Founders Privilege: Hacking the system
On this day a year ago, this picture was taken.
I had just pulled a close to 15-hour working day on investment paperwork, code and all of the other things that you have to do as an early stage tech founder, yet I made it my mission to get uptown to inspire a group of young people of color and DREAMers, genius students at City College New York. I then meet the President, Vincent Boudreau with David Wysoki, a close friend and CCNY alumni and Dee Dee Moleski.
At that meeting, we all came to terms with some difficulties facing the school and discussed ways to fix them, all with the knowledge that these would have to happen with very few resources.
In the meeting before, speaking to these amazing young people I had the chance to look into their eyes and hear their challenges, economic challenges, health challenges and the myriad other things that face people of color living in America trying to make something of themselves.
I faced these challenges to growing up in Catford.
In a lot of ways, these young people are all me. At that time, I was being disrespected. Even though I was studying hard and getting a 4.0 and graduating, the world of tech was turning its back on me, no one in the recent history of my entire program had landed internships at Google, Facebook or Amazon and only 2% of my program were even getting any form of internship or job in technology.
In the midst of facing the harsh world of founding a startup and fundraising as a person of color, I made a resolve.
I would see these kids win, whatever it cost.
Over the coming year, I would personally hire 7 of them, making introductions to every contact I knew and asking those contacts to hire kids from the program, where appropriate, using stronger techniques to ensure that this happened.
We lit a fire.
In the slack group put together by CCNY codes — the initiative myself and David put together to make this happen, self-esteem soared.
Self-esteem transformed to preparation, I started running interview prep sessions with the entire honors program every week at Rise New York, Personally working on resumes, personally working on introductions.
Preparation turned to victory.
Ultimately when the opportunity to partake in a highly selective MIT hackathon came up, my army of kids were ready.
We found the best of the group and we went to prove that regardless of background, City kids could compete at the highest level of academia, and win.
Here is the formal Press Release:
CCNY (City College of New York) an overlooked, underfunded 170-year-old public college located on a hill in Harlem and it’s long-standing engineering school where computer science is its largest discipline with more than 1,200 recruits will have more than 80% go into internships and jobs in the coming year. Its students are mainly immigrants and first generation Americans. Almost all of them are the first in their family to go to college. They come from Benin and Bed Stuy. Singapore and the South Bronx.
Academically, the best of them are on par with students at the Ivies; same GPAs and SAT scores. They opt for CCNY over CMU, Cornell Tech and Columbia because it is all they can afford ($6000 tuition vs. $60,000). And most of them get full merit-based scholarships.
CCNY has never been able to send a single CS student to a major tech company, even though the tech ecosystem has flourished for more than a decade just a subway’s ride down the west side in Chelsea and Brooklyn. Lack of recognition, lack of preparation, lack of career resources.
Until today.
For the first time ever, CCNY CS students this week landed the most coveted of summer internships — at Google, Facebook and Amazon! One of the candidates is even a freshman. For a non-Ivy, second-tier public college to pull this off is unheralded.
The change in the school’s success rests with the deployment of a new catalyst — a single alumnus’ bootstrap mentorship program — CCNY Code. https://ccnycode.github.io/
CCNY Code started as an informal amalgam of 18 students and a single adviser, squatting in the open and airy lobby of Blackrock’s midtown office tower for our first get together less than a year ago. “We couldn’t even find a room to meet on campus,” said David Wysoki, a CCNY alum, founder of the program and a lawyer at a hedge fund in the city. “We pulled chairs together in an atrium lobby and just started lecturing the kids about skill development and tech interview prep while lobby guards scowled at us, trying to figure if they should toss us out.”
Today, the program — part outreach, part personal support and part technical prowess — has attracted 140+ students and boasts industry sponsors (IBM, Amazon, Google and AI/ML startups Centiment and Shopspring), an array of incubators as hosts (Alley and Rise) and a real presence in the city’s tech-centric entrepreneur culture.
Not a single penny was spent on the program. “All desire and drive. Zero dollars,” Wysoki said.
The students who won internships are:
Amazon — Pooneet Thaper
Facebook — Ahalya Sanjiv
Google — Kevin Alvarez
JP Morgan — James Wong
Bank of America — Adomas Hassan
Lockheed Martin — Carlos Villette
Another 30+ students are still in the running for positions at scores of Tech Alley startups and innovation units at the major financial institutions. One or two others are on wait lists at the Big Four (+Microsoft).
Put this achievement into perspective. It is easier to get into Stanford and Harvard than it is to land an internship at Google. Google’s acceptance rate is less than 1%, FB is 3% and Amazon is the “easiest” at 3.3%. For completeness sake, the fourth tech giant — Microsft — is 3.2%. (Source: Quora).
“They are the stealth students. No one sees them coming, no one expects them to excel, “ Wysoki said.
“All they need is direction, support, guidance … and sometimes a paternal-like kick in the ass to do all of the things necessary to succeed. But succeed they can.”
The students have been working with CCNY Code’s external advisers since last February. They were drilled in technical interview preparation. Their resumes were revised and repackaged multiple times for multiples jobs, They were chaperoned to join coding boot camps, hackathons and industry seminars during the year. Their correspondence, Github and other social media profiles were tailored to the task. They were taken to meetups and industry events, and slowly learned the ways of engaging people without stuttering or breaking out into a cold sweat from nervousness. IBM gave them free resources and introduced them to the magic of Watson analytics. Amazon coordinated their engineers onsite to prepare them for a series of lectures on cybersecurity. Centiment, an AdTech AI startup, quickly saw the challenge and the opportunity, offering numerous students a chance to work alongside its founder and CEO to code and design its neuroscience AI SaaS platform. Shopspring hosted a site visit and its lead engineer, Gilad Kalil, donated afterwork time to lead a dozen students in a Bitcoin side project, with visits from other engineers across his company’s offices.
“This is game changing,” boasted Micah Brown, CEO and founder of Centiment, a neuro-enabled AdTech startup and a critic of the lack of diversity in tech who at one point hired seven students to work on side projects at the only minority-owned AI startup incubated in New York.
About CCNY
CCNY is the STEM-centric leader of City University and the crown jewel of CUNY for 140 years. Its engineering school has been supported by, and is named after, alumnus and dearly missed benefactor, Intel founder Andy Grove. The college is located on 137th Street in Harlem and is one of the oldest and most significant sources for diverse engineering talent in the nation. The student population comes from 129 countries and is an uncanny equal mix — 25% each being Black, White, Latin and Asian; more than 30% in CS are women.
“Our students may lack pedigree but they are tenacious,” Wysoki said. “They have to be. They have no choice. They have no safety net to catch them if they fail.”
Happy to set up meetings with the students in a group at your convenience, take you on a tour of the school, introduce you to the school president, Vince Boudreau, who has been a vocal advocate and supporter of the effort from Day 1, connect you to our supporters at big and small companies etc. You name it.
This really is a success story worth sharing. And the potential to tap into the diversity population of 1,200 CS and CE engineers can move the needle on the industry’s effort to attract and reetain a diverse talent pool.
