Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Aki. This week, we're re airing an
Speaker 1: episode that we first published in January. Stick around because
Speaker 1: we'll be back at the end with an update. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is about a guy called Mitchel Lee. He runs
Speaker 1: a startup called Penny in San Francisco. We'll tell you
Speaker 1: later about what Penny does. For now, what you need
Speaker 1: to know is Penny is almost two years old and
Speaker 1: it's really small. It's Mitch, his co founder, Alex, and
Speaker 1: two employees. They're all software engineers, and big surprise, they're
Speaker 1: all guys. A few months ago, Mitch started looking for
Speaker 1: a fifth employee, and he wanted that fifth person to
Speaker 1: be different from him and the rest of the team.
Speaker 1: And since this is a podcast and we can't just
Speaker 1: show you a picture of Mitch, we asked Mitch's sister
Speaker 1: Christina to describe what he looks like. He's always got
Speaker 1: some like really soft hoodie or two shirt on in
Speaker 1: jeans or corduroys. If he was walking down the street,
Speaker 1: you probably wouldn't necessarily notice. He blends in pretty well. Basically,
Speaker 1: Mitch looks just like a lot of other people in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. He's young, he's white, he's straight, and he
Speaker 1: went to a top college. Yeah, he even has this
Speaker 1: neatly trimmed beard, and perhaps because he's a cyclist like
Speaker 1: the rest of San Francisco, he has a nice tan too.
Speaker 1: In Silicon Valley, most programmers are white and Asian men
Speaker 1: who have computer science degrees from elite universities. But for
Speaker 1: Mitch's next higher he's committed to looking outside that pool
Speaker 1: of people. That's pretty unusual for a company of penny size.
Speaker 1: Some people would call it affirmative action hiring, because Mitch
Speaker 1: is going to be actively considering the candidates background when
Speaker 1: he's deciding who to hire. And it's a very touchy topic.
Speaker 1: As we'll find out, not everyone agrees that it's the
Speaker 1: right thing to do him and I'm Ellen Hewitt, and
Speaker 1: this week Undecrypted, we're gonna be talking about something that
Speaker 1: every technology company says they want to do something about,
Speaker 1: which is diversity in the workforce. Well, they want to
Speaker 1: talk about it in these lofty slogans, but when you
Speaker 1: actually drill into the specifics, things start to get uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: We found one of the few guys in the industry
Speaker 1: willing to speak completely openly, willing to get really uncomfortable
Speaker 1: with us, someone who's trying to do something to fix
Speaker 1: the lack of diversity and tech from within his own
Speaker 1: tiny startup. Oh cool, I look at this giant chess board.
Speaker 1: The guy's penny work in a small coworking space in
Speaker 1: downtown San Francisco. They're on a shoestring budget. It's really
Speaker 1: not a glamorous place. They don't have free snacks. There
Speaker 1: isn't very good natural light, and their office is about
Speaker 1: the size of the bedroom room, A spacious, lovely I
Speaker 1: was telling her, I'm excited for her to see how
Speaker 1: like the other half of startups live, this is the
Speaker 1: don't spend a lot of money half of starposts. Inside
Speaker 1: this tiny office, there are four guys sitting side by side.
Speaker 1: My name's Mitch. I grew up in San Jose. I'm
Speaker 1: a mid twenties white guy. I'm Alex and I just
Speaker 1: Stanford is American. My name's Andrew Dennis. I'm half black,
Speaker 1: half white. UM I'm married and I'm my dad. I
Speaker 1: am Jonathan and I was born in Taiwan and I
Speaker 1: grew up in Maryland. All four of them believe it's
Speaker 1: the right move for their company to be prioritizing diversity now,
Speaker 1: not because it's the right thing to do, they also
Speaker 1: believe it will help their product. Yeah, Penny is this
Speaker 1: app that links to your bank accounts and can give
Speaker 1: you financial advice based on your spending patterns. Here's Mitch.
Speaker 1: As we were working on that core product, we were realizing,
Speaker 1: we're both two software engineers that grew up in the
Speaker 1: Bay Area. How are we going to get a product
Speaker 1: that does well in Montana and Kansas and Maine. And
Speaker 1: our answer to that was, we should be solving this
Speaker 1: by building out a diverse team that can empathize with
Speaker 1: people from different parts of the country, from different genders
Speaker 1: or different ethnicities. And you use the app by messaging
Speaker 1: this chat bot, this computer program that texts back and
Speaker 1: forth with you. The chat bot is called Penny, and
Speaker 1: Penny has a female face. But at the beginning, everything
Speaker 1: Penny said was written by two guys, Alex and Mitch.
Speaker 1: Here's Mitch's fiance Lizzie Wagner, explaining one way that when awry,
Speaker 1: so they started to use a little bit of like
Speaker 1: a snarky tone. You know, when you use like a
Speaker 1: winky emoji, it can also be considered flirty. So I
Speaker 1: told him I just read this conversation and I think
Speaker 1: Penny was flirting with me, and he was like, no way,
Speaker 1: it's a computer, it can't flirt, and I was like, no,
Speaker 1: it's a flirty conversation. He's like, this is exactly why
Speaker 1: we need more diverse perspectives, because Alex and I never
Speaker 1: even thought about that comment being taken that way. And
Speaker 1: building a relatable chatbot is super important when you're guiding
Speaker 1: customers through something as personal and sensitive and daunting as
Speaker 1: your finances. When a user writes in and says, I
Speaker 1: overdraft a lot, how do you respond? And some people
Speaker 1: will respond with, well, they should stop spending that much money.
Speaker 1: Other people will put themselves in their shoes and say
Speaker 1: that really sucks. That level of empathy doesn't come if
Speaker 1: everyone thinks and acts the same way in a room,
Speaker 1: They're all just gonna confirm each other's opinions of like, well,
Speaker 1: that person shouldn't be spending money they don't have. And
Speaker 1: Penny stands out from the rest of startups and Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley because it's focusing on hiring for diversity so early
Speaker 1: in the company's history. I think the default for early
Speaker 1: stage companies is not necessarily an aversion to diversity. It's
Speaker 1: not an active process of saying we are only going
Speaker 1: to hire people that look and sound just like us.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that we want to move fast, and
Speaker 1: the fastest way to hire people is to pull from
Speaker 1: our network. They get this big paycheck from a venture
Speaker 1: capital firm and they say, great, we're going to spend
Speaker 1: it immediately. They expand their team from two or four
Speaker 1: people to eight or twelve. If you punt the issue
Speaker 1: of diversity down the line, it becomes much harder because
Speaker 1: when you have eleven men on your team on a
Speaker 1: twelve person team, it becomes a hostile work environment for
Speaker 1: women trying to enter into that team. When you have
Speaker 1: a group of all white or all Asian people sitting
Speaker 1: in the same room together, it makes it hostile for
Speaker 1: other minority groups to join that environment. These kinds of
Speaker 1: companies really do exist. We talked to Jennifer Barbattini, as
Speaker 1: software engineer who interviewed with Penny in September, though she
Speaker 1: didn't get the job. I remember there was one company
Speaker 1: that I interviewed with. It was a smallish company like
Speaker 1: fifteen to twenty. They had ten engineers. All ten were male.
Speaker 1: And all ten were from Stanford, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm a good fit here, like,
Speaker 1: and the hiring person was telling me, We're we're trying
Speaker 1: to be diverse, and I'm like, well, okay, but still
Speaker 1: like this is a little intimidating. I don't have a
Speaker 1: Stanford credential. Um, I'm I'm definitely not. I can't brow talk.
Speaker 1: If it's a problem at a startup with twenty people,
Speaker 1: imagine what it's like at a Google or Facebook or Twitter.
Speaker 1: They have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of employees, only
Speaker 1: about thirty are women, and only about six percent are
Speaker 1: black or Latino. These companies can hire only people from
Speaker 1: those groups for the next year and their numbers would
Speaker 1: barely move. So it makes sense to start early. But
Speaker 1: the problem for startups is the pressure they're under in
Speaker 1: the very early days. You have maybe a year of
Speaker 1: funding in the bank, you have a bunch of competitors,
Speaker 1: and if you can't hire quickly to build quickly your toast.
Speaker 1: The consensus opinion is start worrying about it. When your
Speaker 1: product is successful enough that you know that you're going
Speaker 1: to be building out a team for the long run.
Speaker 1: Even someone like Mitch, who's really determined to focus on this.
Speaker 1: He's run into a lot of obstacles. Remember, Mitch isn't
Speaker 1: this diversity or HR expert. He's just a programmer trying
Speaker 1: to figure it out as he goes along. From a
Speaker 1: macro perspective of actively pursuing diversity, I'm almost but implementation wise,
Speaker 1: I'm i am just throwing darts on board and and
Speaker 1: hoping that we'll learn enough from those to get better.
Speaker 1: Every Monday, Mitch logs onto recruiting sites like angel Lists, Hired,
Speaker 1: and Triple Bite. He's looking for candidates or approach, and
Speaker 1: he'll spend one or two hours on each platform. He
Speaker 1: said it takes him maybe six hours on Monday to
Speaker 1: do that outreach, and then the follow up throughout the
Speaker 1: week brings his time to about fifteen hours every week
Speaker 1: just to fill one role. We spent one such Monday
Speaker 1: with Mitch. As you look through a fresh badge at candidates.
Speaker 1: These ones he found and hired this week, there were
Speaker 1: forty two that matched to search criteria. The very first
Speaker 1: candidate has really which is great, comes from a university
Speaker 1: I've never heard of, also great, and then has experience
Speaker 1: in different areas and you see the person's photos, and
Speaker 1: you see the person's photo and their name, UM, and
Speaker 1: actually what salary they're interested in, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: So I will start looking through this. Fortunately, when you
Speaker 1: have forty two people every week on this platform, plus
Speaker 1: the hundreds across, a lot of startups look at these
Speaker 1: sites when they're trying to hire. But after a while,
Speaker 1: Mitch realized that these job sites, they're only good for
Speaker 1: finding a certain kind of candidate. Angel List is great, UM,
Speaker 1: but not a good place to look for diversity. Same
Speaker 1: with many of the hiring platforms that we tried. H
Speaker 1: I've asked them about that in the past, and the
Speaker 1: typical answer is, sorry, this is just what's available. This
Speaker 1: is the pool of candidates. It's predominantly male, it's predominantly white, orasan.
Speaker 1: So Mitch started to look for ways to find people
Speaker 1: with more varied profiles, things like newsletters and meet ups
Speaker 1: for women and engineering. He also looked for new graduates
Speaker 1: from coding boot camps, which teach you how to code
Speaker 1: in a short period of time. These people tend to
Speaker 1: come from unusual backgrounds, but boot camps didn't turn out
Speaker 1: to be particularly helpful for Mitch. He found that a
Speaker 1: lot of these graduates didn't have enough experience to start
Speaker 1: contributing right away, and Penny, as a young startup, doesn't
Speaker 1: have the resources to train them. To apply to Penny,
Speaker 1: you have to complete a coding questionnaire, kind of like
Speaker 1: a TACOME test. And Mitch found that some people who
Speaker 1: started it weren't finishing. And a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who were dropping out were people who didn't have computer
Speaker 1: science degrees, or were women, or were programmers of color,
Speaker 1: and it was often these candidates that Mitch was most
Speaker 1: interested in. Mitch suspect did it might have something to
Speaker 1: do with a lack of confidence, Like these people with
Speaker 1: non traditional backgrounds are taking themselves out of the running
Speaker 1: before they even tried. Maybe the job description will say
Speaker 1: you have to have at least three years of experience,
Speaker 1: and let's say often the men with two years of
Speaker 1: experience will apply anyway, but the women wouldn't. So Mitch
Speaker 1: he tried something new. Before the break, Mitch had a
Speaker 1: realization that the very candidates he was interested in were
Speaker 1: taking themselves out of the running, maybe because they didn't
Speaker 1: think they would get the job anyway. Here's what he
Speaker 1: decided to do about it. When we get the sense
Speaker 1: that somebody has either a confidence issue, like just doesn't
Speaker 1: think they're a good fit for the position or doesn't
Speaker 1: think they have the skill set required, we will have
Speaker 1: a lot more contact with that person to assuage their fears.
Speaker 1: That may mean a phone screen much earlier in the process,
Speaker 1: It may mean more check in emails. That helped him
Speaker 1: shepherd more people through the whole process, not just the
Speaker 1: ultra confident ones. And that was a small success, but
Speaker 1: it all came at a real cost in the form
Speaker 1: of Mitch's time. The fifteen hours a week that Mitch
Speaker 1: was spending on recruiting, that's fifteen hours he's not coding
Speaker 1: or troubleshooting or mentoring his team. Mitch said it was
Speaker 1: worth it, but you can see why a lot of
Speaker 1: other founders in his position wouldn't really have the time
Speaker 1: to do this. And that brings us to the most
Speaker 1: controversial part. When you get to that final stage, would
Speaker 1: you pick one person or another because they're a minority candidate?
Speaker 1: What would you do? I talked to Jay Shriney Vassan.
Speaker 1: He's the CEO of Spoke, which is a nine person
Speaker 1: enterprise startup in San Francisco. Like Mitch J says he
Speaker 1: wants a diverse team, but he said he's not comfortable
Speaker 1: with making someone's ethnicity or gender one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why he's hiring them. He explicitly did not factor that
Speaker 1: into the final decision because I think that's unfair to
Speaker 1: us as well as the person being hired. UM. At
Speaker 1: the end of the day, UM, we want to have
Speaker 1: the best people possible for each role in our company,
Speaker 1: and this makes sense right. Picking someone in part because
Speaker 1: of what they look like can even be seen as
Speaker 1: employment discrimination, or it can feel patronizing to the person
Speaker 1: who was hired. These are the kind of counter arguments
Speaker 1: you hear a lot in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. But
Speaker 1: we asked, Mitch, here are two hypothetical candidates equally strong,
Speaker 1: encoding and other important values at Penny, but one's a
Speaker 1: white guy and the other has a less typical background.
Speaker 1: Who would you hire? You just said that they're equally qualified.
Speaker 1: What we're saying is that the the people that were
Speaker 1: interested in hiring were weighing them across all these factors,
Speaker 1: and so somebody with a diverse background and a totally
Speaker 1: different perspective, in our opinion, is more qualified. For the
Speaker 1: position that we're trying to fill. Giving us a perspective
Speaker 1: that we've never considered helps the product more than somebody
Speaker 1: that has our same perspective but as good at engineering.
Speaker 1: Did you have put back from people who felt like,
Speaker 1: what's unfair? Should I be punished for going to Stanford? Right?
Speaker 1: What's exactly that should I be punished for going to Stanford?
Speaker 1: It's it's something that I don't have a good answer to,
Speaker 1: other than the entire playing field is leaning in your direction.
Speaker 1: I know that it can feel like in that specific
Speaker 1: and sense um you're being discriminated against or you're somehow
Speaker 1: unfairly disadvantaged, but you are unfairly advantaged everywhere else in
Speaker 1: your life. So it's just, uh, it's just a slight
Speaker 1: tilt of the playing field a little less in your favor, um,
Speaker 1: which I'm okay with. I can I can sleep easy
Speaker 1: at night knowing that, knowing that if you graduated from
Speaker 1: Stanford you're going to be fine. I'm not worried about you.
Speaker 1: And we just heard Mitch laughing there, But you can
Speaker 1: tell just how carefully and deliberately Mitch has been choosing
Speaker 1: his words through this whole interview. His face was flushed.
Speaker 1: You could really tell that he was nervous. And I
Speaker 1: don't blame him here. We are shoving a mic in
Speaker 1: his face asking him to talk about gender and race
Speaker 1: and all these other things that are so touchy. The
Speaker 1: things going on in my mind are I need to
Speaker 1: be careful about this. I know that people are going
Speaker 1: to look at me and say, you're just some white
Speaker 1: dude rattling off about diversity, but you have no idea
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. That may be true. I may
Speaker 1: not know what I'm talking about, but I want to
Speaker 1: get that conversation going so that I can learn, so
Speaker 1: that the rest of our team can learn, and so
Speaker 1: that um we do better moving forward. We're basically just saying,
Speaker 1: you know, Allen, I really can't remember the last time
Speaker 1: I was this nervous trying to come up with the
Speaker 1: most delicate way to pose these questions. Me too, and Aki.
Speaker 1: You and I are both women of color, you're also gay.
Speaker 1: It really makes you think back to every time you've
Speaker 1: ever been offered a new job. Yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: until now this has all been theoretical. But when we
Speaker 1: went in to interview the Penny team, they were in
Speaker 1: the final stages with one candidate. They were talking to
Speaker 1: a woman and she's of Indian descent. While we were
Speaker 1: in the Penny office, we got the team altogether in
Speaker 1: a room and asked them what they thought of her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they all thought she would work well with the team,
Speaker 1: but she lacks some techical experience. Specifically, she wasn't fluent
Speaker 1: in the main programming language that Penny is written in.
Speaker 1: On top of that, the company was about to enter
Speaker 1: a really busy period. Great culture fit. It's somebody that
Speaker 1: we would all gladly have in the room working with us,
Speaker 1: because she's articulate and well thought out, and it is
Speaker 1: very responsive to feedback. How do you weigh that with
Speaker 1: the fact that she has no experience shipping production Ruby code,
Speaker 1: which is the language that we write in UM, but
Speaker 1: seems to have the aptitude to pick that up quickly. Well,
Speaker 1: the answer is we don't know, so ACKI. When we
Speaker 1: visited Mention his team, everything that they were saying seemed
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable to us. Yeah, I thought he was a
Speaker 1: really thoughtful guy. I was just genuinely impressed. But we're
Speaker 1: not experts on this either. So we outlined Mitch's philosophy
Speaker 1: and tactics with my Von Hutchinson, a former labor lawyer
Speaker 1: who is now a concip Bolton helping smaller startups on
Speaker 1: diversity and inclusion. You get an A for enthusiasm. Mitch
Speaker 1: for this letter grade, I would give him a beat. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that he's doing some of the right things. Um,
Speaker 1: he's taking a couple of risks, but he could take
Speaker 1: bigger risks. I think that he could definitely educate theself
Speaker 1: a little bit more. Just come through the resources and
Speaker 1: see what's out there. My Van said that in the
Speaker 1: long term, Penny should build relationships with organizations that are
Speaker 1: trying to bring more underrepresented groups into tech host dinners
Speaker 1: and meetups and that kind of thing. But she also
Speaker 1: gave Mitch some practical advice for right now, like put
Speaker 1: your pledge to diversity on your company's landing page, not
Speaker 1: just on your job spage. Consider bringing in an expert
Speaker 1: to help guide you instead of trying to figure it
Speaker 1: out for yourself. And when you hire minority candidates, don't
Speaker 1: expect them to do the work of recruiting diverse candidates
Speaker 1: for you. I'm real happy there are guys out here
Speaker 1: like Mitch. I think, Um, sometimes we see guys like
Speaker 1: Mitch don't stay like Mitch for very long. I think
Speaker 1: it's going to be in the next few years it's
Speaker 1: going to be really hard to hold those values and
Speaker 1: not to succumb to the temptations that are going to
Speaker 1: be abound in the industry when it comes to making
Speaker 1: the final call on who to hire. My Vaughan said,
Speaker 1: Mitch is taking the right approach by focusing on the
Speaker 1: different perspectives that a candidate would bring to Penny. I
Speaker 1: don't think that you should hire someone just because they're
Speaker 1: black or just because they're a woman. That will fill
Speaker 1: a short term goal, but that's not going to pay
Speaker 1: off in the long run. And I feel like so
Speaker 1: often we we equate identity with experience and it's not
Speaker 1: the same thing, although sometimes they're tied, right, So I
Speaker 1: think if you can figure out a way to really
Speaker 1: capture that, to capture the experience part of the identity
Speaker 1: as opposed to just the identity in a vacuum, like
Speaker 1: that's when you're kind of like more set up for
Speaker 1: a six US, Which brings us to our climax. Did Mitch, Alexandrew,
Speaker 1: and Jonathan hire the female programmer? We followed up with
Speaker 1: them in late November, and even though they were approaching
Speaker 1: a busy time, they decided to give her an offer.
Speaker 1: Her name's Vertica Shrivastav, and we met her just a
Speaker 1: few days after she accepted Penny's offer. She told us
Speaker 1: that as she's met with all these different companies, she
Speaker 1: knew she was likely going to be an outlier. I
Speaker 1: made it a point to ask Um how many female
Speaker 1: engineers they had, and after I started asking, I realized
Speaker 1: it made people uncomfortable. I didn't mean I didn't mean
Speaker 1: it as like a point of superiority. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to know how many female engineers because it would affect
Speaker 1: me as someone joining their team. And it made people uncomfortable. UM.
Speaker 1: They kind of be like, you know, well we had
Speaker 1: this engineer. She left UM, but she didn't sense that
Speaker 1: same discomfort at Penny. I had asked him a question UM,
Speaker 1: saying that companies always asked me why am I interested
Speaker 1: in them? I think it's only fair for me to
Speaker 1: ask UM, why are you interested in me? And I
Speaker 1: like that They didn't like tiptoe around the fact that
Speaker 1: I'm a female engineer. They're like, diversity is something that's
Speaker 1: really important to us, and you're clearly different because you're female,
Speaker 1: and then also listed like other things that were a
Speaker 1: little different about me than I guess the average software engineer.
Speaker 1: So like that. They're honest about that, and they're not
Speaker 1: trying to just because I'm a girl got out of
Speaker 1: the team, like they saw something more in me other
Speaker 1: than just that I'm a female. Fortica starts this week,
Speaker 1: but Mitch's work isn't over. Wi Bond, the diversity consultant,
Speaker 1: told us that it's not going to be enough to
Speaker 1: just hire candidates with minority backgrounds. The hardest part is
Speaker 1: making sure that the new hire feels like a real
Speaker 1: and necessary part of a team with challenging work, but
Speaker 1: also the right amount of support. It's a difficult balance,
Speaker 1: Mitch just success in the long term ultimately depends on
Speaker 1: whether Vertica stays and thrives at Penny and down the road,
Speaker 1: whether the different people Mitch keeps hiring will make the
Speaker 1: app more useful and enjoyable to everyone, not just people
Speaker 1: in the Silicon Valley bubble. Okay, silent, it is June
Speaker 1: now because birth con. She's been good. She's still at Penny.
Speaker 1: I talked to her and Mitch this week and asked her,
Speaker 1: you know, what her experience was like, and I was surprised.
Speaker 1: She told me, you know, the first um part of
Speaker 1: her time there, she felt actually pretty uncomfortable, pretty because
Speaker 1: she was the only woman there. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: because her engineering background was different. I think she just
Speaker 1: you know, she didn't have a background in fintech. Uh.
Speaker 1: But she told me she was really touched by how
Speaker 1: much the company really tried to make sure she understood
Speaker 1: they felt she belonged with them, she was part of
Speaker 1: the team, that kind of thing. So, you know, for example,
Speaker 1: they eat lunch together every day, and she said that
Speaker 1: even though the conversation could sometimes move to topics that
Speaker 1: she wasn't that interested in, she noticed that at different points,
Speaker 1: you know, different coworkers of hers would notice and try
Speaker 1: to move the conversation back to something that we could
Speaker 1: that they could all participate in. So they made a
Speaker 1: real effort. Yeah, and she felt like, you know, they
Speaker 1: were the ones who were really pushing the message like, yes,
Speaker 1: you're part of the team. And if anything, she said,
Speaker 1: she was the one who was nervous about it or
Speaker 1: or unsure that that was that that was the correct
Speaker 1: thing to do. And she also said, you know, Mitch
Speaker 1: made some changes to his leadership style to accommodate her
Speaker 1: as well, Like she had told him at one point
Speaker 1: a few months in that you know, he's really excitable.
Speaker 1: He really he talks fast and things out loud. He
Speaker 1: was really outgoing. Yeah, and she said he you know,
Speaker 1: she told him at one point, you know, when people
Speaker 1: speak loudly, it makes me feel like there's not enough
Speaker 1: space for me to give my ideas, or it makes me,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of pull back. And she said she
Speaker 1: noticed Mitch tried really hard to speak more softly when
Speaker 1: he was talking with her, and even though she was
Speaker 1: a little embarrassed that that change had to be made
Speaker 1: and had to be asked for, she was grateful that
Speaker 1: it was something that people really put effort into changing
Speaker 1: so that she could work there as well as everyone else.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Mitch talked about in our
Speaker 1: original episode was that hiring for diversity is not just
Speaker 1: the morally right thing to do, it's also a good
Speaker 1: business decision. And I'm wondering if hiring Vertica was a
Speaker 1: good ended up being a good business decision for him.
Speaker 1: I think he would agree, He said, for example, you know,
Speaker 1: she would have prospective and ideas that he would have
Speaker 1: never come up with him self. So he cited this
Speaker 1: time when they were talking about checking accounts and saving accounts,
Speaker 1: and he and the other guys had sort of assumed
Speaker 1: most people knew the difference between these two Rota chimed
Speaker 1: in and said, you know, actually I only recently learned
Speaker 1: the difference between these accounts. Maybe we should include an
Speaker 1: explanation for our users, and they did, and um, a
Speaker 1: lot of users clicked on, you know, wanting to know more.
Speaker 1: And so he was shown, you know, her perspective was
Speaker 1: actually correct. They had made an assumption about their users
Speaker 1: that turned out not to be so true. And so
Speaker 1: I think he was really grateful that having people just
Speaker 1: with a different background, a different experience, which show small
Speaker 1: things like that that could still be really important to
Speaker 1: how someone uses their product. It's been a year and
Speaker 1: a half since we first aired that episode, and a
Speaker 1: lot has happened since then in Silicon Valley and also
Speaker 1: other industries too, about the way we think about women
Speaker 1: in the workplace. I'm wondering if he sensed if Mitch
Speaker 1: had changed his thinking at all about the way he
Speaker 1: thinks about diversity. I think he probably stands in about
Speaker 1: the same position. You know, he's pretty committed to the
Speaker 1: ways that he views it. I think it's, you know,
Speaker 1: speaking as a reporter, it's been interesting to view how
Speaker 1: both you know, the me too conversation has led us
Speaker 1: to hear a lot more stories about how harassment in
Speaker 1: the workplace holds women back or affects the workplace dynamics.
Speaker 1: And then we also I think I've been getting more
Speaker 1: people speaking up on the other side, white men who
Speaker 1: say that they are starting to be discriminated against by
Speaker 1: over zealous diversity efforts, like the former Google engineer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: James damm or Is is really sort of a big
Speaker 1: player in this. And it's just been kind of crazy
Speaker 1: to watch these two conversations come out at once and
Speaker 1: and see how those are playing out. So I think
Speaker 1: if you're a CEO today, you're weighing a lot of
Speaker 1: different questions about how to approach diversity and inclusion at
Speaker 1: your company. So do you think there's anything that those
Speaker 1: CEOs can learn from a dis experience. I think just
Speaker 1: that diversity and inclusion is a lot of work. Uh,
Speaker 1: Mitch put in a lot of work to hire EVERTHCA
Speaker 1: and a lot of work afterward to make sure she
Speaker 1: felt comfortable and included. He told me that he feels
Speaker 1: like it would have saved him time, you know, if
Speaker 1: he was doing more hiring in the future, now that
Speaker 1: they have a better idea of this process, now that
Speaker 1: there already is a woman at the company. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that they know, you know, they've made some changes to
Speaker 1: their process to help make it more accessible to different groups. Uh.
Speaker 1: But Penny was actually acquired in March by Credit Karma,
Speaker 1: so they won't be doing that same kind of hiring anymore. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole team went over to start working at Credit Karma,
Speaker 1: including Brethica, including birtha um and so now they're developing
Speaker 1: a chat functionality for Credit Karma, which is a much
Speaker 1: bigger company. So he's in a little bit of a
Speaker 1: different position now he's not CEO of his own company.
Speaker 1: But I think he definitely feels like the effort he
Speaker 1: put in for that first hiring process is something that
Speaker 1: he would have been able to reuse if he'd been
Speaker 1: doing it again in the future. Well, best of luck
Speaker 1: to Mention and his team, and thanks for that update. Ellen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're welcome, and that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Do you have a story about diversity
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley? You can send us a message at
Speaker 1: Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Ellen Hewitt and I'm at aki Eto seven. If you
Speaker 1: enjoy listening to Decrypted, please recommend us to your friends,
Speaker 1: and if you have it already, take a moment to
Speaker 1: write and review our show. This really helps us find
Speaker 1: new listeners. The original episode was produced by Pia get Cary,
Speaker 1: Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. And thanks to topor Foreheads
Speaker 1: for his help on this update. Francesco Leavie is the
Speaker 1: head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. Table
Speaker 1: of the Abacus Robert, the last of Man of Ragus