From Paper Forms to Machine Readable Data — Cameron Scherer
When I tell my friends what I’m doing this summer, I tell them I work for a tech start-up. “Ooh, what are you working in?” they ask. “IoT? VR?” Not quite. The company I work for, Captricity, works with one of the most old-fashioned technologies out there: paper. Using a combination of machine learning and crowd-sourced human verification, Captricity extracts handwritten data from paper forms and converts it to machine-readable data. “So you work for a scanner?” my friends asked, half joking.
I was drawn to work for Captricity after working for several years with the Afghanistan team of an international development organization. Fresh in my mind were the hours spent reviewing the data from our training programs, and trying to figure out if the errors we spotted originated with the paper surveys themselves, our data clerks at the Kabul field office, or with our Excel template. Yes, it annoyed me that this time cut into my ability to think strategically about how we could learn from this data to improve our programs, but what frustrated me even more was seeing our local staff in Kabul who demonstrated so much potential have their professional development held back by this slow and cumbersome process. Naturally, when I heard about Captricity (founded by a Cal alum!), I knew I had to join the team for the summer.
Although Captricity has grown immensely since its humble beginnings in a rural health clinic in Tanzania, it retains a commitment to its founding story, having carved out a “Captricity.org” vertical, run entirely on a volunteer basis by full-time employees. This summer, I’ve been working for Captricity.org, gathering customer insights and conducting a competitive landscape analysis. It’s not the traditional business internship, but it’s been great to flex the ethnographic interviewing muscles I developed in PFPS, and apply the customer segmentation framework I learned in Marketing.
When people think about business school, they understandably conjure images of financial statements and complicated Excel models. However, the learning to place myself in the shoes of a wide range of individuals has been a recurring theme of both my experiences at Haas as well as Captricity. One of the company’s core values is to “meet customers where they are.” This is a sound business principle, but it’s also one rooted in empathy.
More importantly, this internship has reaffirmed not only my belief that mission-driven businesses can be successful, but also that a hybrid business model can actually be an asset for drawing and retaining employees who are guided by values and a willingness to take risks.
I hope to spend the next year seeking out similar companies not just for my own benefit, but for all other Haas students interested in social impact work. A lot of students are turned off by the assumption that social impact work automatically means working for a non-profit, or doing CSR for a major corporation. Alternatives exist that combine the dynamism of a traditional for-profit with the values-driven goals of non-profits, and I hope to educate my fellow students — and myself — about them when I return to Haas.
Cameron’s collaboration with Captricity.org was made possible through the funding of HSIF. To find out more about how to get involved, visit the Haas Social Impact Fund page.
