[Bytes of Good Ep. 2] Big Tech to the Nonprofit World

An edited transcript of Episode 2 of the Bytes of Good podcast. Elena Fowler talks to Anthony Suarez about his career experiences at Amazon, Code.org, and, now, at founderFM.

Find the episode on Spotify, Stitcher, and other streaming platforms here, and feel free to contact us at podcast@hack4impact.org if you have any questions or feedback!

ELENA FOWLER: When I was in high school and first decided that I wanted to study computer science. I knew that I wanted to build accessible Computer Science Education software. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do that, but I figured that when I started college, I’d be exposed to all sorts of different opportunities. And I was exposed to all new opportunities and topics in computer science, but when it actually came to the job hunt, people weren’t talking about their niche interests. They were talking about big tech.

And eventually, I too decided to try out big tech and accepted an internship offer from Amazon. I never lost my interest in education software, but like many, I didn’t know where to find tech for good opportunities.

Funnily enough, it was through my internship at Amazon that I met Anthony Suarez, who at the time was the CTO of Code.org, an organization that builds CS education software. But before Anthony was at Code.org, he spent many years working at Amazon.

As many college graduates debate which type of company to start their careers at, I wanted to talk to Anthony about his experiences, working in both big tech and at a tech-focused nonprofit, and learn more about how he made this career transition. Thank you so much, Anthony, for being here. And would you like to start by introducing yourself?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah. Hi Elena. Thanks for having me today. My name is Anthony Suarez, and I most recently was the CTO at Code.org and excited now to kick off founding an organization called founderFM, which is a social purpose corporation focused on connecting female founders and women learners that are learning to learn new professional skills, mid-career, so really excited to get this new initiative off the ground in the coming months.

ELENA FOWLER: Great. Thank you so much, we are so excited to talk to you today about your career path and how you made the transition from big tech to the nonprofit world as the decision to start in one or the other is a common dilemma for many of our listeners. But before we jump into how you actually made that transition, we want to start at the very beginning. So coming out of college, what were your professional goals? Were you exposed to the social impact space? Or did you know that you wanted to work with nonprofits eventually?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, great question. I think, for me, when I first entered into the industry, I think my primary objective was always just to learn. I think I wanted to be in an environment that exposed me to opportunities to learn new things, that challenged me to learn new things, and it really gave me access and opportunity. So I think that’s really where my mindset was, and kind of what drives me.

Reflecting on this, too, I would say that I always felt that I wanted an opportunity to feel connected to both the mission of the organization and the people that I worked with. And it turns out that both of those things tend to be pretty critical when you get into the nonprofit space. So it’s not surprising at all that I found myself working at mission-focused organizations at this point in my career.

I always felt that I wanted an opportunity to feel connected to both the mission of the organization and the people that I worked with. And it turns out that both of those things tend to be pretty critical when you get into the nonprofit space.

ELENA FOWLER: Yeah, that’s really great that you’ve been able to find organizations that meet those goals. And they certainly sound like they would align well with nonprofits, as you said. So looking forward to your career at Amazon, what first led you to pursue an opportunity there?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, well, even prior to Amazon I worked for several years in what I would call, non-tech organizations. So everything from medical device manufacturing to education, and what made me join Amazon was this, like, access to working on a product that was very technical focused, right. So shifting from being maybe an operational cost in a business to really the focal point of the business, it kind of changes the mindset, often of how engineering teams are perceived and the access that they have to like, you know, focus on building things, and products for end-users. So that’s, you know, one of the main things that brought me to Amazon.

I think there are two like technology events that like in my career got me excited about working in the tech space. The first was virtualization. And the second was what we call the cloud now. When I first started working, these were newer concepts. I’m not even sure that the idea of the cloud existed, especially in its current form, and I was really excited about working with virtualization. And we were doing these things in like local data centers. But what excited me particular about both these technologies was the idea of the impact that could have on our end-users and for customers. It allowed organizations to bootstrap their idea with very little funding. You didn’t need 100 servers, you just needed one to experiment. And so reduce cost. And increase the speed for being able to build things and opened up opportunities for trial and error and innovation, because you can actually, like, spin up an environment, test an idea — if it works, great. If not, you know, try again. And those sort of like concepts, really, were not available to everyone. And so combining virtualization and eventually, the cloud, where you could actually just pay for usage as you went, versus having to make a bunch of capital and operational costs, investments upfront, was like, huge differentiators in how businesses could operate and who could even start their own business. So that piece, in particular, was really interesting to me.

ELENA FOWLER: It sounds really interesting to be at the beginning of some of those things that are now so commonplace in the tech world. Could you tell us briefly about the different roles that you had at Amazon and what you actually did as your job there?

Yeah. So my first job at Amazon was building software that provisioned all the EC2 servers, so EC2 is sort of the underlying infrastructure as a service product that AWS offers — a compute offering. And every server that landed in an AWS data center needs to get powered on by a data center technician and eventually needs to be made accessible for customers to launch instances on. So my team was responsible for all the DNS, DHCPs. So core infrastructure services for all of those environments, and then the software that inventoried the racks of servers kept track of them, and then eventually installed the underlying software on the physical hardware so that a user could launch an EC2 instance. So it was pretty cool to be at a foundational layer of what enabled millions of customers.

ELENA FOWLER: Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And it certainly also sounds like you had a high impact on customers as well. So you mentioned that was your first role, but what were the other positions that you held?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, great. So the second team that I worked on while I was there was an opportunity that arose to build a brand new team from scratch and a brand new product from scratch, which was to solve a problem for customers who were starting to use Docker containers as a way to provision their applications. And they really didn’t have a ton of support, they were managing all those environments on their own. And my, you know, boss, or became my boss, had this vision of creating a managed service for Docker containers in the cloud. And I thought the idea was super cool, and signed on to join him and a handful of other engineers, I think there was four of us to begin with. And we built this new series of products or family of products from scratch called Amazon Container Services. So Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, and eventually like a serverless container offering called AWS Fargate. And that was a really, really cool experience, because I got to build those products from scratch and also grow the team. Like I said, there was like four of us to begin with, and eventually grew to be about 100 people on the team in just under four years.

ELENA FOWLER: And was this your last role at Amazon before you transitioned?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: That’s right. Yeah. So it was from this role that I took the opportunity to join Code.org in 2018.

ELENA FOWLER: And what motivated you, or when did you first consider leaving Amazon? And did you know that you wanted to move toward the nonprofit space? Or were you also considering other for-profit companies?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, great question. I don’t know that I knew I always wanted to be a nonprofit. But when I left Amazon, to join Code.org, it was specifically targeted, I didn’t, I wasn’t seeking other opportunities. I thought Code.org presented a very unique opportunity to allow me to do two of the things that I really loved.

You know, first was, you know, working in tech and like working on technical products and building things. And the second was something that I discovered as part of my ECS journey was that I enjoyed building teams as much as I did products and seeing the mission of Code.org and the focus on access, and opportunity for CS education to historically, you know, underrepresented students in tech like this, this seemed like a perfect opportunity for me to do something that I was really passionate about.

ELENA FOWLER: Now, to me, Amazon and Code.org seem very drastically different. So were you worried about anything when you made this transition?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, I think coming from a company that was really focused on technology, and was working with really cool cutting edge type tools and require deep technical expertise, and then going into a nonprofit environment, I was worried that I wouldn’t feel challenged as much, or have as much access and opportunity to work with, with new technologies. And that that would be like, potentially, you know, maybe less exciting, or even long term, like would I lose some skills by choosing to work in maybe a nonprofit environment where the focus was less on the tech and more of the mission.

ELENA FOWLER: Yeah, that definitely all sounds like very valid worries, considering you are making a huge career transition. So now looking at some of the perceptions that you had of the nonprofit sector before you went to Code.org, can you talk a little bit about that? And if anything surprised you, once you got there?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: You know, I was working in a very fast-paced environment, new challenge every minute. It was really, really exciting.

And I was worried about the perception of like, you know, is there a lot of politics? Is there a lot of red tape? Are things moving slow? You know, at times, the teams are much smaller, maybe don’t have access to as much funding. So does that really, you know, lead to like, a slower-paced environment where, or maybe I wouldn’t be as challenged or, or would be working on less exciting things. So I think that’s, that’s definitely at times a perception that I hear about nonprofit.

To your last point about what surprised me, I would say, all of that, because my experience has been that it’s just as fast-paced as large tech, it’s just as challenging as large tech. The opportunity and access to work with new technologies is there, the criticality of delivering highly available software to our especially at Code.org to our, you know, millions of students and teachers, makes for an extremely challenging problem space for us to solve when it comes to scale and availability. And, you know, on the perception around like, pace, you know, there’s always something to do and, and, and, frankly, maybe even more so from an urgency standpoint, because our mission is just so critical to the work we do. So, you know, I think, at this point, I’d challenge anyone that was coming from tech and worried about whether they feel excited, engaged, or have access and opportunity to learn new things by moving into nonprofit and I’d say, for certain, you can get those opportunities in both places.

I’d challenge anyone that was coming from tech and worried about whether they feel excited, engaged, or have access and opportunity to learn new things by moving into nonprofit and I’d say, for certain, you can get those opportunities in both places.

ELENA FOWLER: That’s really great to hear, because I think that is definitely a concern of a lot of students. But I also want to ask, just, if you think that’s unique to Code.org, because it is a tech-focused nonprofit. There are also a lot of other organizations that may not have those same people with technical experience; do you think that has made that much of a difference?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, I think for me, I think of it more as like, what problems you’re trying to solve on behalf of your users. So while our product may seem more technical at Code.org, there are lots of nonprofits that are trying to solve problems on behalf of their users, and are using technology to do so and are doing it at scale.

… there are lots of nonprofits that are trying to solve problems on behalf of their users, and are using technology to do so and are doing it at scale.

Right. So, you know, organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation, or Khan Academy, or DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving like these are organizations that I’ve all had opportunity, I’ve had opportunity to get exposure to through a CTOs for Good group that I’m part of, and they’re dealing with the same types of challenges, maybe different technical applications, but, you know, from an education standpoint, but they’re building systems of scale, they’re building these back-end distributed systems that are challenging to figure out how to operate and, you know, give great learning opportunities to engineers who are interested in exploring those spaces. So I think it’s more about the culture of the organization, are they focused on solving problems for users? And are they willing to invest in using technology to help them do that?

ELENA FOWLER: That’s definitely a really great point that we have to look at the people and the culture and see if it will give us the type of opportunities that we are looking for, regardless of what type of organization it is. So not only did you make the transition from Amazon to Code.org switching companies, but you also made the transition to a new job title as the CTO of Code.org. Could you tell us a little bit about what that was like? And if you were able to keep the same amount of technical involvement that you had had in previous positions?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah. While it was intimidating, you know, sometimes the title is reflective of the job role. And sometimes it isn’t, and what I appreciate about the opportunity to work at Code.org was, I was able to really create a role that focused on doing what was best for the organization.

And so some days that meant being hands-on, and helping out by being in the on-call rotation, and, you know, supporting the team after hours. And sometimes it meant stepping back and helping the team or other parts of the organization, think bigger picture around organizational aspects, like our hiring processes, or how we build and grow individuals within a team or things like pay equity. So I think for me, the title in this case just represented, you know, a commitment to do whatever it took to support the team. More traditionally, I would say, there are several types of CTOs, I think, you know, in some organizations, the CTO doesn’t have any direct reports. And they’re just sort of like an architect. Or someone who’s responsible for helping the team make, you know, high impact technical decisions, and maybe they don’t have direct responsibility of like, overseeing any engineers. And, in other roles, you have direct reports. And so I think it really just is organization-specific.

And what I like to think about when it comes to having a long-term vision about your career is, is to invest in both. If you’re interested, you know, even if you decide to lead teams that have the opportunity to lead teams and have direct reports and know finding ways to stay hands-on is a great way to continue to earn the trust of your team, and for you to have empathy for the work that they do every day. So I like to encourage doing both as long as you can.

ELENA FOWLER: Yeah. And you mentioned two different kinds of types of CTOs. Which one, would you describe your role as?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, I think it depended on the day, which was what made working at Code.org super fun and exciting. Probably, if you asked my team, more times than not, they’d like me focusing on the organizational and more strategic things and leaving the tough technical things to them.

ELENA FOWLER: And you did mention this previously, actually, with your work with CTOs for Good, but you are involved with a lot of other initiatives besides Code.org, including CTOs for Good and Evenpay.org? Can you describe how you got involved with those? And if that happened as a result of joining Code.org, was that an interest before working in the nonprofit space? How did you get those different initiatives?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, so it’s a little bit mixed.

With Evenpay.org, that really stemmed out of an interest for myself to learn more and become a better advocate for pay equity, particularly focusing on helping women in engineering and STEM roles advocate for themselves around compensation fairness. There’s just so much to learn, and it’s still a challenge across the industry. And so for me, I use these as vehicles to learn more and to share what I’m learning with others. And then in any way to encourage them to also get involved and do something. So that’s been just a great learning opportunity.

For CTOs for Good, that was a unique opportunity that I was presented with when I became a CTO and joined Code.org, and this is an amazing collective group of individuals that are all leading engineering and technology teams and product teams within nonprofits across the country, and in some cases across the globe, and they come together to share ideas around what it means to, to build effective teams, you know, effective cultures and an inclusive and welcoming cultures within organizations and technical teams, and then how to leverage all that to have the impact within a mission-focused organization. So it was a great opportunity to be part of that group and to learn from so many other inspirational leaders across the industry.

ELENA FOWLER: That sounds like an incredible opportunity to share knowledge and learn from others who may be facing similar challenges to those that you face in your position. Now, we have talked about Amazon, we’ve talked about Code.org. But most recently, you have created your own organization, founderFM. Could you tell us a bit about what founderFM is?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, it’s very exciting. So just, you know, a combination of an opportunity to do something new, and to hopefully have an impact in an area that I feel really passionate about.

You know, one of the best things about being a Code.org and my time at Amazon is, I’ve had an opportunity to work with just really amazing people, and to give back in small ways to help them grow their careers, establish their careers, and the direction that they want to do so. And I think one of the most rewarding experiences that I’ve had in my entire career has been when I’ve had a chance to help someone see their own potential and create, access, and opportunity to achieve it, right.

And my goal with founderFM is to bring a group of female founders together, give them the space to incubate their ideas, get their vision around their product, and pair them with learners, other women who are interested in building new professional skills that allow them to change job roles, mid-career — pairing these two groups of highly motivated individuals together to form founding teams and to give them the support they need to execute on these big ideas and help them be successful. So that’s the basic premise. It’s a community and a set of programs that help women change the face of the future face of tech.

[founderFM is] a community and a set of programs that help women change the face of the future face of tech.

ELENA FOWLER: And on your website, you have a letter listed from you, and it says you’re starting with $1 million towards this initiative with the goal of growing that later. And I mean, this sounds like an incredible organization, but also a somewhat daunting task from my perspective. So what actually gave you the confidence to leave your job at Code.org and start your own organization?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yes, good question. I have to ask myself that each day too. You know, I think the inspiration comes from seeing the success of so many strong women that I’ve had an opportunity to work with, right? They are the inspiration, right? I’ve learned from them. They’ve been my mentors. They’ve been examples for me. They’ve supported me throughout my career. I feel super fortunate in that way.

So you know, I think when you kind of brush all of the risk perspectives aside, at the end of the day, I try and keep a laser focus on, you know, what impact I want to have. And a lot of times we associate impact with scale. And for me, this is a lot more personal. Impacting one person, two people, five people, ten people, you know, it’s an opportunity to change lives and to help people achieve their goals that, for them, may change their lives. And I think that’s just an amazing opportunity to be part of something like that.

ELENA FOWLER: That’s really interesting that you mentioned getting to impact individuals and working on maybe a bit of a smaller scale, because at Code.org, you impacted so many students across the globe. So it’s really cool that through your work, you’ve had the opportunity to do both.

And now moving on, you’re focusing on women and other underrepresented groups with founderFM. Have you ever faced criticism as a man working in this space? Particularly because you don’t necessarily have the same shared experiences as the people that you are serving?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, I mean, I think any criticism there would be correct, right, I don’t have the shared experiences of the, you know, people I’m working with.

But I think it’s also a daily reminder for me to step back and create space for them to be the ones that are really leading. My goal here is just to be a facilitator. So as we build out the organization, as we think about the folks that are really having an impact within this organization, supporting this organization, they’re all the ones that are doing the heavy lifting, and the ones whose voice that we want to amplify. So you know, I think, anytime I face criticism on this topic, it probably means I’m doing too much talking, and then enough listening. And it’s just a good reminder for me to step back and let others step forward.

ELENA FOWLER: Now, stepping back and looking at the roles you’ve taken on through Amazon, Code.org. And now founderFM, they all appear to be very different in their purpose. So how do you define success in your career as you move throughout these seemingly very different roles?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, I think maybe I have two different lenses.

On the product side, I think now, especially for the work that we’ve done at Code.org, I think it’s, it’s been just amazing to be part of an organization and a team that’s that shipped really cool curriculum and, and tools that help students learn about things like AI and machine learning, or how to code. And so evaluating purely from a product perspective, like, and as an engineer, it feels good to, like, look at, like fun stuff, and to see the impact and the usage, right, and you can, you know, take a moment to reflect that, like, you know, the number of people that have used the stuff you shipped — that has a large sense of reward, right? At least it does for me.

But I think the more long-lasting success criteria has been the people that I’ve had a chance to work with, the people that I’ve seen grow their careers and grow as humans, as people. And I think, for me, success is seeing them recognize their potential and achieve their potential and their goals. So I had a chance to work with individuals that were engineers and wanted to be product managers and change job roles. And, you know, people tell them that they couldn’t do it, and work with them. So that they saw a path forward and had the opportunity to do so and, and have been extremely successful in those roles. People that were not engineers and wanted to be given opportunities to become software engineers and see them succeed equally well. There’s probably nothing like that, at least for me, as seeing, seeing people be your product and see them do amazing things.

And if you’re looking for a way to amplify your impact, for every time you invest in another person, and they go and do other great things, there’s an added benefit of that too, especially when we think about nonprofit work and mission-focused organizations. That is a great way for you to extend your impact.

So I think those are the two things but certainly, the latter one around measuring success by the number of people I’ve had an opportunity to have a positive impact on is the thing that drives me the most.

… if you’re looking for a way to amplify your impact, for every time you invest in another person, and they go and do other great things, there’s an added benefit of that too, especially when we think about nonprofit work and mission focused organizations.

ELENA FOWLER: So looking at most of our listeners are students, and they are interested in pursuing similar types of work that you are doing currently. So we want to take a moment to address some of the concerns students may have about entering the nonprofit space and also maybe see what advice you have for them going forward.

There is a focus at schools on going into big tech and working for the most competitive companies. And the nonprofit sector is really discussed very rarely and more specifically, that may stem from a fear of not being able to have a stable job in the nonprofit sector or fear that the work done at those organizations is undervalued. So from your experience, do you believe these fears are valid?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: I like to think about them slightly differently. I don’t want to discount anyone’s, you know, fears or instincts around a specific job role or organization, like generally, I say, trust your instincts, right. So if you’re faced with making a decision, I think instead, my encouragement is to do your due diligence, look at the culture of the organization, look at the access, that you’ll have, to learning opportunities and the people there that will help you grow.

But at the end of the day, for me, I would take, 100 times out of 100, the person who’s dedicated to learning and going to seek out those opportunities to learn that they’re going to be successful, regardless.

So whether it’s a large tech, nonprofit, startup, those are not the foundational things to make the bets on the, like, the thing to bet on is yourself. And, you know, businesses come and go people around, you come and go, because it’s a business. And I think the critical thing is to invest in yourself.

And I think the critical thing is to invest in yourself.

Learning opportunities can happen at any size organization. You know, just look at the last, you know, 10 years, many large organizations that we thought would still be here didn’t adapt with, you know, market and, you know, maybe aren’t here anymore, others that we’ve that were maybe barely used up until, you know, March of this year, one thing has changed, are now, you know, the next Google, right, you know, we don’t have — when we do a video call, we call it a Zoom call now, right? So, you know, from an industry standpoint, things change, often.

But I think finding opportunities, regardless of the organization size, or type, and a place where you can grow is the most foundational thing you could do.

ELENA FOWLER: That’s a really great perspective to keep in mind when looking at the massive range of opportunities available to students looking to start their careers in tech. Many students also want to first work in big tech to create a foundation in skill and monetary security. Do you think students have to first go to a large tech company before working in the nonprofit space as you did?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, great question. I think that if you look at your career, over a longer period of time, again focusing on opportunities to learn and build skills, pays off over taking a high-paying job, right out of college, every time.

Everyone’s circumstances are different. And so this is definitely an individualized decision that has to be made.

But, you know, when I think about a career that’s, you know, 10, 15, 20 years long, you know, like, way longer, there’s plenty of time to make money. And as you build skills and you know, become more of an expert in a specific area, like access to that doesn’t go away, it grows. And in many cases, it grows even more so on your terms, right, you get to be more selective about the companies you work at because you have a skill set that is desirable.

But the initial element is you have to have the skills.

So going to work at a large tech company simply because of the financial reward… if you don’t think it’s a place that’s going to help you as an individual grow and excel, then I’d say it’s not the right decision.

Go join a company where you feel you’re going to be supported, and given the opportunity and space to learn new things grow. Because those are skills that people can’t take from you. Those are the things that once you have them to yours.

And you just want to accrue as many of those experiences and skills as you can early in your career because they become the building blocks for, you know, additional learning. That next project, that next skill, like just keep building on them.

And so, for me, I’ve always just tried to prioritize that and you know, in the near term, sometimes people look at that, and they might even tell you you’re making the wrong decision. They might say, “how can you choose this opportunity over this other one?” And they may be singularly focused on compensation.

But, you know, I think my experience has been when you look at this in aggregate, there’s plenty of time for that. And you’ll likely be a lot happier if you focus on, you know, investing in ways that help you grow as an individual, especially in the long term.

Go join a company where you feel you’re going to be supported, and given the opportunity and space to learn new things grow. Because those are skills that people can’t take from you. Those are the things that once you have them to yours.

ELENA FOWLER: And we’ve now talked a lot about, you know, finding growth opportunities, finding people to support you in finding a company that will give you the opportunity to build your skillset. But how should students actually go about finding those companies finding those organizations where they believe they can do those things?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, so I think a lot of the ways I think about this is the work to find that, you know, the first job starts before you even graduate.

So getting involved in organizations like Hack4Impact, where you can work on projects, and get the experience of working in production codebases, that really helps to not only give you that exposure you need to understand how to, and build the skills to be effective in that first job as an engineer, but additionally, it helps you create a differentiated resume, so it gives you real projects on your resume.

And I think often, the challenge is having a resume that shows, you know, project work outside of the classroom. And that’s a critical piece to getting your resume, often reviewed, by hiring managers.

So there’s a lot that you can do while also doing good, through organizations, like I mentioned, like Hack4Impact, contributing to other open-source projects that you’re really passionate about, and, you know, volunteering time working on a side project, certainly is something that that I think is often done.

But at the end of the day, not everyone has an opportunity to do all those things outside of the classroom. Because they may be spending all of their, their free time on classwork or, frankly, working to support their education. So, you know, for those folks, when they get that first job, what I would say is, it’s really a discovery phase, right. So if you’re in that first job and start at a company, which you’re what you’re unsure of, you’re in an evaluation mode, like if it feels like the right fit. And you’re learning in the ways that you want to, that’s great. If not, then, you know, seek out the opportunities, mentorship within the organization, mentorship outside the organization, connect back to the people that maybe you were in university with that maybe have moved on to other places, and can give you access to, to mentors in their companies, or even opportunities in their companies.

Don’t feel stuck, don’t feel complacent, don’t feel like this isn’t for me, because for this, you know, this first swing wasn’t successful, it may take several attempts, right out of school, to land in a place that feels like home, and that, you know, the place that you were meant to be this entire time. You might not always get there the first time, but sticking to what you know are your values. And the things that motivate you. And create a space where that you feel you can learn and grow. That’ll come in time.

And, you know, that’s part of what we’re trying to do with founderFM. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you don’t feel like you’ve been able to do that and need the support to find that place, then those are exactly part of the outcomes that we’re here to help facilitate ourselves.

ELENA FOWLER: Yeah, and I really like that advice. And it may be difficult to not feel stuck, but for so many people, finding that great opportunity where they’re meant to be takes a while and it takes a little bit of trial and error as you go through different roles. So I really appreciate you sharing that piece of advice.

And lastly, again, because most of the students listening or a lot of them are interested, maybe working with nonprofits or working in the social impact space, do you have any general advice for students who do want to make an impact in their work?

ANTHONY SUAREZ: Yeah, get started.

I’m confident that every student listening to this will find a unique way to have an impact that aligns with their areas of interest. But it takes initiative, it takes the risk, it takes the courage to take that first step.

But it takes initiative, it takes risk, it takes courage to take that first step.

So, find the organization that you’re passionate about, that aligns to things that you care deeply about, you know, find ways to make an introduction, volunteer, you know, apply for an open role. And then when you get those opportunities, realize that there’s something to learn in like nearly everything you do early in your career, like, you know, maybe it’s not the most technically challenging, but what you’re learning there is how to become more proficient, more efficient, maybe the tasks that took you a week to do last time, because you’ve now done it three times. And you’re saying, Wow, this is boring. Well, maybe the subtle note is like, it no longer takes me a week, I can actually do it in four hours now. Right. So what you learned was not a new technical skill, but you learned how to be more efficient and effective. And now you can share what you learn with someone else.

So just, you know, I encourage everyone to step back and realize that, early in your career, every single experience is an opportunity to learn something new. And in the future, those will be the things you’re sharing with. Those are the experiences you’ll be sharing with your future mentees and people that you’re offering advice to down the road. And it all starts on Day One. So every opportunity is a learning experience.

early in your career, every single experience is an opportunity to learn something new

ELENA FOWLER:
This podcast episode was hosted by Elena Fowler and produced by J.J. Lu and James Wang. Thank you so much to our special guests this week Anthony Suarez, Bytes of Good is a collaboration between Hack4Impact and Impact Labs. To learn more about the podcast or our partner organizations, visit us at bytesofgood.org. That’s “bytes” with a “y”. Be sure to follow the podcast on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram for show updates. Thanks again for listening.

Special thank you to Anthony Suarez for joining us in this episode!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai, funded by the Meinig Family Cornell National Scholars program.

Additional resources

• Learn more about founderFM, a place for female founders to connect, collaborate, and create.

Nonprofit organizations mentioned in the interview:

• Code.org is “dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups” (Code.org, 2021).
• DonorsChoose helps support public school teachers in need by vetting and fulfilling (i.e., purchasing supplies and shipping them to the teacher) classroom project requests.
• Evenpay.org focuses on “closing the gender and race wage gap for women in STEM, female athletes, and under-represented groups” (Evenpay.org, 2021).
• GlobalGiving connects nonprofits, donors, and companies in nearly every country and helps nonprofits access resources like funding, support, and training to help them better serve their communities.
• Khan Academy is an education-oriented nonprofit that supports teachers and students by providing free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.
• Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit that “ provides the essential infrastructure for free knowledge” (Wikimedia Foundation, 2021). The organization hosts Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and several other projects through the support of volunteers who help by discovering, contributing, and sharing information.