Why I Hustle: Ysiad Ferreiras
I grew up on welfare in the Bronx, and was on probation the majority of my teenage years. After many years of risk-taking and hard work, I’m now the VP of Sales and Marketing for Hustle, a personalized text messaging platform that organizations use to reach their objectives.
I tell my story because I would like to inspire those hoping to join the startup ecosystem who grew up, like me, without the privileges that many people in leadership roles at startups may take for granted. And I would like to inspire those in leadership positions to take a risk in opening doors for them.
How I Hustled
My mother immigrated to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic as a teenager, and raised me as a single parent. My first language was Spanish. I learned English in elementary school and was fortunate enough to earn a spot in a program called Prep for Prep, which in turn got me a scholarship to Horace Mann, a private school in New York City.
As is true for many others from similar backgrounds, getting into Horace Mann was both a source of pride and embarrassment.
On the one hand, I was proud to attend one of the most selective private high schools in the country. But I was ashamed at being unable to afford school lunches or the school bus, basic needs that nevertheless weren’t covered by my scholarship. My embarrassment was only part of the problem — there literally wasn’t enough food to eat. My mother relied on food stamps to feed us, but the benefits didn’t cover three full meals a day for school-age youth, thanks to a built-in assumption that they would receive free lunch offered to low-income public school students. At Horace Mann there was no free lunch. Nor was I old enough to get an after-school job to pay my own way.
Instead of complaining to my mother, I started doing whatever it took to “keep up” with my classmates. I sold illegal cable boxes, swiped food from the cafeteria, and sometimes even stole from my peers. I tried to ignore the deep sense of shame that welled up when I stole from my classmates, even though I knew it was making it impossible for me to form trusting friendships.
At the same time, a gang war was brewing in NYC, which peaked in the late 90’s. Violent crime was rampant throughout the city. The Bronx, with its unique blend of minimal police presence, rampant poverty, a drug epidemic, and multiple gangs, was particularly dangerous.
Between the violence and the unaffordable school bus, merely getting to school presented a challenge. I rode my bicycle until it was stolen. After that I ran to school, my backpack bouncing along on my shoulders and sometimes getting passed by the actual school bus. If anyone raised an eyebrow, I told them I was doing it because I needed to make weight for wrestling.
After a number of physical altercations, I got worn down. To gain the respect of, and therefore protection from some of the aggressive elements in the neighborhood, I built a reputation in the neighborhood of engaging in criminal activities. Things escalated. By age 15, I found myself in a management position in criminal activities. Shortly thereafter, I found myself pleading guilty to robbery in the first degree, possession of stolen property, and assault with a deadly weapon.
Despite being on probation from the ages of 16 to 21, I consider myself lucky. Most juveniles who confront those charges in NYC serve time. If I didn’t have a white skin tone, and the judge at the initial hearing at central booking didn’t go to Horace Mann, things would have turned out worse.
In retrospect, I certainly could have found legal ways to eat and commute to school safely. But being an at-risk youth means you sometimes lack the perspective to think strategically.
Navigating the criminal justice system at such a young age had a profound effect on my life. I was keenly aware of the stress and shame it caused my family. I would have been expelled if the school administration had found out what happened, but somehow I managed to keep it all a secret. I feared that if people discovered the truth, I would never achieve my goals. I wanted to make something of myself, financially support my family, and get out of the Bronx.
As with many who have criminal records, the stigma of an offense follows you long after the official penalty has been served. It’s a second punishment you can never shake off. In an effort to put the past behind me, I got a job as a computer programmer as soon as I was old enough to work, leveraging the skills I’d learned in my AP computer science class. From that point forward, I would pay for my own food instead of stealing it.
My resolve paid off — I was accepted into a number of Ivy League universities with full scholarships, and I accepted a spot at the University of Pennsylvania (I had to lie on my applications, saying I hadn’t been arrested).
Hustling at Seventeen
In college, being on probation continued to hold me back; travel restrictions and the critical need to stay out of trouble limited my ability to engage in social activities. A single probation violation could have led to incarceration for 12 years or more at an adult facility.
Instead of graduating, I dropped out to become an entrepreneur. I got a series of small businesses off the ground — a T-shirt company, household moving, fair-trade importing. Each project was a little more successful than the last, but they were all self-funded, so I had to learn to inspire people to work with me despite lacking the money to pay fixed salaries. This often meant hiring people of nontraditional backgrounds and quickly training them to handle the responsibilities that needed to be met.
Somewhere along the line, a former employee introduced me to a friend of his who had a lucrative career as a consultant for hedge funds. I started staying up late reading financial books, upgraded my computer programming skills to a professional level, got an internship at a hedge fund, and then leveraged that position to get a formal interview with that friend of a friend where I convinced him to take a chance on me. His company was still small enough that it did not conduct background checks, so shortly thereafter I began consulting.
Clients started asking for me by name, and there was more work than we could handle. The next challenge was to build a successful team. My previous experience hiring people of nontraditional backgrounds proved helpful, as I was able to hire people faster than our competitors could, and used our larger size to increase our market-share. In many ways it was a lot easier than I was used to; with the high revenues we were earning, we had an easy time paying salaries. Everything was going fine until the company grew to approximately 30 people and some of our larger customers started requiring us to run background checks. I put off agreeing to the background checks as long as I could, but things eventually came to a head. Rather than tell the partners of the firm about my past — knowing that they would be required to tell our customers, which would immediately tarnish the company’s reputation — I quit before filling out the form to authorize a background check.
Imagine going from welfare to attaining an income in the top one percent, and seeing it vanish due to decisions made in the process of escaping poverty.
I was extremely frustrated and disappointed.
As a silver lining, by that point I was a member of a completely different socioeconomic status. So I had the luxury of doing what young rich people do when they need to process things and take time off — I went into nature (and bicycled a thousand miles from Boston to Ann Arbor), took an international trip (moving to India for a year and a half), and did some feel-good, yet light-hearted charity work (some friends and I came up with the idea of “The International Day of Happiness.” It passed as a resolution by the United Nations, and is now on March 20th every year). And then when I was ready again, I moved to San Francisco, where I thought organizations might be less likely to run background checks on their employees.
Finding Hustle
In San Francisco, I had a great living situation residing in a beautiful historic Victorian inhabited by a number of unique characters including Cory Rae Shaw — Hustle’s first graphic designer — and Perry Rosenstein — one of Hustle’s founders. Perry is an activist. I had always been pretty skeptical of politics. When I was growing up, political activists from outside my community would approach us and tell people that if they wanted change, they needed to vote. I learned to be wary of politicians and the campaign workers who worked to get them elected. Despite my doubts, I agreed to do some consulting and help with marketing and sales.
I think differently about politics and activism after seeing the inside of the machine through the work Hustle was doing. When I first joined Hustle, we were focused on political issues like immigration reform. For the cost of less than a single postcard, campaign organizers could send highly personalized texts to people across targeted groups. If they wish to reach people like my mom, who primarily speak Spanish, they can communicate with them by text in their constituents’ preferred language. This allows campaigns to develop appropriate messaging in a variety of languages to reach everyone in a comfortable and respectful way.
Hustle changes the equation by lowering the barrier of entry for getting people involved in the political process.
Since 2015, Hustle has partnered with advocacy groups, non-profits, and labor unions with phenomenal results. I’ve seen first-hand how well Hustle works. It makes it possible for field organizers to activate thousands of supporters in hours instead of weeks. And fundraisers who need to respond to donors in a personalized manner know they can count on Hustle to connect them with supporters personally and efficiently.
In short, Hustle is possibly the most effective, most talked about campaign tool to come out of this election cycle.
At the date of this posting, over 12 million people have been contacted using our tool. We’ve been mentioned in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and others.
But the success we’ve had so far is only one part of why I’m proud to work at Hustle. From the start, it’s been a community that accepts and gives a voice to all communities, especially those communities that have traditionally been left out of the political process, such as the one I came from. Every background at Hustle is valued; we function on the idea that every person should have input to the issues going on in their communities. Because our tool uses texting and allows personalized contact with users, Hustle is the most effective way to reach people — especially those living in poverty. Previously, most campaigns and organizations considered contacting poor people too expensive to justify. But the decision to reach them ultimately determines whether those people have a voice in changing the outcome of elections.
Why I Want to Help You Hustle
As someone in an executive position at a fast-growing startup, I now have a voice and additional opportunities to help others.
Along with the trappings of financial success, winning brings with it the responsibility to remember where you came from and help bring others up.
A key factor in the cycle of poverty is sometimes having to take calculated risks where you do things outside the legal system to enter the same arena others get to compete in as a birthright. I know firsthand that one ramification of this cycle is that once you end up on the wrong side of the law, opportunities become closed to you regardless of how hard you work. I may have made it out, but I am an exception to the rule. And given how many mistakes I made, it was more about luck than skill, and exploiting every privilege I had available. For every person like me who makes it out, there are at least another fifty with an equal amount or even more potential who were held back.
One of my deepest passions is to create opportunities for people who have overcome adversity. Maybe you have a criminal record like I do, or maybe you don’t look or sound as people expect you to, or maybe you’ve just had a hard life.
I know from being in a hiring position that there is a large appetite in the technology field for smart people of any background who are willing to work hard. I would be even further along in my career now if I had been able to connect with startups and larger companies sooner, but I was intimidated to reach out and no one was really inviting me in. So here I am reaching out to you today.
Silicon Valley is waking up to the reality that excluding people without pedigrees leaves them lacking in crucial talent. And the more of us with non-traditional backgrounds who get into hiring positions and have the power to change this, the more welcoming and diverse the industry becomes. So if you’re ready to hustle and you’re looking for a way into this world, please reach out. I’m ready and willing to help plug you in.
