Surprises from a Summer of Tech x Social Impact

A summer of 3D printing houses, bounding boxes, cryptocurrency, clean meat, egg freezing, and community!

This summer, Anne Raheem and I co-founded the Tech x Social Impact of the Harvard Franklin Fellowship. It was both of our first time creating a community from scratch and if you had asked me pre-COVID if I think that could have been possible, I would have said no. However, our virtual community of fellows got pretty tight, as enumerated in How to Build a Virtual Community.

While community was central to our fellowship, another objective was diving deep into the many facets of Tech x Social Impact. This piece gives an overview of my personal takeaways and moments of surprise from our speakers. Our fellows also share their own learnings about Tech x Social Impact, so be sure to check their writing out at our Tech x Social Impact medium publication.

Tech x AI

Who: Wendy Gonzalez, CEO @ Samasource

What: Samasource “employs low-income workers in developing countries to classify data, among other tech work. Samasource mission is to expand opportunity for low-income individuals through the digital economy.”

Highlights:

• The company shifted from being a non-profit to being a for profit. Apart from being a legal challenge, that move and restructure was fascinating to learn about! They priced assets @ fair value, made the non-profit (rather than co-founders) the majority stakeholder, and went through a traditional series A funding round.
• Going back, B-corp could have. been a better fit
• Balancing a double bottom line is hard! Wendy shared one COVID moment where this balance was particularly hard, but reflective of the company’s values. When COVID hit, they had 7 hours to make a decision about employing and housing workers in Uganda. At 3 pm one day it was announced that all transportation would stop at 10 pm. COVID could have caused Samasource to pause all work, thus losing their employees jobs and their customers' work orders. Therefore, they offered an (opt-in) plan for their workers to stay in resorts to continue working, but in quarantine. While this increased COGs, hurting gross margins EBIDA, they asked some customers to shoulder some of these costs and got a positive response. This was an example of hard leadership, where Wendy had to act fast.
• Samasource’s goal is to be a bridge employer. Wendy wants people to progress in their career, and therefore Samasource offers. personal, professional, and technical training. Next steps for their employees include university and roles in other industries. Note: Formal banking is part of time at Samasource.
• When annotating data for CV, elementary literacy of workers will do. As you expand your portfolio of services, what’s next for samasource? Maybe traning data consultants and QA.

Tech x Healthcare

Who: Hassaan Ebrahim, Co-founder @ Hikma Health

What: Hikma Health partners “with nonprofit organizations providing healthcare in underserved and refugee populations. We create customized data systems for these healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes. We analyze health data to support delivery of personalized healthcare to refugees.”

Highlights:

• Coming from a western perspective, Hassaan shared about how Hikma Health thinks about getting your patients to trust you and your organization.
• Offline data entry is important, given that they work with patients who can have unreliable data.
• Healthcare is a delicate industry, so you can’t have the mindset of “move fast and break things”
• Data entry is SO tough and annoying for doctors
• It’s hard to raise money from a traditional VC (something I also experienced when co-founding WellPower)
• They want to expand to other refugee crisis area, including Bangladesh, Africa, and migrant farmworkers.
• Agency is with the patient, they have ownership of their data
• I was surprised that the team wasn’t full time, yet able to make so much impact. Will they hit a scaling point, if the whole team continues to stay part time?

Tech x Surgery

Who: Raahil Sha, Co-Founder @ Z Imaging

What: AR for Surgery

Highlights:

• How to think about risk in such a regulated industry? You can directly address it by clearly stating how your team is going to minimise it or classify a concern as not a technical/medical risk. A table is often helpful to represent the risk + your proposed mitigation.
• Developing in AR is time consuming, so use visual proxies.
• Neuro surgeons like interacting with new tech, are interested in robotics, and relatively open to new technology.
• Accuracy can be broken down into alignment and precision accuracy.
• Framing is everything! Rather than using acronyms such as AR when describing your high-tech startup to a non-tech person, use a metaphor, such as “we’ll make this as easy as playing a video game”
• Shadow a physician to see user pains up close and personal

Tech x Crypto

Who: Kevin Weil, Co-Founder @ Libra

What: Libra’s mission is to “build a simple global payment system and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”

This conversation was off the record!

Tech x Global Homelessness

Who: Matthew Marshall, CEO @ New Story and Morgan Lopes, CTO @ New Story

What: New Story pioneers “solutions to end global homelessness” by 3D printing houses.

Highlights:

• I love New Story’s mission to end global homelessness but initially wasn’t convinced that this was the most cost-effective way to do this. However, Morgan made the case for why personalization matters more than scale.
• Lean Participatory Design ensures that New Story has buy-in from locals
• I was SO surprised that people turn down free housing when uprooted from their community.
• Green space matters!
• Village champions act as sort of a scout program
• The metric of success is kind of hard here and not so straightforward as a number of homes built or quality.
• The average donor is more compelled by a personal story than numbers/data.

What surprised our fellows :

• I found his personal moral values really refreshing :)
• Surprised that they’re not for profit
• Intrigued by the detail with which he thought through his purpose statement
• Surprised they have such a huge team and pass 100% on
• Cool to hear that many of the people turn their homes into businesses — does wonders for the local economies
• I did not know 3d printed homes were being built this rapidly and effectively. I am impressed.
• Challenging to think about metrics that your funders don’t want to see!
• Surprised by the two bank account approach and the types of people who donate to organizational overhead vs who donate to the housing cause
• Surprised by the Pro-SF rhetoric and was intrigued by the note of the power of connections in a place and saturation of networks (when it’s okay to move from the high cost of living location)
• Surprised by the idea of nonprofits’ goal of “making themselves obsolete” — in a for-profit people might say that’s not dreaming enough..?

Tech x Reproductive Equity

Who: Alyssa Atkins, CEO and Co-Founder of Lilia

What: Lilia, “Your Egg Securing Concierge.” For $ 485, Lilia is an “easier way to get your fertility baseline & navigate your options. Lilia gets you answers, a plan, and access to data unavailable anywhere else.”

Highlights:

• Lean into your natural energy cycles. Alyssa cites founder burnout to be a big reason why companies fail. Therefore, she’s a big advocate for leaning into your natural energy cycles and goes to bed around 8 pm every day.
• Framing matters: Investor != customer != employee. Therefore, your framing for each stakeholder should be different.
• Investor updates: In a monthly update to your investors, include specific asks along with your updates.
• Geography matters especially when thinking about markets
• “Only get champagne when we get sales.” Building business is hard and sales, not raising money, is what you get to celebrate
• You want the culture to be polarizing at the beginning. Make this somewhere that YOU wanna work at. You have to be mindful and don’t want the culture to form itself. Culture is more than what you say and what you do. It’s also what you reward and penalize publicly.

Tech x Climate Change x Clean Meat

Who: David Lee, CFO @ Impossible Foods

What: Impossible Foods “develops plant-based substitutes for meat products.” Their burger is “made from simple, plant-based ingredients. For the health of people and the planet.”

Highlights:

• To deny that any innovation without disruption is foolish
• When it comes to a big goal like climate change, different players can have the same goals and mission with a diversity of approaches.
• I love Impossible Foods! Therefore, I paused when one of our fellows asked: “What do critics say, which reminded me to
• Grocery customers are always in a hurry and as a clean meat company, Impossible foods needed to consider their motivations in advance.
• Americans have a fundamental addiction to beef
• The same meat-eater acts differently at a restaurant than in a grocery store.
• Impossible Foods got free brand awareness on restaurant menus

Tech x Safety

Who: Yasmine Mustafa, Co-Founder @ ROAR for Good

What: ROAR for good is a “woman-led and mission-driven technology company dedicated to creating safer workplaces.”

Highlights:

• She was a badass yet vulnerable!
• In speaking about her family, she noted that she did all of these great things “in spite of” her father, rather “because of him.”
• Walking us through why she pivoted from B2C → B2B
• She evidently thought deeply about her initial customer and market segmentation. I didn’t realize that the hospitality industry and healthcare workers experienced high rates of sexual assault.
• This conversation made me wonder if a hardware device to prevent sexual assault is ever possible? She noted that a bracelet is structurally tough because being grabbed by the wrists is so common. So, then what’s the technical solution to tech x safety? Where else on the body would it make sense to put a safety device?