Social Impact Tech: Josh Lachs of Moneythink On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact

We’ve developed technology that helps students quickly and accurately understand the affordability of their college options without needing to do financial aid interpretation alone. Students learn how to fit college affordability into their long term goals.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Josh Lachs.

As a former first-generation student struggling with college financing, Josh has a deep passion for the work at Moneythink. As CEO, Josh sets the strategic vision, bringing with him a 20+ year leadership career within social enterprise, workforce development, and education sectors. Prior to joining, he served as CBO at Net Impact, CEO at Breakthrough Collaborative, and Chief Officer of Workforce Development for Goodwill Industries. In his spare time, he provides executive coaching and mentorship to aspiring leaders. Josh earned his BA at UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) and graduate degrees from Columbia University.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

Sure thing. I grew up as an only child in a single parent household in Southern California. My mom worked several jobs to make ends meet; and we were on food stamps for several years. I wasn’t a great student in high school because I didn’t have self-discipline or desire to do well academically. However, I had a motivated group of friends and was inspired by them. I attended community college and eventually transferred to UC Berkeley.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I switched sectors after working in higher education for 15 years. It was a scary, but rewarding move. Two months after I started in a new C-level role at the new organization, the CEO who had recruited me, had informed us and the Board that she was resigning. For me it was from left field. This news threw me off, but I navigated through that experience.

The other interesting story is that I got to meet and work with Deepak Chopra. That was fun!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Peter Wilson. I was in my late 30’s and had established my career in higher education administration. Peter had come out of retirement to support our institutional strategy; and I reported directly to him for about 1 year. He also became my unofficial mentor during that time. Peter taught me how to be more risk tolerant, how to be comfortable navigating through the uncertainty and the grey, and how to be more confident in my vulnerability.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Don’t let perfect get in the way of great enough”

I used to feel like everything needed to be perfectly lined up before making a big professional decision. And that’s not how life works — or is at least optimal. I changed my mindset to trusting my gut and working with the information we have at hand, knowing we have to start somewhere and we’ll evolve along the way.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?

○ Vulnerability

○ Humility

○ Vision

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve? How do you think your technology can address this?

The big problem we’re aiming to solve is the interrelated issues of college affordability, student success and debt. Getting a college degree is one of the biggest factors in breaking the cycle of generational poverty, yet college degrees are unaffordable for many.

■ There are limited affordable school options, which leads to low graduation rates and high student debt.

■ The average amount of assistance a high school student receives from college counselors or advisors is only 38 minutes across four years.

■ A college degree is extremely valuable but difficult to get due to the many challenges students face along the way.

■ College students continue to face hurdles even after they’ve enrolled in school. Whether it’s the high cost of attending school, confusion about continuing financial aid and eligibility, or personal time constraints, college success is increasingly precarious for many students.

■ Only 11% of low-income students attain a college degree, compared to 58% of high-income students.

■ Due to the lack of clear financial information and lower cost options, students are forced to take out exorbitant loans to pay for college.

■ Confusion behind the language of financial aid award letters is a primary driver of the postsecondary opportunity gap. Award letters are often filled with jargon and formatted in misleading ways, plus missing basic information about financial aid options and clarity on next steps.

■ Nearly 60% of the outstanding student debt is held by Pell recipients. 19 million borrowers, or 31% of the total outstanding debt, did not complete their degree.

We’ve developed technology that helps students quickly and accurately understand the affordability of their college options without needing to do financial aid interpretation alone. Students learn how to fit college affordability into their long term goals.

Our tool, DecidED, demystifies college costs to empower more students to graduate with minimal financial burden. It’s the first automated college affordability tool that is backed by decades of direct mentoring expertise to help traditionally underserved and first-gen students make informed, personalized college enrollment decisions. By translating financial aid packages and delivering insights into cost comparisons, Moneythink’s solutions provide students, families and advisors with easily accessible data and resources to ensure college and career success.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause? How do you think this might change the world?

I’m a former, first-generation college student who struggled to understand and consequently manage my financial circumstances when I enrolled in undergrad and grad school. I took out lots of debt to pay for those schools and my years of education, and I’m still paying those loans for the next 30 years. While I don’t regret my path thus far, I do wish I had more guidance, tools, and resources to help me make much more informed life-altering decisions.

I feel and know this challenge on a personal level. I want to make sure that every current and future college-aspiring student is an informed and empowered education consumer.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

The one thing we keep top of mind is making sure that all students — especially those who come from traditionally marginalized communities — have access to our tech tools. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve created DecidED as a non-native application. Anyone from any device can access DecidED through a web browser instead of an app store.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

I’ll share three key things. We know that data-driven transformation, cultures of innovation, and cutting-edge digital experiences lead to and sustain dramatic mission impact. For us this means systematically empowering students by giving them ownership of their choices and the best chance to succeed in college with promising career pathways. It means holistically transforming the college success ecosystem by shifting the role that college success advisors play using our automated solutions that allow practitioners more space and freedom to provide the high-touch support students really need. And it means informing and impacting college affordability practices and policies by leveraging our automated tools and predictive datasets that could influence efforts towards greater student financial and academic equity, research, and advocacy efforts.

So, what can others who are considering creating a digital programmatic component, developing an app, or pursuing a digital strategy learn from our experience?

■ First, digital is not the end game. Digital is a powerful vehicle that can fuel your mission. Human relationships and insights highly matter. Maintaining personalization with a balanced high-touch, high-tech approach is key.

■ Second, determine the right approach and dosage. Figuring out the parts of your program or organization that could be automated without losing fidelity and your equity-centric focus is important.

■ Third, and perhaps most significant, is to conduct lean, rapid testing with incremental digital experiences. Lean testing, development, and validation helps teams to iterate, fail fast, see what sticks, and helps mitigate early, unnecessary spending on what could be costly endeavors designing in-house technology. For Moneythink, this meant operationalizing human-centered design so that we frame our product approach in terms of “how might we” provocations, find ways to build lightweight prototypes of innovative ideas, and use design sprints to test new tools and features. Even more, we routinely test our ideas with and for our end users. This has resulted an accelerated and often times, cheaper, development process saving the most important resources — time and money — for bigger, bolder, confident bets.

These digital shifts demand enormous energy, vulnerability, and high-risk tolerance. However, becoming even more innovative, agile, and efficient so that we can optimally serve our respective beneficiaries and our team members requires all of us to take the leap. Together, we have the ability to unlock game-changing tools and resources.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Choose something that’s meaningful to you, that you can get behind, and shout out from the rooftops

Be open to listening, learning, evolving, changing your point of view

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.

Barak Obama. His grace and humanity, along with his vision for a better country and world has deeply inspired me. He and his family are walking the talk regarding improving opportunities for youth.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

○ Moneythink.org

○ DecidED.org

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.