DareIT: Lifting More Women Up and Into Tech

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Natalie Pilling was a bit fed up. She had fulfilled one of her lifetime goals — to serve as CEO of a successful company — and had grown EL Passion, a software development agency based in Warsaw, Poland, from 50 to 80 employees. “But I looked around the room, and in many of the meetings, I was the only woman there,” recalled Pilling. “It was very annoying to me. I knew there were many other women out there who could be successful in the tech industry if given the opportunity.”

She had lunch one day with Aleksandra Bis, a product designer at EL Passion, and discovered they had a common understanding of the gender gap issues in the sector and shared a desire to do something about it. Out of this initial conversation in 2017, the idea of DareIT was born. “Initially, it was a side project,” said Pilling. “We started a mentoring program for women who wanted to break into the tech sector. We got together most of our female designers and engineers at EL Passion (about 12 volunteers) to serve as mentors. We knew we were onto something when we hosted an event to introduce the program, and within two weeks, we had 800 applications. We could see right away the demand was out there.”

For the next two years, they piloted and refined the mentoring program, while keeping their day jobs. By 2020, they’d determined that the need and opportunity were large enough that they should devote themselves to it full-time. They set DareIT up as an “Impact business. We’re a for-profit with a social impact mission,” observed Pilling. “We debated what type of organization would be the best fit. We decided to be a for-profit LLC because we wanted to get paid for the services we provide as a way to insure we are delivering real value to our customers.”

“We have bootstrapped it from the beginning,” continued Pilling, using their own savings to get the business started. “We had a small public grant and debated whether to go for funding from an impact investor, but we were happy with how we were able to grow and preferred to retain full control.” Thanks to robust continued growth, they were able to pay themselves a salary for the last two years.

DareIT founders Aleksandra Bis and Natalie Pilling (Source: DareIT website)

Stanford University Partnership

Although the mentoring program was going very well, the founders realized they had a problem: “We were always very over-subscribed; we had 2000+ applicants for 120 slots. So we knew we needed to find a way to scale, but we had hit a roadblock. Based on experience with prior cohorts, we knew the quality of the program suffered if we went over 120 at a time. Participants get a lot of value from the networking, but if the group gets too large, then folks get lost. That meant to grow we would need to run additional cohorts, which would add to the cost and complexity and require recruiting new corporate partners.”

The solution came in the form of a partnership with the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. “Emil (Palikot, a postdoc in the Golub Capital Lab from Poland) had heard about our program,” recalled Pilling. “He was curious about the effectiveness of what we were doing. Measuring impact had been part of our focus from the beginning of the mentoring program. We always tracked our participants to see if they were able to achieve their goal of getting a job in the industry. We had been achieving a 50–60% placement rate, which compared very favorably with other similar efforts.”

“We started talking about doing research together to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of the mentoring program and identify improvements,” she continued. “In parallel, we began working on the design of a totally new program” at the prompting of Prof. Susan Athey, the Director of the Lab, who specialized in using technology to build scalable, low-cost solutions to societal problems. “We used some of the same building blocks and learnings from the mentoring program to come up with a new program, which we called Challenges. What we’d heard again and again from mentees was that they were frustrated that they couldn’t get job interviews because they didn’t have the relevant prior experience the employers were looking for.”

The Challenges program was “designed for someone in the later stages of preparing for a career in IT,” according to Pilling. “We realized there were plenty of offerings out there for the initial stage of exploring career paths and providing the education and training to get the required basic knowledge. We wanted to address the gap in actually getting the first job, which can be quite difficult. We provide learners with opportunities to gain real-world experience they can share with employers.”

Challenges gives participants a project “as if they were in a real company,” said Pilling. “We started with product design and front-end coding projects, and then extended to QA (quality assurance) and Cloud engineering. We worked closely with one of our corporate partners, who brought the perspective of a potential hirer to make sure these were realistic assignments.” Participants are given the option to pay to get feedback on their project from an experienced mentor. In addition, DareIT will sometimes run a contest for participants with the best projects to get a guaranteed job.

The program kicked off at the start of 2022 and has already served several thousand women. After Russia invaded Ukraine, DareIT received a large grant from Activision Blizzard to run three special cohorts of Challenges for the many Ukranian refugees that had been forced to relocate to Poland, helping over 1,000 women in their search for work.

DareIT has been delighted with the results of the partnership with Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. “We can only say great things about the cooperation,” said Pilling. It has been a real game changer, both in properly validating the results we’re achieving to fulfill our mission, and in enabling us to create a new program that has been designed from the outset to make it measurable.”

“It has been a true partnership from the outset,” Pilling continued. “We’ve felt everyone at the Lab — Susan, Emil, and all the others — are invested in making DARE IT a success. We’ve benefitted from the different perspective from the US and useful insights they’ve brought from other organizations and projects they’ve worked on. They also brought a deep technical perspective. For instance, together we built a bot based on OpenAI that allows mentees to query our vast content database of written and video material helping them to find a job in IT.” Susan Athey describes this project as a prime example of fulfilling the mission of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. “The Challenges program is a great example of a digital solution grounded in research that is cost-effective and scalable. Partnering with DareIT allowed us to build a solution that was responsive to DareIT’s on-the-ground understanding of the transition process from the perspective of both workers and employers, and further DareIT was able to attract a group of women eager to participate in the program.”

As DareIT looks to the future, Pilling sees a couple of options to build on their initial success: “One idea is to expand beyond Poland. We’ve had close talks about potentially going to Saudi Arabia. We’ve also been looking at other Western European countries. May consider other places where we follow the lead of our corporate partners.”

“A second idea is not to expand geographically, but rather to adapt to generative AI and other tech innovations. We’re big believers in no-code tools. We just created and began recruiting for a large new program on no-code automation called NoCodeMakers. Our goal is to ‘future proof’ new entrants to the changing tech landscape and teach them skills of the future.”

Susan Athey also highlights the importance of thinking big. “The influence of the tech sector in our everyday lives is ever-growing. Scalable solutions like Challenges can further help diversify the sector; in the future we might look beyond gender and into enriching representation across underrepresented groups. In doing so, we can increase equity within the sector, and foster further creativity and growth of the sector, as well.”

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Golub Capital Social Impact Lab @ Stanford GSB
Golub Capital Social Impact Lab @ Stanford GSB

Written by Golub Capital Social Impact Lab @ Stanford GSB

Led by Susan Athey, the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB uses tech and social science to improve the effectiveness of social sector organizations

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