I moved to New York five years ago after David Karp took a chance on me, convincing me to join Tumblr and move to the best city. And those five years of living and building in New York have been transformative. While Silicon Valley taught me to build with the scientific method and a growth mindset, New York taught me to build with heart and soul. It was in NY that I began angel investing in and advising early-stage startup founders on how to build a product-driven company, make their first PM hire, and find product-market fit early.

It was in NY that I found ways to champion the boldest and most ambitious founders who also happen to be first-gen immigrants, liberal arts majors, and BIPOC folks coming from nontraditional backgrounds. It was in NY that I realized my core mission of supporting and championing founders at the earliest stages. The past 10+ years of operating, advising, and investing has taught me the chaos theory of company building. One thing has become clear from these experiences–I want to be in the trenches helping founders and builders.

I’m so excited to be joining Silicon Valley Bank as Director of Early Stage Startups, helping New York’s vibrant and inclusive ecosystem of founders and builders.

SVB has been a vital part of my New York tech experience. I’ve loved every minute of partnering with Andrew Oddo on startup programming, learning about the LP world from Daniel Dehrey, and meeting the best NY founders at SVB’s intimate gatherings. What resonated with me the most is the way SVB supports founders with a human touch. SVB is more than just a bank. It’s also a constellation of confidantes and trusted advisors who offer platform support, banking, and fundraising help. And I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to champion founders, leveraging SVB’s world-class platform, brand, resources, and network. This is a dream come true.

Founders, it is my deepest honor to serve you as a confidante, fundraising strategist, and product advisor. Please don’t hesitate to drop me a line at bren@svb.com.

You can find me on Twitter at @bosefina and my DMs are open as always.

I’ll be sharing musings on Substack here.

See you in the trenches,

— bo

In celebration of Asian Pacific Heritage Month (APAHM) we hosted a virtual salon with Gold House last month. Gold House is a nonprofit collective of diverse leaders dedicated to forging stronger relationships that empower Asians to have more authentic, more successful, and healthier lives to advance all of society.

We partnered with Gold Rush Venture Directors Megan Ruan and Mikkoh Chen, along with our Head of Diversity and Inclusion Jiun Kimm, to gather fifteen Asian founders to talk about their shared experiences and challenges.

Key takeaways:

• The bamboo ceiling prevents many Asian Americans from advancing to leadership positions.
• There is a need for Asian American founders to cultivate a narrative around shared heritage. Very few successful Asian founder stories are shared in mainstream media.
• Many Asian American founders are building goodwill and brand equity through their philanthropic donations and volunteer work, giving back to the Asian community during COVID-19.

Breaking the bamboo ceiling

Our salon included an incredible group of 10 founders representing many different industries, including travel tech, fintech, and hospitality. This event included Sahra Nguyen founder of Vietnamese off brewery Nguyen Coffee Supply, Lucia Liu creator Rock the Boat podcast about Asian Americans challenging the status quo, and Gary Chou founder of Orbital Studios, a community practice for techies and creatives, and many notable Asian American entrepreneurs.

Even amongst this powerhouse group, many founder participants in the salon felt as though they were the “only” Asian representatives in many situations, including board rooms, pitch meetings, and in leadership.

This sense of “onlyness” persists as Asian Americans advance higher in organizations. A recent Harvard Business Review study showed that Asian Americans are the least likely group to be promoted as executives in corporate America. The proverbial “bamboo ceiling” prevents many Asian Americans from advancing into leadership positions at corporations.

George Zeng, founder of Moonfish, said he saw very few Asian executives while product managing at Facebook. He noted in Silicon Valley there are very few Asian leaders in management despite the number of Asians employed in tech companies.

Company diversity data in 2013 reveals Asians and Asian Americans comprised 27 percent of the workforce at Google, Intel, Yahoo, Hewlett Packard, and LinkedIn, but they held just 13 percent of executive jobs.

George wondered if this lack of advancement for Asian executives and founders has to do with a lack of cultural fluency and bias against Asians to navigate traditional power structures. He hopes that the Asian American community can work to de-risk the founder journey as a profession so that more next-generation Asians can aspire to such a path.

Cultivating more shared narratives

A recent Gold House study showed 30 percent of emerging unicorns and unicorn companies have Asian founders, but we don’t often hear their stories. One way to combat the sense of “onlyness” and lack of representation is to highlight Asian founders and executives and promote them as models of success that others can aspire to.

To that end, Lucia Lee founded the podcast Rock the Boat. Through the podcast, Lucia hopes to encourage more Asian founders and executives to share their own experiences and narratives publicly so we have more success stories and paths to look up to.

She discovered there are actually many high-ranking Asian executives and founders in tech. They include Patrick Lee, who founded Rotten Tomatoes; Holly Liu, co-founder of Kabam and the first Chinese-American woman to exit a billion-dollar business; and Eric Ly, the original co-founder and CTO of LinkedIn; all of whom have spoken on the podcast.

Our Head of D&I Jiun Kimm said there is power in sharing personal stories but also finding ways to connect with the larger community. Storytelling is incredibly powerful because it helps other Asian Americans feel less lonely as the “only” in corporate America but also finds ways for the Asian community to reject storylines that are not ours. Change happens slowly but stories compound to change.

Adapting businesses to the reality of COVID-19

The COVID crisis is causing this group of founders to think more deeply about how their businesses are pivoting to support those most directly impacted by the pandemic and, specifically, support those within the Asian Pacific Islander community who may be impacted given barriers to access and limited resources.

Pearl Chan created Snowball Wealth, a fintech startup dedicated to student loan relief, to help first-generation immigrant students overcome student debt. After COVID-19, she is seeing an increase in demand for financial advice from college graduates and recently unemployed people. In her experience, first-generation college graduates have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic so she is pivoting her business to meet her users where they are.

The pandemic has also impacted small businesses in New York City. Sahra Nguyen from Nguyen Coffee, was worried about the community’s older generation who may lack the language skills and cultural fluency to navigate the bureaucracy of PPP loans and small business resources. As a result, she started a fund for undocumented workers and has donated 5 percent of May proceeds in honor of APAHM to Mekong NYC, a Bronx-based nonprofit that aims to improve the quality of life of the Southeast Asian community in New York City, where she also sits on the board.

We hope that more Asian American founders continue to celebrate their heritage by sharing their narratives and struggles as barrier-breaking entrepreneurs. Samsung NEXT is a global organization dedicated to cultivating a culture of diversity and inclusiveness for all walks of life. Please get in touch with us to continue the conversation and meet some awesome founders.

Want to stay in touch? Join our new Slack community here to continue the conversation about Asian American founders and connect with other founders: http://discuss.samsungnext.com/

Gold House x Samsung NEXT virtual salon: Asian Founders Cracking the Bamboo Ceiling was originally published in Samsung NEXT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Samsung NEXT we have been pondering the question, “How do you cultivate communities online during changing times?” To answer this, we gathered Community Lead at First Round Capital Serena Bian, GM of Startup Initiatives at Zendesk Pedro Muller, and Head of Developer Relations at Samsung NEXT Jesse Freeman to share their insights and best practices. Here are key learnings from our virtual salon on “Cultivating Community During Times Like These” hosted on April 8th via Zoom.

Get more tactical and more targeted

As we shift from offline to online events programming, Serena explains that most community tools have been grounded on the “socialness” of an event e.g. retreats, breakfasts, diners, etc. Given the current COVID-19 challenges, Serena admits “there is a social component to events that is very hard to create virtually.”

She asks herself, “How do you build 1–1 community intimacy in a space like Zoom?” For Serena, instead of trying to recreate social components in virtual events, she focuses her efforts at First Round on supporting startups in tactical ways. Jesse tries to be “the introduction powerhouse for our community” connecting First Round’s founders to knowledge experts in their community.

Be expansive and inclusive in your community offering

When it comes to tactical support, Serena recommends a more inclusive approach:

“Be more expansive in what it means to support our founders.”

A lot of the founders in First Round’s community are parents with children. As a result, First Round has organized tactical ways to support working parents through hosting weekly virtual parenting office hours, virtual children reading sessions, remote work forums, and weekly virtual yoga. To ensure these offerings are effective, Serena monitors her community’s health through sending out frequent micro surveys.

Focus on Quality over Quantity

When it comes to virtual event curation, Serena recommends focusing on quality over quantity. Everyone is doing the same thing trying to build intimacy at scale and competing for attention online. Try to do something different.

Before coordinating a virtual event Serena thinks through two criteria:

1) how can you do less?

2) does the event target hypersegmented audiences?

She asks herself, “How can we send people less emails? How can we ensure that each email received is segmented and efficient and not too much?” When it comes to audience segmentation Serena focuses on gathering smaller groups over optimizing for sheer quantity in order to engage deeper and more thoughtful discussions.

Prepare for a cultural shift in community-building

Jesse, Head of Developer Relations at Samsung NEXT, observes,

“We are undergoing a huge cultural shift.”

He believes how we convene as a community will be fundamentally different after this pandemic. Jesse said, “This isn’t a fad. This isn’t going away. This is going to be the norm.” He predicts new community behaviors will emerge and social norms developed around events gathering in the online world post-COVID-19 era. He ponders, “Will people want to go back to old events?” He recommends community builders take the time to figure out new models around migrating offline to online communities, anticipating lingering effects to persist post-pandemic.

Jesse predicts,

“We will see the shift online is way more important in person for the foreseeable future.”

Be ready to ask yourself questions on how to migrate people back to offline events after all this over. It’s plausible a portion of your community will prefer to remain online after this pandemic is over so be prepared to navigate the new ambiguity of offline and online communities.

Get others to share your message

To navigate this paradigm shift from offline to online communities, Jesse has been honing his writing skills, penning articles on Medium.

He follows a simple rule,

“Write and do interesting things that other people want to share in an organic way.”

To measure success in his writing and online events, he asks himself a simple question:

“Are [people] sharing our message with their community?”

Through writing online, Jesse creates brand advocates and evangelists about a concept or product. However, you want more than just retweets but rather passionate evangelists who can share your ideas, thesis, and products for you. This creates a scalable model for you to disseminate your organization’s ideas or products.

Find new ways of measuring success

When it comes to fostering online engagement, Pedro, GM of Startup Initiatives at Zendesk, has been developing new ways of measuring success. Fundamentally, his core business KPIs have stayed the same but he has changed how he tactically executes online events through a couple of new metrics.

To measure the success of events, he tracks the following:

1. Average time spent in the event

2. Dropoff points of attendees: when did your audience lose interest?

3. How many questions did people ask? Was your audience engaged in the content?

Pedro recommends creating an experience where attendees feel like “they are building with us.”

To do so, he recommends shifting from marketer to community builder mindset. Do not create a one way channel to massively broadcast your message, instead create a dialogue between you and your attendees in virtual events, permitting shared discussion and intimacy.

Key Takeaways for Community Building in the New World

It’s not easy to be building a community in a changing landscape, to better equip you to navigate through uncertain times, Serena, Pedro, and Jesse share the following takeaways:

1. Prioritize quality over quantity. Serena recommends being hyper focused on your topics so you can cut through the noise and attract your target audience. Make sure your topics are relevant and segmented to a specific audience e.g. founders, product managers, designers, engineers etc.
2. Execute fast. “The speed of execution has increased.” By the time you put on a virtual event or publish a blog post in two weeks that topic may be obsolete. “Sometimes you need to put on an event in a week” said Serena as the window of relevancy shrinks online. The response time to new events and content is faster, which accelerates the speed of execution. Your audience needs are changing faster so you must adapt as well. The speed in which our world is changing creates a sense of urgency in executing faster to stay relevant while still maintaining quality as the highest metric.
3. Reassess and reevaluate regularly. Pedro recommends reevaluating all your projects and focus on the ones that drive growth and community engagement. Don’t be afraid to question everything as you know it — wind down certain projects and accelerate others. Ruthlessly prioritize high impact projects and discard what’s not working — nothing is precious.
4. Experiment, test, and iterate. Jesse recommends maintaining an open mindset for experimentation. We are all figuring this out as we go. There is no right way to do things anymore as all the rules have changed. Jesse recommends maintaining a growth mindset when it comes to experimentation and agile development of virtual events and content. Come up with new hypotheses to test, ship a MVP version, gather rapid feedback and rinse and repeat.

As we collectively navigate through paradigm shifts in community building, we hope that founders, community builders, and operators continue to innovate in this new world. Maintaining a growth mindset is critical to overcoming challenges and paving new ways of thinking. History shows us that innovation happens during critical paradigm shifts — policy/regulation changes, macroeconomic crises, and political changes — what’s important is we continue to test, experiment, and iterate through time.

Additional Resources:

• Zendesk guide on how to organize an online community event: https://medium.com/startup-central/virtual-events-guide-for-startups-a335cd86c834
• CMX Space Model: https://cmxhub.com/the-space-model/
• First Round article featured David Spinks from CMX on virtual events and cutting through the noise: https://firstround.com/review/dont-just-throw-together-a-webinar-the-virtual-events-crash-course-you-need/

How to Cultivate Community during Uncertain Times was originally published in Samsung NEXT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Purpose-driven technology has become a huge focus in tech for the past year given the rise of privacy/data breaches and adverse effects of persuasive technology. With the rise of social enterprise startups, B-corps, and humane tech advocacy groups, the tech industry is at an inflection point. After seeing the negative externalities that came out of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 business models, many in the industry are seeking to course-correct and find new ways of building and innovating mindfully.

To explore this topic further, we convened a group of builders and founders from Human Ventures, Condé Nast, Motivote, Hire Tech Ladies, Breathing.ai, The Village, Juxtapose, Enigma, and Deed for our fourth What’s NEXT dinner on Tech for Good.

A big culprit for the internet’s myopic focus on growth and data collection stems from the adoption of the “time spent” metric. Large advertising and social media platforms adopted the metric to measure user attention, which created an incentive to optimize their products to keep users engaged.

While this metric is an indicator of usage and attention, it does not accurately measure an app or service’s value to the user or the quality of a user’s experience. Did the user learn something new? Do they feel closer to someone (or the world at large) after using the product? Was the content they viewed useful in any way?

Could new metrics do a better job of measuring user value?

The overreliance on time spent as the defining metric for so many businesses created a ruthless optimization that did not consider the consequences of consumer health or product integrity. However, what you measure, you can change.

Ryan Cooley from Human Ventures shared a story about building a group live-streaming app, which found that greater emotional discomfort in users correlated with longer viewing sessions. That is, the more emotional tension users felt, the longer they spent using the app. The product ended up shutting down in part because growth stalled while trying to optimize for more usage. Ryan warned about how important incentives are to an organization because that becomes the North Star for everyone.

We asked, “What new metrics could replace time spent?” But finding new metrics to supplant time spent is a challenge because each product is designed to do something different. The group agreed that moving away from engagement metrics is a start. Defining metrics specific to a startup’s core business model is a better way to measure actual value delivered to users.

Breathing.ai CEO Hannes Bend recommended measuring psychosocial factors in digital consumption affecting a user’s subconscious and wellbeing. His company personalizes the UX/UI of screens and audio devices using patented “adaptive interfaces” that are designed to improve existing screen time by individualizing the user experience within the applications used. For example, the colors and fonts on a screen can change due to a user’s neurological activity, which is detected via web/smartphone camera and AI.

Hannes believes that understanding the impact of time spent on devices on user physiology can lead to more positive behavioral changes and the design of more humane digital interfaces. By informing users of the health effects of their devices, Breathing.ai hopes to center device usage around the user’s wellbeing.

Jun Harada, who is working on digital strategy & innovation at Condé Nast, is bullish on using “loyalty” as a new KPI to measure subscription and readership. Condé Nast’s digital innovation team is still early in measuring loyalty in users and is experimenting with new metrics. The team is exploring longitudinal data analysis of its audience and the frequency of site visits over a time horizon as long as 10–15 years.

Who and what will get surveillance capitalism to change?

Many at the dinner were skeptical that regulation could keep up with the speed of technology. Others who had worked for big tech companies doubted the efficacy of employee advocates making an impact against corporate management.

Rachel Konowitz, who works on a voter engagement platform called Motivote, believes that industry change for more humane technology practices will come out of a collaboration between regulators and companies. Rachel pointed out that perhaps the catalyst for change will rest on a combination of consumers, nonprofits, ethicists, and lawyers rallying together, pushing for activism and change outside of tech companies.

Michael Brent, Data Ethics Officer at Enigma, has founded a grassroots organization called the Technology Ethics Coalition (TEC), which connects people working in the local tech industry. They address the social, political, economic, and moral issues related to the current and future state of our industry.

Their ambitious goal is to protect individuals and communities from the harms caused by the uncritical use of data and machine learning technologies. They seek to achieve this through building an educated and engaged base of coalition members comprised mainly of local tech workers, fostering industry adoption of regulatory frameworks that protect companies from ethical risk, and by playing an integral role in the inevitable development of future legislation regulating the tech industry.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about how things that are broken in tech today, but this group of passionate change-makers is hoping to make an impact on the way the technology industry defines success. Today, creating a success is no longer based on blind optimization for a single metric.

It will be a challenge to address the industry’s metrics, incentives, and old habits, but the future of how technology will evolve depends on us solving the unforeseen consequences of how it’s measured.

One of the basic tenets of building technology is iterative learning, which means learning from our past mistakes. What we’ve learned from the consequences of blind optimization for engagement and growth will inform how we build a new generation of technology that’s more humane, mindful, and truly willing to put the user first.

What’s NEXT Dinner Series: How to be a force for good in technology was originally published in Samsung NEXT NY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few weeks ago I had the honor to speak on a Tech for Good panel co-hosted by Enterprise Ireland and Deloitte Digital. It was entitled “Tech, Media, and Ethical Innovations” and also featured Facebook VR Product Designer Michelle Cortese and Newship founder and CEO Paul Quigley.

On the panel, we spoke about the intersection of tech, humanity, and design; shared mistakes we think the tech industry has made; and discussed where we are today and where we hope to go in the future as builders, founders, and investors.

In the age of surveillance capitalism and privacy/data breaches, we believe doing the right thing as a business will be a competitive advantage in the next formative decade, a view both Michelle and Paul echoed on the panel.

Paul’s startup Newship tracks the spread of information online, including fake news. The technology behind Newswhip can predict what’s going to go viral in the next 24 hours. He spoke about the need for companies to do the right thing and think about the information and media diet consumers are ingesting every day.

Paul believes big tech companies can no longer be ingestion engines or agnostic distributors of content. They bear the responsibility for the types of information that spreads on their platforms and its effect on society.

Michelle spoke about her research in the VR space and the negative impacts VR can have on victims of sexual assault. She has been designing for virtual respect and consent in VR spaces. Many victims of sexual assault may experience triggers in the VR space, mimicking their assaut. About 50 percent of women in VR have experienced some form of sexual harassment, and many victims of sexual assault experience triggers in the VR space.

Michelle has been designing for virtual respect and consent in VR spaces, and published a paper in Facebook Research about how to design for safe spaces and respect with her VR coworker Andrea Zeller. She was hopeful about the future of design ethics and responsibility as companies realize that safe spaces are important for women online and offline.

During the session, I shared the user empowerment thesis Samsung NEXT uses to inform how we think about investing in and building products, while learning from other panelists how they seek to course-correct the industry’s ethical problems.

How we think about consumer empowerment
One reason I joined Samsung NEXT is the values-driven work we do. We partner with, acquire, invest in, and are helping to build the next wave of companies enabling people to take back control of their time, attention, and data.

Our mission statement is centered around “championing builders and founders inventing a more purposeful future.” That means we not only squint into the future, but also are committed to leaving a positive legacy to the world.

Our consumer empowerment thesis, in particular, is founded on the core principles of humanizing technology, resisting the attention economy, and empowering users. Unlike other tech companies that are based on an advertising business model, Samsung primarily sells hardware. As a result, we aren’t in the business of harvesting your data, time, and attention.

Online advertising has brought tremendous growth and revenue for many big tech companies, but that also means for the consumer their attention and data are bundled and monetized. With that business model also comes the negative externality of optimizing for maximum time spent on each company’s platform.

I would like to believe those companies couldn’t have anticipated the current state of technology 20 years ago, or the negative ramifications their business models would have on the human psyche, media, and politics.

But with numerous data breaches and increased government scrutiny, consumers are becoming more skeptical and sensitive about how their data is being used and manipulated for tech company gains.

Studies show that 78 percent of global citizens are concerned about their online privacy. Gen Zers are growing more and more concerned and outspoken about privacy and data issues. With the rising consciousness of surveillance capitalism and persuasive technology, tech companies now have a fiduciary duty and social responsibility to build more humane technology for their users.

We see this shift in consumer sentiment and consciousness as a great competitive opportunity to mindfully innovate and do the right thing as a business.

For example, we recently invested in a startup called Scroll that offers subscription-based, ad-free browsing of multiple publishers across the web. The service offers a better experience for users while also generating more revenues for publishers than they would receive in an ad-based business model. We believe backing companies like Scroll creates a win-win situation by growing online publisher revenues while also helping consumers and society at large.

I’m hopeful with the rise of VC funds like Attention Capital and nonprofits like the Center for Humane Technology that builders, founders, and investors are innovating on new business models that put the consumer first while making returns.

I also hope that as we move into the new year, more businesses see that being mission-driven and humane in their data privacy practices, harassment policies, and information dissemination will create better business models and returns.

Originally published at https://samsungnext.com on December 26, 2019.

At Samsung NEXT, we understand that each individual’s various identities largely shape their experiences as builders and founders. In an environment where women of color receive only about 1 percent of total funding in the United States, we recognize that being in the workforce can feel isolating and impact issues related to cultural identity and mental health.

As fellow Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) women in tech, Mia and I wanted to create a space for others to discuss the intersection of racial and cultural identity with mental health. As part of our What’s NEXT Founder Dinner series, we convened founders, operators, and investors from Amazon Web Services, Google, 2U, Flexport, and Splunk.

We co-hosted this dinner with Cassandra Lam, founder and CEO of The Cosmos. The Cosmos is a community for Asian women that creates online and offline cultural spaces to help them flourish and thrive. Its mission is to empower Asian women to cultivate wellness and confidence through culturally relevant care and community.

We were inspired by the organization’s founding story, so we invited Cassandra to lead our discussion about wellness, mental health, and career. The dinner covered the following themes:

• Self-love vs sacrifice: The conflicting definition factoring cultural nuances
• Impostor syndrome: You can’t be what you can’t see
• The Asian identity: Inclusive definitions of AAPI, including underrepresented groups like Southeast Asians & Pacific Islanders
• Wishes for the next generation

How do you define self-love and wellness?
Amy Chen from AWS spoke about the challenges of defining wellness in a culture that fosters sacrifice as a form of love and filial piety. Wellness seems like a selfish and foreign endeavor when you’re raised to prioritize putting others ahead of yourself. Cassandra pointed out how the concept of “boundaries” does not exist in Asian families and culture, which makes it challenging to put yourself first.

Chrystal Zou from chimed in that she struggled with embracing wellness because, “Growing up my first encounter with the concept of mental health really came in glossy magazines where a lot of the women were wealthy and privileged, and wearing fancy yoga pants.”

The commodification of wellness made it challenging for Chrystal to identify with the mainstream wellness space. As the wellness space makes strides, we hope that it introduces a more diversified and inclusive suite of services and products for all underrepresented groups, while taking into consideration cultural nuances.

Eunice Kim-Skenderian, the founder of InkyZen, shared her dad’s story of sacrifice as a “goose father.” Goose fathers are fathers who stay behind in Korea and send money to their wives and children living in the states. Often fathers suffer from loneliness and depression silently.

Within the context of deep family sacrifice, it’s no wonder that it’s difficult for Asian American women to define wellness for themselves. Understanding the psychology of sacrifice is important for Asian American women to come up with their own definitions of wellness in the context of two cultures.

Overcoming impostor syndrome
The topic of impostor syndrome resonated with everyone in the room. In light of a recent promotion to engineering director, Nafisa Chowdhury from 2U felt impostor syndrome based on her childhood upbringing. As a Bengali immigrant growing up in Canada under extreme poverty, she never identified with the model minority stereotype that befalls Asians.

As a manager, she is now reflective of how different her socioeconomic background is compared to her parents. She realizes her perception of self is informed by her immigrant upbringing and the poverty she experienced.

Overcoming impostor syndrome is not as easy as getting an injection of external validation. It often necessitates integrating how we perceive ourselves with how others perceive us, all the while discerning what can be left behind.

Mia Manantan from Samsung NEXT shared her own struggle in identifying with other Filipino women at a company given the scarcity. She said, “you can’t be what you can’t see.”

Knowing what’s possible comes from seeing role models, examples, and mentors who look like you. I deeply resonated with her statement because an HBR study found that Asian American women are the least likely minority class to get promoted to executive roles. An Ascend Study on “The Illusion of Asian Success” analyzing executive composition in Silicon Valley companies from 2007–2015 found that Asian American women are the least likely to be represented as executives by 66% underrepresentation.

Contrary to the saying “it’s lonely at the top”, it’s lonely period when you can’t find others who look like you in an organization. This is one of many reasons why representation matters so much. Like Mia, I’ve been looking for the “future me” in the tech companies I’ve worked at only to be disappointed by how sparse Asian American women leadership is at the top.

Inclusive Asian American Identity
When it came to identity, many women talked about their conflicting senses of self growing up. Growing up the token Asian in the 93 percent white city of Portland, Oregon, I felt a lonely sense of otherness and “onlyness.” I wrote about my persistent feeling of not belonging in America growing up and the cognitive dissonance of reconciling to opposite cultures.

One point Nafisa stressed is the need for an inclusive definition of Asian Americans. Often, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are left out of the Asian Americana identity. Inclusive descriptors include AAPI and AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander). Nafisa shared the importance of seeing Asian Americans as a textured and diverse tapestry of many ethnicities, countries of origin, and cultures.

Intentions for the Next Generation
We closed the night with our intentions for the next generation. Laura Gonzales from 2U shared that our parents came to the United States with the hope of the American dream but it’s also important for us, the children of immigrants and refugees, to figure out our own version of the American dream.

With builders and founders coming from diverse backgrounds, NEXT is committed to creating space for individuals to share stories that can enable and empower others to keep moving forward in an industry that is still working to become more diverse and inclusive. We hope that hearing stories, particularly from those who are underrepresented in the industry, will make us an even stronger ecosystem of builders, thinkers, and founders.

Special thanks to Ryan Lawler, Cassandra Lam, Jiun Kimm, and @miamanhattan for making this piece possible❤

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Are you interested in joining us for future #What’sNEXT Founder dinners? If so, please subscribe to our NY ecosystem newsletter. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Originally published at https://samsungnext.com on November 27, 2019.

Creating space to talk about the hard things: AAPI women in tech discuss mental health was originally published in Samsung NEXT NY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How does the role of responsibility and governance come into play for companies building the foundation of AI? How can AI be biased? What are the best practices around privacy and trust?

To discuss these questions, we hosted our second What’s NEXT Founder Dinner series on October 24, with a focus on ethics in AI. We convened some of the brightest minds from IBM Quantum Computing, Group Project, Alpha Drive, and Argo Digital Ventures to chat about the social, legal, and human implications of what they are building.

We wanted to ask philosophical questions related to building a more just, equitable, and diverse future with AI.

Will AI eat the world?
From 2001 to Blade Runner to The Terminator, pop culture for decades has warned of robots and AI machines threatening to take over. More recently, the specter of automation has threatened to take our jobs and decimate the global workforce.

Who will be the winners and losers of an AI revolution? Will truck drivers lose their jobs with the emergence of AI-enabled autonomous vehicles?

Sally Simms from Group Project believes that many jobs displaced by AI will be augmented by greater accessibility due to AI-enabled technologies. For instance, more people will be able to code and develop products without a deep technical background, since AI-enabled no-code tools will make it easier to do so.

“Something I’m excited about right now is we built our initial product with my dev and data scientist last year… earlier this year [we] wanted to explore a new feature area, and it was going to be really burdensome for us to build on top of the stack we already had, so I built it with a no-code [framework] which was good app builder,” she said. “I have consequently gone really deep in the whole no-code movement I’m really bullish about it.”

Sally built that feature using Bubble, a visual programming language for web and mobile applications. She believes the no-code movement will bring more diversity into the AI space, as more people will have access to building AI products from all backgrounds.

How biased can AI be?
One of the biggest takeaways from dinner was around the principle of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance.” Oftentimes, mistakes are misconstrued for malice, when more often it’s due to ignorance within an organization.

The problem is twofold: The training data used in many AI algorithms often create biased results… but also people have automation bias, which means they believe in the results of data that is automated. Therefore, we give AI and algorithms more power than they should have through a blind faith in their results.

The first source of bias often comes from the datasets AI algorithms use. Many training libraries are compiled by post-docs in the research field, but the data may not be published so the degree of bias in a dataset can’t always be determined.

Furthermore, these datasets are rarely updated or maintained after the creator graduates from their Ph.D. program, which creates bias propagation as companies continue to train their models on these libraries.

To combat this, Anamita Guha from IBM Quantum Computing encourages more diversity in the people who train AIs and build algorithms to reduce bias.

That’s only half the problem, though, as people often give more power to those algorithms through automation bias. One example of this can be seen in the criminal justice system. More and more courts are using AI and algorithms to sentence criminals to determine their parole and bail.

Judges were using a software called COMPAS to determines the likelihood of criminal recidivism, and their sentencing methods take into consideration the risk score COMPAS generates.

However, its algorithms were trained on data from previous court precedents, which was biased and generated longer sentences for African Americans than white counterparts being evaluated for the same crime. The judges evaluating those sentences believed in the validity of the software and were not aware of the bias in COMPAS.

The creator of the sentencing software, Tim Brennan, has testified that he didn’t design his software to be used in sentencing. “I wanted to stay away from the courts,” Brennan said, explaining that his focus was on reducing crime rather than punishment. Despite media coverage and criticisms, judges are still using COMPAS to inform their sentencing practices.

How can we build an ethical AI from Day 1?
To prevent misuses of AI like COMPAS in the court system, we need to think about ways to prevent such biases from occurring in the first place. One way to do so is to think about the ethical implications of using AI during the design phase of building a product.

Dan Wu, a legal engineer from Immuta, shared the need to instill interdisciplinary thinking in the room from day one of a company. To prevent myopic decision-making and short-term tradeoffs, he believes social scientists and behavioral scientists should be sitting in the same room as AI engineers when they make early product decisions.

“I think this is exactly why social scientists and behavioral scientists need to be in the room,” Dan said. “Because [they need to be] working with AI engineers to think about the risks… we have to build systems where there’s governance and trust by design so the default action that you take on an AI model, or when you’re analyzing data, is the safest.”

Recently, Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey shared that his biggest regret was not hiring a social scientist, a behavioral economist, and game theorists during the early days of the company to better understand the addictive qualities of social media and its impact on society. After a company gets to Twitter’s size, it’s often too late to retrofit the product to deal with the behavioral ramifications of how it’s used.

However, it may still be possible to create bumpers and buffers along the way for startups. To prevent them from the pitfalls of large companies, Dan believes startups should consider many diverse points of view in their decision-making across multiple, cross-functional stakeholders.

Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra spoke about the need to build a behavioral-driven test environment as opposed to a development test environment. While a development test is written from the perspective of the developer, a behavioral test is written to measure how a product will impact the end user.

Dan warned about the need to test risk and behavioral designs. If you are working in a regulated category like fintech or health tech, it’s understood that a single mistake can negatively affect people’s lives in a deep and intimate way. But startups in unregulated areas should also be thinking about the impact their products might have on vulnerable populations.

Each technologist should at least consider the deep-seated implications of their algorithm or model before unleashing their AI onto the world. Tools like NIST’s Risk Assessment and Omidyar Network’s can help you ask the right questions. This also goes beyond just thinking through the behavioral implications, but also designing the behavioral systems within an organization using frameworks like data protection by design.

Everyone in the room agreed that engineers need a code of ethics similar to the Hippocratic Oath. A few companies are starting to infuse ethical checks and balances for data science into their daily operations.

I left the dinner with our AI experts feeling hopeful. We believe that the future of AI is bright but also riddled with bias, risk, and blind spots. The responsibility rests on us as builders, thinkers, and investors to establish ethical codes of conduct, recognize human and automation bias in AI, and create a culture in organizations that fosters multidisciplinary conversations.

If anything, the backlash against big tech companies has taught us that just because we can build something doesn’t mean we should. The world needs more than just engineers to make decisions that reverberate through society. We need to facilitate a multi-party discourse amongst AI engineers, data scientists, behavioral scientists, lawyers, and the people who are impacted by the technology they build.

P.S. If you have any data & AI ethics questions or want to talk about inclusive smart cities, we recommend reaching out to a friend of Samsung NEXT. Dan is a Privacy Counsel & Legal Engineer at a leading automated data governance platform for analytics.

Special thanks to Ryan Lawler, Daniel Wu, Anamita Guha, Vin Tang, Yuval Greenfield, and Jesse Freeman for helping me with this post and pushing me to think a little further.

Originally published at https://samsungnext.com on November 6, 2019.

Why we should care about ethics in AI was originally published in Samsung NEXT NY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every month at Samsung NEXT NY we choose a theme to focus our events and content programming on. In September, we chose the Future of Food.

We thought this was an appropriate topic because, for several decades New York has been the food capital of the U.S. We are home to David Cheng’s Momofuku, Danny Meyer’s Union Hospitality Group, and countless other great restaurants.

We’ve learned a lot about how to be good investors and stewards to entrepreneurs from Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, which is not just a memoir but also a business philosophy. I love this line from Meyer’s:

“Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”

At Samsung NEXT, we believe that we are also in the hospitality industry… because at the end of the day, we want to deliver amazing experiences and winning services to our ecosystem of founders and operators. We derive a lot of inspiration from Danny Meyer’s central philosophy on “enlightened hospitality,” which is how the delivery of a product or service makes the recipient feel. Steve Schlafman from Primary Ventures summarized this concept well in a recent blog post.

“Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue — we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.”

Mia and I explored the Future of Food Theme last month by visiting NY food tech startups and hosting a What’s NEXT founder dinner with a number of food tech founders.

We learned how hydroponic systems and vertical farming are changing the future of food production and distribution. Imagine having fresh AND local produce year-round!

Well, it’s possible with the hydroponic indoor farming shelves that Farm Shelf is building. They offer year-round produce to many NY restaurants like Mercado Little Spain in Hudson Yards, Red Rooster Harlem, and Tender Greens. We loved eating their Portuguese kale and purple opal basil.

During our What’s NEXT founder dinner, we discussed several themes, including access to food, the “goopification of food,” and decolonizing ethnic cooking.

On Access to Food

A child living in a food desert like the Tenderloin in San Francisco does not have access to the same fresh produce as a child in Park Slope who probably lives close to a co-op. As a result, there is still a lot of work to be done on lowering the barriers to proper nutrition.

The “goopification” of food has also made many wellness and nutrition products available only for the uber-rich. Mike Lee from Alpha Food Labs spoke about the need to lower farming costs and encourage biodiversity in crop turnover to increase access to nutritional food for everyone.

Unfortunately, farmers are currently incentivized to grow crops that sell, instead of thinking about the biodiversity of their soil. Often farms become barren due to a lack of crop rotations based on market demands. Therefore, the margins for healthier food are higher due to shipping costs and an oversupply of mono-crops.

Decolonizing Ethnic Cooking

One of our favorite mission statements comes from Kim Pham of Oxtale. Her unofficial, non-investor mission statement is decolonizing ethnic cooking.

For too long, ethnic food has been romanticized to be exotic and “elevated.” Ali Wong’s character in Always Be My Maybe was accused of creating “elevated Asian cuisine” for white clientele.

My earliest memory in middle school was being bullied for eating chive dumplings during lunch hour because the other white classmates had never smelled chives before and called it “stinky.” Kim’s spice starter packs aim to democratize Asian cooking while containing the authenticity of local cuisines combined with the ease of a food kit. I tried her Mapo Tofu spice kit, and it was both delicious and easy to make!

Food is personal, emotional, and cultural. We learned so much from founders and operators at Oxtale, Farmshelf, Alpha Food Labs, Hungry TV, WeWork Food Labs, Misfit Foods, Shookit, Sunwink, and Runuble. Thanks for leaving us with a lot of good food for thought!

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Why We Care about the Future of Food at Samsung NEXT was originally published in Samsung NEXT NY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article was originally published on Samsung Next, which invests in innovation.

If a tech company made a big investment in a new product initiative without achieving any tangible results, shareholders would rightly demand that something should be done to fix the situation. Yet every year big tech firms spend millions on diversity and inclusion initiatives, often with very little to show for their efforts. We need to be as diligent about fixing the diversity problem as we are in triaging stagnating products and growth numbers.

I recently had the pleasure of appearing on a panel at the CDX NYC Open Innovation Summit on the topic of diversity and innovation alongside Rita McGrath, distinguished professor of strategy and innovation at Columbia Business School, and Julia Taylor Kennedy, EVP of the Center for Talent Innovation. We discussed the barriers women and minorities face in tech today and what the industry needs to do to tap into the power of diversity.

Outsourcing has a corrosive effect
Lack of personal accountability is a major reason for the failure of tech industry diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Large tech companies often outsource their talent recruitment to third parties who are in the business of hitting quotas instead of truly assessing candidates for their intrinsic value. As a result, women, and minorities are primed to think they are hired on diversity and not on merit.

Early in my career, a recruiter told me that I was a “diverse candidate.” As an employee, this can cause you to question your value and feel like a second-tier candidate or impostor. You start to feel like you’re the only person there with a liberal arts degree, the only woman, the only person of color. Being the “only X” creates an insidious force where you start to doubt yourself.

Most of my career has been marked by a feeling of not belonging. There is a long term, corrosive effect in which corporate recruiters end up labeling people as diverse candidates instead of affirming that they have earned their positions.

Owning unconscious biases
Unconscious biases against women and minorities don’t end at recruitment. Female business leaders constantly face difficulties that their male counterparts don’t have to experience.

For example, female entrepreneurs receive only about 2 percent of all venture capital funding, despite owning 38 percent of businesses in the United States, according to a 2017 study reported in Harvard Business Review.

During our panel discussion, Julia referenced a survey conducted by her organization that found 71 percent of managers pick proteges of the same race and gender as themselves. The survey also found that 77 percent of managers picked proteges with the same management style or skills.

As Julia noted, this isn’t just a problem from an equity perspective. It also prevents companies from developing the innovation they need to reach diverse markets.

Both my fellow panelists argued that a more personal approach was key to helping managers overcome unconscious biases. Rita noted that unconscious-bias training often creates a kind of resentment in managers. To counteract this problem, she suggested managers be given targets for finding and maintaining diverse talents.

The true test of time of a diversity initiative is in retention. It’s easier to hire diverse talent but harder to retain them. There is no point pouring diverse candidates into a broken system if the environment is not designed to support them.

Often, managers don’t know how to act on what they learn in diversity training, Julia said. Teaching managers how to exhibit inclusive leadership is far better than just telling them they are biased and leaving it to them to figure out the next step, she added. She even recommends building inclusive leadership into the performance evaluation or bonus package of managers.

Building diverse ecosystems
As I mentioned on the panel, Samsung NEXT is uniquely positioned to tackle diversity and inclusion. As an investor in software and services, we plan to focus on how we can tap into a diverse market of founders, entrepreneurs, and operators — and thereby serve diverse markets.

Diversity can only truly be achieved by partnering with practitioners, investors, operators, and founders to institutionalize change. For starters, we intend to form a consortium of experts who have worked on interventions, studies, and research on diversity and inclusion.

As a member of the Global Corporate Venturing & Innovation Summit, comprised of hundreds of global corporate funds, we are looking into how we can partner with researchers to measure and track longitudinal studies on the impact of diversity and inclusion initiatives.

The question we are hoping to answer is: If a fund sets a quota, how close do they come to sticking to the quota as they go down the funnel to portfolio companies?

Additionally, Samsung NEXT is exploring a partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, which would involve pooling data points from all these different corporate funds.

Having more data will help us create recommendations to guide corporate venture capital firms on how to build diversity and inclusion into their partnership networks.

From the workplace to open innovation partnerships, promoting diversity and inclusion is key to accelerating corporate digital innovation. Inclusiveness is a moral imperative because all candidates should feel they are judged on their merits and not just made to feel they are there to fill a quota. It is also an industry imperative because bringing in a more diverse field of people can help the tech industry overcome its blind spots.

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Originally published at https://samsungnext.com on October 4, 2019.

How to Fix Tech’s–and Venture Capital’s–Diversity Problem was originally published in Samsung NEXT NY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.