the things that
are next to the ketchup in the fridge,
which are usually mustard or mayo.
But if you are a ketchup in the cupboard
person you might open the cupboard and
realize, I'm out of ketchup, so
you might put malt vinegar on your fries.
And so I love that example because,
basically, it showcases that the more
diverse backgrounds you have represented,
the more associations you get,
the more ways that you have more
pathways to solving problems.
So, honestly, before hearing the study,
I had no ideas that humans even
put their ketchup in the cupboard.
I didn't even know people
like that existed.
So I was like wow,
this is blowing my mind.
So anyway,
recruiting might not be something
that you're thinking about right now.
But inclusion is in the words of Makinde
who you'll meet in a couple minutes.
Inclusion is something
you can tank early on.
So there are really well known stories
about what happens when you don't start
thinking about this at an early stage.
There is issues with the ride sharing
company who will not be named, but
let's also talk about Airbnb.
So last year at the Fortune Brainstorm
Tech Conference, the founder of
Airbnb Brian Chesky was talking about how
they were struggling with claims that
Airbnb enabled discrimination especially
against the African American community.
And he admitted,
I think we were late to this issue.
He said we realize that while we were
building a platform we were three white
guys, Joe, Nate, Brian.
And he said that there were a lot
of things we didn't think about.
So there were a lot of steps that
they're having to re-evaluate now.
So now that we've talked briefly
about DNI, how to define it,
why you might want to think about it.
I would love to invite the panel up to
share their stories and observations, and
have them introduce themselves as well,
and let's bring you guys up.
>> [LAUGH] Thank you Stephen.
>> Okay, No, I'm not-
>> So we'll be sharing be the mics,
because [CROSSTALK]
>> So yeah, you can just pass them.
Is this awkward if I'm standing,
is that okay?
>> [LAUGH]
>> Okay, so
I would love you to go down the line and
introduce your name,
your company, your role, and
how big your company is today.
>> Sure my name is Ashu,
I'm one of the co-founders of Make School.
We're building a college for
computer science.
The company is about 25 people and I'm,
me and my co-founder are co-CEO's.
>> Hi my name is Jen,
I was an early employee at Lever, and
we build hiring software.
So if you've applied for a job or
an internship in the last year or two,
you've probably used Lever before.
As for my role, I've had various roles
building and leading teams in our product,
customer success recruiting, and
employee experience functions.
And we're over 100.
>> And they're at 50/50 gender split.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Which is-
>> Among other things.
>> Yeah, among other things,
but it's hard to do.
>> Hi, I'm Cristina Cordoba, and
I manage the partnerships team at Stripe.
Stripe builds tools and
infrastructure to accept payments for
online businesses, and
we are about 750 people.
And I also spend a significant amount
of my time on our diversity and
inclusion initiatives.
>> I think I have a mic here,
can you guys hear me?
All right, my name is Cat Perez, and I am
the co-founder and CPO at HealthSherpa.
We are a technology platform and
team of people,
helping individuals enroll
in marketplace coverage.
We've enrolled over 840,000
folks on our platform to date.
Apart from products and
just leadership things,
I also lead up D&I at HealthSherpa.
And we're about 20, scaling up to
about 40, 50, in the on-season,
the open enrollment season.
>> Cool, my name is Makinde Adeagbo,
I'm the founder and CEO of dev/color.
We help black software engineers set and
reach ambitious career goals.
We are a team of three.
>> My name is Mitchell Lee,
I'm one of the two co-founders of Penny.
Which is a personal finance app, that you
interact with by way of conversation.
We are a five person team.
>> Awesome, so one of the things that was
very clear to me, as I talked to a lot of
YC alumni, is that diversity is sort of
defined differently for every company.
So I wanted to ask a couple of you,
why was D&I important for you and
your company, and how did you define it?
Let's start with Jen.
>> So why was diversity and
inclusion important for us?
Even though we are an HR tech startup, it
really just started as very organically.
What do we want to do as people and
as coworkers,
wow can we build
an inclusive place to work?
Actually, once we started telling stories,
writing blog posts about it, we realized
there was a lot of resonating with
both our applicants and our customers.
They wanted to know, what are you doing
differently, what can we learn from?
And realizing, as leaders in this space,
we had a lot to do to show here's
what we're experimenting with.
And sometimes, let's be real,
sometimes we make mistakes in.
And to be honest, what's been really cool
is that it makes a lot of difference in
also sales and growth.
So that we're able to show,
this is how we're approaching culture and
inclusion, with this much intention.
It allows prospective
customers to look at, well.
If they are building their
internal company culture that way,
I want to know what their
software looks like.
I want to know what their product is like.
So it's been a really huge benefit for us,
that it gets to be
an ongoing conversation.
>> Cool, I wanted to, let's go with Kat.
I'd really liked hearing about why you
thought it was important, both for
your business case, and for your culture.
>> Yeah, yeah, so for our team,
I mean, I was hire number seven.
And we, I mean, we're a pretty small team,
we scaled up really quickly.
But by nature of who we're serving,
we are serving folks of lower income.
Folks who would qualify for
subsidies on the marketplace.
Kaiser Family Foundation released
a report, I think, for 2015.
The majority of
the uninsured-under-65 market in
the United States are people of color,
over half, so 55 to 60%.
Specifically Latinx and
Hispanic communities, as well as black and
African-American communities.
So, for us it was, it was,
it's a no-brainer, I mean,
our mission is to enroll these people.
Give them access to coverage,
let them know what options they have.
You can't do that, if you have a team
that does not reflect that audience.
So for us, it was really simple and
straightforward, why we needed to do that.
>> And I'd love to hear
a little bit about Stripe.
Why it's important, how you've defined it,
how you interacted with founders as well.
>> Yeah, so I would say, on our side,
we thought about this really early.
But probably not in the way that
you would think a company would.
Both of our founders are Irish, and
immigrated to the United States.
A lot of our really early
employees are also immigrants.
Everywhere from Honduras to Kenya,
to Sweden,
all in our first 20 or so employees.
And I think one of the reasons for
that is because of our core mission.
Which is really looking at, how can
we enable economic opportunities and
access to creating an online business,
no matter where you are in the world?
We've launched products like Atlas, which
enable entrepreneurs around the world,
to get set up with a US entity and
a US bank account.
Which if you are an entrepreneur in Cuba,
or
if you're an entrepreneur in Canada,
very difficult to do regardless.
And I think for us early on, it was about,
how can we build this into our culture?
Because we know that we need
to launch a product that works
in 20-plus countries now,
hopefully every country eventually.
And we need to have people on board who
really understand, what are the right
products to be building for different
entrepreneurs, all around the world?
And how can we make it easier for
people to become entrepreneurs?
The other piece really early on was,
in working on diversity and inclusion.
Making sure that we had a direct line to,
ultimately, people who were
making decisions that affect inclusion and
diversity across the company.
So for us, that means me working very,
very closely with our CEO and COO.
And meeting with them every other week on,
how are we on doing on these various
different aspects of diversity and
inclusion, throughout the company?
And making sure that they
are aware of what's going on, and
that they are approving every single
thing, every step of the way.
And that way,
I can go about what I need to do,
to make things happen within the company.
>> So giving you that autonomy, and
that ability to actually make change?
>> Right.
>> Where you see needed.
So one, the next question I had is, when
did you first start thinking about D&I?
And a couple of you had some
interesting conversations.
And so I want to talk to
Ashu about Make School, and
your experience sort of being
two guys starting this company.
When did the conversation first come up?
>> Sure, so
the conversation first came up, for us,
when we started talking
to some of our students.
At the first summer program that we had,
we had a particular female student,
Sophie.
Who, from mine and my co-founder's
perspective, was this confident,
badass girl who was
building this amazing app.
And we never really realized
she had a bit of a struggle,
when she was actually going
through our summer program.
And it wasn't until a year later,
where we started to talking to some of our
students about what their experience
with our program was like.
And where we really heard that, behind
the scenes, there were a lot of concerns
around how she fit into
the environment of the summer program.
And its important to acknowledge that,
it's not that the environment was
explicitly sexist, or
explicitly discriminatory.
But there's just a lot, just in terms
of the culture and the language.
That you might not obviously flag as,
this is something that might make someone
feel uncomfortable, or feel not included.
And it was only really hearing her
experiences that made us think one level
deeper.
Not just the surface-level challenge,
but one level deeper than that.
How do we go above and beyond, to try and
make this summer environment a lot more
inclusive for For people like Sophie, so
it was really shocking to us
to hear about this experience.
And because we thought that things
were actually pretty good and
that we had a pretty good
culture in the program.
But it wasn't until we actually had
these kind of hard conversations.
And got some very candid feedback to
realize we had a long way to go to improve
that environment.
>> Can you give one example of something
that she experienced that you didn't
realize was giving her a hard time or
making her less able to perform well?
>> Yeah, some of the things were
a little bit less gendered.
It was around,
she was someone who was very athletic and
had a lot of hobbies around not just
computer science and app development.
And most of the students were very
focused around app development and
computers and video games.
And as a result didn't necessarily feel
like she fit in socially as well with
a lot of the other students.
And a lot of it is also just feeling
whether like she had a place in
the environment when you step into a room
where you're one of the few girls.
Or one of the few people of color it
becomes a lot tougher to feel like
you fit in.
And your doubt, whenever you're having
questions or struggles about I don't
know how to build this feature,
I don't know how to solve this bug.
There's a two questions that
are being asked is, one,
is it just that I did not learn this.
Or also is it because I do not fit here
because I am not a person who should be
a programmer.
There is that kind of rhetoric that
society has kind of pushed especially at
the high school level where you tend to
have a lot more boys who are in computer
science or math classes.
And that sort of second line of
questioning makes people and her case
other students to make them less likely
to approach instructors and ask for help.
They feel like I should know this and
should be going for help for
this kind of topic being and so be more
proactive like offering help definitely.
>> And one example that you
gave that I thought was really,
like stuck with me when
she didn't know something.
You know some of the very young
men in the class, high schoolers,
would be like you don't know that?
And I think just like trying to like,
I guess like coach people through.
Like here's an appropriate action
when someone asks a question.
And I think like sharing a really small
personal side note on that is that for
the first year for example at YC I didn't,
I used to wear dresses all the time.
And I didn't, I've wore jeans and a
graphic TV because I just want to fit in.
>> [LAUGH]
>> And I realized I was using way more
brain cycles to really try to fit in and
be taken seriously than I needed to be.
But I wish I'd had this
conversation because,
yes [LAUGH] I think that other
people felt the same thing.
And I'd never talked about it until
actually right now, so there you go,
sharing a story, first time.
[LAUGH] Okay.
And I would like to talk
to you Mitch about Penny,
because you are one of the kind of you and
I think Dav Collar,
probably the most recent
companies to go through YC.
And this is something that
you've thought about a lot.
So, why are you thinking about it?
You're a team of five?
>> Five.
[COUGH] So I guess I should address
the elephant in the room which is
I am a white male on a DNI Panel.
Raised a round of funding for Penny and
started to look to expand our team
at the time we were just two people.
And with a little bit of back story here,
Penny is a conversational app that
helps you with your finances.
It's really intended to help people who
struggle with financial literacy or
just find finances intimidating.
That correlates strongly with people
that don't make a lot of money,
lower income people so.
We were building this interface
which has this personality and
I'm a prolific emoji user and so
Penny ended up using a lot of emojis.
And one day my fiance kind of tapped
me on the shoulder and she says,
I think Penny's flirting with me.
And I was like, whoa,
I just use emoji that's my style.
But kind of experiences like that.
And I heard from other friends as well
really hammered home the point that if
we want to build a product
that's accessible to everyone we
need to have a team that looks like
the people that we're trying to help.
And is kind of representative of the group
of people that we're trying to build for.
So that was one of the turning moments for
why we need to focus on this right now.
>> And, okay.
And Makite you had mentioned,
and I mentioned it briefly that
you think that inclusion is something
that you can tank really early on.
So are there any example's you've seen,
either on the positive or negative
side of companies that you've worked
with that are doing this really well?
>> Yeah,
there's a lot I could say on this one and
I'll start with an example
just from my own organization.
So clearly we're a diversity organization
so it matters a lot to us both for
the team that we build but
also the membership that we build.
One of my big mistakes early
on was taking it for granted.
So I'm a black man, so
I was like okay, that should be easy.
>> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] But
I actually very quickly when starting the
organization fell into this trap of, okay,
the initial members will
be the people that I know,
because that's who it's
easiest to start with.
Turns out there not a lot of black women
in software engineering in that initial
set of people that I brought together.
And right away it became a very
clear issue that the gender balance
in our group was off.
It's something that we
have worked on since then.
It's still not where we still have a lot
and its something we keep an eye on.
But even just realizing that even I had a
blind spot was a big wake up call for me.
So I'm guessing everyone has
a blind spot for different groups.
>> Yeah.
>> So they're small signals
The other thing I'll say is,
just piggybacking on people feeling
like they belong somewhere.
That's another thing that I think is
really easy to mess up just realizing that
you and your company are constantly
sending out signals of who belongs and
who doesn't.
So for us something as simple as sending
out our members to go on off-sites, right?
Like, I was making a list of like,
here's some off-sites you can consider.
And I just put a list of things that I
enjoyed which are like zip lining or
rock climbing.
And for some people that was great, for
other people it sent a subtle signal again
like, hey is this group for
me, do I belong here?
So I had to actually go back to the
drawing board and thankfully we had a lot
of different people on our team who
could add different perspectives.
And also within the membership
who could help fill out that list
to be something that everyone would
find something that appealed to them.
>> That's really cool.
And, so, one of the things that I think I
heard from all of you, and all the alumni
talked about is one of the major kind
of obstacles to start implementing
really impactful DNI programs is getting
people to have tough conversations.
It's getting people, even if they're
uncomfortable to have, to share and
have these conversations.
So, and Jen can you talk a little bit
about you and what's going to come next
is sort of inspired by what Jim told
about a pin, she heard about a Pinterest.
But then also talk about how
you implemented that at lever.
>> Yeah, the particular problem we were
trying to solve for at the time, about
a year and a half ago was this question of
how do you make inclusion truly inclusive?
To make inclusion and culture building
a company-wide activity it's not just
that's like the women's issue or
that's the racial minority's issue.
So something we realized was when we had
events and different discussions about
inclusion there was a smaller subset
of the company that was very active,
very passionate about it.
And actually a larger subset
that considered themselves kind of
a like a little bit on the sidelines.
So don't get me wrong, they thought it was
a good idea, they were very supportive.
But for whatever reason they were a little
bit hesitant to jump really deep in and
be visible leaders for it.
So I was kind of wrapping
this around my head.
And I met a head of inclusion at
Pinterest, Candace at event and
she told me about this
event that they had called.
Sorry, I didn't mean to offend.
And what they did was put a members
of the majority group, I think,
a lot of engineers, white males,
put them on a panel just like this.
And created a safe space where they
were able to talk about mistakes,
missteps, here is something I just had
no idea about, I said, something and
I offended someone, and
I was so mortified.
But by having leaders and by having
their colleagues speak openly about
these events really set a tone for
the culture, right?
Saying, you are not going to be
vilified by saying the wrong thing.
We are going to assume best intentions and
really try to go from there as a team.
So, what we ended up creating, inspired by
that idea, was a session called DNI for
our supporters.
It was an internal seminar, led by,
actually, somebody on our team who's also
from a majority group,
a straight, white, male engineer.
And the fact that maybe was led
by him had two different factors.
So, one, maybe,
because when the person leading it
it someone from the majority group people
are like, I'm way more curious about it.
Maybe I should go,
even though previous events they
didn't seem like they were for me.
And then second, again, really the
designing it with that audience in mind.
The subtitle to that seminar was DNI for
Dummies.
So, it's like if you were ever confused,
or uncertain, and
you just didn't want to
say the wrong thing, so
you've been holding yourself back,
this is the space to come for you.
And it ended up being really successful.
And a lot of people who previously
weren't actively involved came,
and shared really personal stories,
and opened up.
And just to wrap this up, I think,
something one of my coworkers had said.
So, this was a black male coworker of
mine who said, you know, when the cause
isn't your own, it can feel really
uncomfortable to speak out on behalf.
Even if you really,
really want to, because, again,
that fear of saying the wrong thing,
being misinterpreted, being attacked even.
So, it really is a deliberate effort you
have to make for your future employees,
your culture, to say that this is okay.
We're going to navigate
through these things,
just like you would with any
business problem for a company.
>> So, in the spirit of getting
people talk about hard things and
having hard conversations,
I would like everyone on this panel to
share a story about mistake they made.
Or a misstep, something that they
wish they could have a do-over on
when they started thinking about DNI,
at their workplace, so
let's talk about our mistakes.
Do you want to start?
[LAUGH] You can volunteer.
>> I think, I went already, so.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Yeah,
I messed up on gender balance for
the organization at the start, and
I'm still developing more strategies
to sustainably fix that issue.
>> So, I've made a lot of mistakes.
I will say, that we're pretty early on.
And so, for
us, I don't view it so much as mistakes,
as just kind of learning opportunities.
There was a lot of learning opportunities
as we started this process.
How do you approach the subject
with people that you're
interested in recruiting.
How do you position it within your own
company, and have an open dialogue there.
There were also just
small missteps like we
had one woman that actually
ended up joining our team.
We had a dinner with the team.
And the way that we were positioned at
the dinner was just very aggressive,
it was like a noisy environment.
She was surrounded by men, and
we were peppering her with questions and
that's just not a way to make
somebody feel comfortable.
And open up with you kind of
like on a personal level.
There are a lot.
>> [LAUGH]
>> But, I do think,
that we're learning and
we're getting better at this.
Step one is just talk about it openly.
>> Yeah, so, [LAUGH]
we had a few missteps,
I'd like to call them, early on when
we started our DNI initiatives.
We started about two years ago, and at the
time I had come on as hire number seven.
So, we were still pretty small.
Made the really big mistake of
assuming everyone had the same
perception of what diversity and
inclusion meant, to each and
every one of us, and
our lived experiences.
And that means everyone,
including white, cis-males on the team.
All right, so, Jenny talked about this,
but one of our biggest missteps
was just not necessarily even
practicing this concept of inclusion with
our white cis-male team members, right?
Their thoughts matter, and they need to
be involved in the conversation as well.
So, I think, that was our biggest mistake,
was just assuming,
team of seven everyone conceptually
agrees we should do this, but
not really having that tough uncomfortable
[LAUGH] conversation about it, and
then the second thing
I just said there is.
We approach it as a to-do list,
which is a terrible thing to do.
We [LAUGH] were overly ambitious.
We had like seven initiatives we
wanted to roll out at the same time.
Definitely don't do that.
[LAUGH] One is enough.
We learned to approach MVP style,
start small, because this stuff
is really emotionally taxing, and
intense, and triggering for people.
So, yeah, just starting small would have
been something we would have changed from
the start.
I can go, yeah.
So, I would say for us at Stripe.
Probably one of the biggest mistakes
we made fairly early on was,
we need to hire a pretty significant
number of engineers in a very
fast [LAUGH] period of
time in our early growth.
And we hadn't necessary hired the number
of engineers that we were looking to hire
in that period of time,
which was about three months,
at that rate ever in our history.
And we set a really like audacious goal,
in terms of like the percentage of women
and percentage of under represented
minorities, that would make up this
kind of batch of engineers that we wanted
to bring on in that short period of time.
And so, we set this lofty goal,
we had all these aspirations, but
we actually had no plan for
how to meet that goal.
So, of course, we completely failed.
And it was a very hard time,
I think, in the company,
because we effectively hired all
the engineers that we wanted to hire, but
not many of them were people of color,
or women, and as a result,
we had to sit down as a company and
say, like, yeah, we screwed up.
And we had to admit that, like add in all
hands, in front of our entire company, and
start thinking about, okay, well, what
are we going to do to fix this, right?
Because we are going to continue to hire
engineers, and we need to set up a plan,
so that we can do that
in a more effective way.
So, what we did from that point on was,
say, that, I think, at Stripe at the time,
we had this kind of disconnect between
recruiting and hiring managers.
So, I think, in a lot of ways,
hiring managers,
people who need to add engineers on to
their team think about in the context of
recruiting is bringing
me these candidates.
And so, I'm going to find the best ones
and bring them through my hiring pipeline.
But the reality is that as a hiring
manager it's your responsibility for
what your team looks like
at the end of the day.
And you need to take an active
role in that hiring process.
So, we actually implemented
two quarters ago,
a goal effectively saying that
every engineering manager.
Is required to bring an underrepresented
candidate, so a person of color or
a woman, for engineering.
All the way through to the on site
stage of our hiring pipeline at Stripe.
And this really put the onus on the eng
managers to do this because we, one,
created a internally public spreadsheet in
the company of all the eng managers and
which one of them had met the goal.
And so, they could see this,
their team members could see this.
And so, if they weren't dedicating
the time necessary to meet this goal,
everyone would know about it.
And so, that really put the power in the
hands of the higher managers to say, well,
okay, like how can I go out there and meet
people who are not in my direct network?
And how can I insure that we are bringing
more people from different backgrounds
into the funnel of our hiring pipeline.
And we three exed the number
of women in engineering
that we would normally hire during that
period of time through that effort.
>> Cool, I have a story
about how we made a mistake.
And really a valuable lesson was,
how we were going to treat and
kind of deal with other
future problems like that.
So we have an employer resource
group called Leverettes.
And that's what we call
female employees of Lever.
It's a slack channel and dinner like,
I think two or three times a year,
to talk about issues,
you know resources, mentorship.
I had found out that about a year and
a half ago,
somebody had created a private
Slack channel Lever Dudes.
And so, this is a little bit of gray area,
and I think you'll find the pattern,
in that, the gray areas and the kind of
like the awkward, uncomfortable and
ambiguous problems
are some of the hardest.
Because, if you looked at the channel,
there was nothing super wrong with it.
But there was this tone that could be
interpreted a little bit of a mocking.
So, it was said something like, well,
they have a Leverettes channel, so
it's only fair.
And there were some jokes that, again,
nothing super crazy but it didn't make
people who were in it actually,
other men, didn't feel good about it.
So when it was brought up to me,
we talk about how one of our standards and
principles, for Dee and I, is this phrase,
if you see something, say something.
The standard that you walk past
is a standard that you accept.
And even though it's comfortable,
it was our job,
as start up employees, as leaders,
to do something about it.
So we reached out to one of our founders,
Randall, who was incredibly empathetic,
listened to the situation,
took it really seriously.
The problem here was that,
again, it was undermining the other
Leverettes channel and the group.
And also, if left alone,
it could potentially lead to a little
bit of a us versus them mentality,
if it were to grow.
So he ended up addressing the employee
in question, super professionally,
not trying to call him out, just saying
that like hey, this is not okay.
So I'll like to talk about what happened.
Again, really try to understand and
listen, but then also draw the lines.
And then, I think the next part, what he
did, was really something up as a leader.
And again, like Stripe, we decided
to address it at our next all hands.
And I think that's one
of our key learnings.
You have to address things.
It's not fun.
Nobody goes up to all hands in front of
your entire company saying, this happened
and it was super uncomfortable and
awkward, but you have to do it.
Otherwise, it becomes
an elephant in the room.
So Randall addressed the entire company,
and
what was really interesting was
he started the story saying,
by being very honest about a mistake
that he had made in the past.
So, when the Leverettes group was first
formed, and it was just the four of us
women just going out to dinner, he made a
joke about like well maybe I'll grab some
of the engineers and go and get pizza
dough or something, like the same night.
And it wasn't until later he realized
that wasn't what he meant to say,
because, again, if you think about why
that group exists in the first place,
because women may not be minorities,
but they are minorities in tech.
And, therefore,
they have experiences, burdens,
hardships that you might
not even know about.
So the reason the group exists is
not to have fun and go to drinks,
and talk about, I don't know, nail polish.
It really is about the work, and
what can we do to support ourselves,
each other, and just for
future employees and future inclusion.
And just being really honest and
authentic as a leader, I think,
made a huge difference.
Later that day in Slack,
multiple employees both, and also in
person, went to Randall to thank him.
To say things like,
my previous start up founders
would never do anything like that.
I feel really grateful and
lucky to work for place where the leaders
really care about the people, and
it's really human and authentic.
So I think that was
a lesson that we leaned.
It's not just to address it one or
one, you want to prevent it
from happening in the future.
Very easily, could a new hire could
have been drawing six months later and
the same thing happens over again.
So how do you address head on,
really step up as a leader.
It's not going to be fun, sometimes,
it's not going to be comfortable, but
that is your responsibility.
But the thing is, people will remember.
A tone you said, what you say,
your employees remember it, and
it gets embedded into
the culture as you grow.
>> Yeah, so two quick ones.
One Kat touched on earlier,
which is the concept of feigning surprise.
So in the first summer,
we had asked certain students to,
hey, can you zip up your folder and
email it to us?
And students would say, hey,
I don't know how to zip up a folder.
And we would say wait,
you don't know how to zip up a folder?
That's, like, such a basic thing.
But it operates on this assumption that,
this person has gone through the same
education and upbringing that you have,
such that they'll actually know this
thing that you're asking them to do.
So that was a big one,
especially from a standpoint of a teacher.
Not a really great thing for
a student to hear.
Second one was,
starting from early in the company,
we had a very strong voice
culture in meetings that we had.
So, anytime there was some sort of
discussion about certain topics,
it'd get pretty heated,
voices would raise.
Not in an argumentative or
healthy debate way.
But, it also means that people who are
more introverted or are more soft spoken,
suddenly don't have as much voice.
And it's really a big problem when you're
including those folks in meetings and
they're really not getting
a chance to speak.
And those are really two
big mistakes that we made.
And the main thing that we've done,
from a cultural standpoint,
to help people work on these mistakes,
is really assuming negligence and
not malice in these kind of situations.
And really focusing on
where people are going,
as opposed to necessarily where they are.
Both my cofounder and I were quite
young when starting the company so
had lots of mistakes in terms
of leadership and management.
And it's only because we have a culture
where other folks on the team are willing
to understand that we're
constantly trying to improve.
And similarly, if you notice some
behavior and you say something about it,
it's important not to make the person
feel that they are a bad person for
having said this.
But really just help coach them so
that, a year from now,
they'll be a lot better at
this kind of situations.
>> Cool, and you've all talked a little
bit about some things you're doing that
are are going well.
But shifting a little bit from the
mistakes that you've made in the past or
that your organization
have made in the past.
Let's start talking about
things that you're trying,
that you're excited about, that are paying
off, that you think are going well,
in terms of building this
great culture from scratch.
>> Is it going well for anyone?
>> [LAUGH]
>> And yeah, and
I think the thing is is like,
we know there's no easy button, but
if there are any lights
that we can follow.
[LAUGH]
>> Yeah,
can only share what's worked for us.
What's worked for
us may not work for everyone.
There is no playbook, one size, or
blueprint that, one size fits all.
For us, at Health Triple, we did, when we
were hiring, is we leveraged pot tools.
Not to be mistaken, but the other pot.
So people ops tools,
that's what it stands for.
One specifically that we used, it was
called Unidive, it's a Kapor Capital,
a portfolio company,
they're called Talent Sonar now.
And we use it to run our job
descriptions through it.
And the job description check
would score the job description,
it would call out words
that were heavily biased.
And the reason we did that was
to obviously cast a wider net.
So super easy tool to use.
They had other features,
like the blind resume review,
as well as scoring questions.
And making sure that each person who
was interviewing a candidate was asking
every single person the same question.
And those questions mapped
back to competencies and
skills that you need, right?
So when you're a startup, you're
going to do things in a scrappy way,
but we finally built some structure
around our interview process.
And what we ended up finding after
rolling out that one initiative is,
we ended up hitting our diversity goals.
We 2 X-ed our Hispanic,
Latinx hires and team members,
as well as our black team members as well.
So it totally worked.
Another thing I like to throw in there,
as we had that new
team leveraging that initiative, is we
had a plus 85% revenue growth as well.
So I would like to attribute that
to the team that we had in place.
So it's just a testament to the fact that
hiring diverse team members, especially
when you are serving diverse communities
really does impact your bottom line.
>> Yeah, I usually get this question a lot
because of what our organization is.
A lot of founders of small companies
will come up and ask, hey,
how do I hire more Latinx or
black or.female engineers?
And what I usually actually tell them is,
look,
if your company is four, five, ten people,
what you should really think about is,
what are the attributes and
skills that you need on the team?
And be really honest about those things.
So for example, if your building
an ag tech company, right,
and all of your employees are from cities,
that may not be the most effective thing
when you're trying to sell, and
no one has ever been on a farm.
[LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH]
>> So I think it's step one for
me is really taking a really honest look
at what you need your employees to be
able to do.
And what specific things matter to
you at the stage that you're at, and
then hiring against those things.
As opposed to just trying
to check the boxes,
or make your numbers look a certain way.
Because you know when you're larger,
the press will be looking at your stats.
Figure out what's important to you at
your stage, and then hire against that.
>> So I think the thing we probably
have done best is start early.
We started thinking about this
when we were two and three people.
That's important both because the people
you hire early on are eventually
going to go on to be the leaders at
your company and hire their own teams.
And so you want to make sure that you're
building the team now that you eventually
want to have.
It's also important because if you
end up as a team of 15 white and
Asian dudes sitting in a room and
start trying to incorporate diversity
into your team at that point, good luck.
Because people don't want to be
a a token diversity candidate, or
feel alienated by a culture that's
already in place, so that's a big one.
We've also been pretty proactive.
So you mentioned kind
of blinding the resume,
or putting together good job descriptions.
That, at a very early stage,
is not quite enough,
because you're working with
a much smaller funnel.
So we've been very proactive about saying,
no we're actually seeking out
people of different backgrounds and
different cultures to try to incorporate
them into the team early on.
And so partnering with different
organizations that can
kind of help broaden your
recruiting funnel there,
was something that I think
we did well early on.
>> So for us, talking about these issues,
and whether it's community, culture,
diversity, and talking about them
at effectively reset points.
So for our education programs,
when the programs actually
start is a really good time.
But with the company, you can't always
go back and reset to the very beginning.
So at a company off site, let us say in
January right after everyone has come back
from winter break, usually is a good
time to address these kinds of topics.
Because whatever impression you set and
whatever culture you start building
in the first few weeks of the new year
will typically last throughout the year.
And the second piece is providing
mentorship, especially for our students,
and providing mentorship of people who
look like them and feel like them.
We have one of our alums,
Leslie, she works at Lever.
She's been amazing in terms of
creating a support group for
our current female students
in our college program.
That's gone a really
long way to helping that.
And finally,
just finally talking about the numbers.
You shouldn't be ashamed if your
numbers are not very diverse.
Last year,
the first year of our college program,
we had 1 girl out of about 22 students,
which was not great.
But we still talked about that, and
we thought about how can
we actively improve that.
And because it was an open dialogue,
we could think about how to
make plans to address that.
And now we have about 7 girls out of 40,
or 36 students and
100% retention throughout the year,
which is a big improvement from last year.
And so for both programs as well as for
the staff,
we've started talking about the numbers
when they weren't great, and
then continued to increase and
improve them year over year.
>> How are we doing on time?
>> If you could each take one minute.
And then I think I'll, yeah [LAUGH] sorry.
>> Yeah, I'll keep it short then.
So you're hearing a lot of answers
to both on the diversity side and
the inclusion side.
And I can talk a lot about there, but one
thing that I think adding on to what those
two at the end said,
really figure out what works for
your company that might not be for
every other company.
For us, we are a SaaS organization,
in that we have quite a large
sales part of the company.
And one of the very common associations
with what makes a really good salesperson
is we should get some athletes in here,
right?
Right, athletes are the best people.
And I have no doubt that some of
the best salespeople are, in fact,
previous athletes.
But that doesn't mean that if you
weren't an athlete you're going to be
not good enough, right?
So really took to examining some of
these biases and beliefs that we have in
the Valley and work places in general and
really looking at, is that actually true?
And is not going to work for
us at that Lever?
So we've been able to have, yeah,
just make the previous college
athletic experience required,
taking that out of job descriptions.
And making sure people are not being
punished or feeling like they're being
left out because they didn't
have this certain background.
>> Last thing I'll say is,
we did probably 20 things to improve our
intern diversity for this past year.
So in 2016 we had 11% women and
underrepresented
minorities in our internship class,
which was failure, mistake.
And this year, we had over 41% women and
underrepresented minorities in our intern
class, and
we over doubled the intern program.
And I would say one of the things that we
did in particular, that had that effect,
was we created multiple ways to
actually get into our intern pipeline.
So your traditional way of showing
up at a career fair, for example,
or applying to our website were still
ways that we looked at candidates.
But we found that all the other technology
companies were looking at those
exact same candidates.
And you were looking at the same
candidates that had two other great
internships at Google and Facebook, etc.
And you were all fighting over
those particular candidates.
When the reality is, you're looking for
capabilities at the internships stage,
you're not necessarily looking for
people who have tons of experience.
Because likely hood is,
if you're in college, you probably
don't have very much experience at all.
So, how could we hunt for people who have
those fantastic capabilities that we need,
that we think are going to
do really well at Stripe?
And so, one of the things we did was
create two additional application paths.
One was a coding challenge that you
could do in your own free time and
then submit that challenge to us.
And you'd actually go straight
to a phone interview,
you didn't even have to talk a recruiter.
And then the other path was
a show us your code option.
So we went to a bunch of events, like
the Black Society of Engineers at certain
different colleges, the Grace Hopper, etc.
And we said, if you just take out your
computer and show us a project or
something that you've built,
if we think the code is good,
you automatically get to
the next stage right?
So how can we think about candidates
as more than just their resume?
Especially when, in reality,
at a college stage their resume
probably doesn't matter that much.
>> Yeah, all right so we are at time.
So to kind of thank you all for
sharing all your stories.
And I realize a lot of you are pre-hiring,
so
you aren't thinking about
some of these issues.
But I created a resource list and
sort of a living document.
So I will list everything you guys
mentioned, all the resources and
tools that you've used.
And where Steven is going to be sharing
that with class and with everyone online.
And Jen, I'd wanted you to talk
a little bit about the framework for
creating ongoing DNI programs.
But I'm just going to have you,
since we don't have time,
I will hopefully work with you on
a blog that you can, [LAUGH] blog post.
And Lever also has a series, it's a ten
part series that walks through DNI for
companies that I already added on
the resources list of great places
to start if you're looking
to read up more on this.
So we will be sharing that list with you.
And also kind of putting
together all of your notes, and
then anything else that we missed.
This is such a meaty topic,
and there's a lot here.
But thank you also for listening.
And you feel free to reach out to me with
any questions that you have either for
the speakers or for me.
I'm Kat, K-A-T, @YCombinator.com, and
I can connect you to any of these
ladies and gentlemen if that's desired.
So thank you again, and thank you.
I want a round of applause.
>> [APPLAUSE]