Jopwell

“And when companies say, oh, you know, there's not even like the pipeline of black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American engineers. One, that's not true. And the data does not suggest that at all.”

“But in terms of, you know, testing this out, I never really tested it out because I lived through it. I was so convicted with it and I like intimately understood what the pain points were. So You know, ignorance is bliss to some degree. And so I had this visio…”

“We then actually applied to New York Techstars. And did not get in. And this was in December. Made it to the final round. They basically said, I don't understand diversity. Recruiting is not a big challenge. And you guys don't have anything. Like, I don't know…”

“What we do really well in is call it people within their 20 or 30 somethings within their age range. And so really that entry level to mid-level talent is where we thrive the most. We do have people that we would consider executives on the platform, but it's l…”

“When users on Jopwo are saying, you know, why don't I just apply? You can, and you should but you're going to go into a black box unless you know somebody.”

“So we set out from the start to build it as a for-profit entity and not a nonprofit, which there are many amazing nonprofits that, that focus on diversity recruitment. But we just took their approach to leverage technology, do it at scale and solve a problem.”

“Now I have a coffee session where every morning I get coffee with a different employee for about 45 minutes cause I go get coffee anyway. So I might as well go with somebody and just sit down and just have a conversation. And it's in those one-on-one settings …”

“When I hear the word diversity and I hear people describe diversity challenges I think that One, when I hear that, I don't really hear much because that diversity is kind of, it could be anything. You can make an argument that anybody is diverse and that reall…”

“And once a senior partner at a firm feels like he's being taught in a very respectful way, The leverage changes.”

“And by the time we applied to YC, we had built a business that was getting traction, and 10 weeks later, we raised three and a half million dollars on Demo Day.”

“And I made this deck along with Ryan, my co-founder, and we just showed it to companies and said, this is what we're going to build, and if we build this, will you be a customer? And so we got really fortunate that when we made these phone calls, people answer…”

“So what we've now done with our platform is that based on certain tags and triggers and whatnot. We speak to you in a different tone. So people When they interact with Jopwell, they're, they have different personas at Jopwell that they're interacting with. Not…”

“Focusing on the culture. It's the number one thing that like, you know, when you're four people, it don't really have to focus on it. It just, it's just, you know, it is what it is. And when you're 10 people, you really don't have to focus on it. At some point…”

“If you look at the numbers in tech, for instance, right? If two percent of your workforce is black and three percent are Latino or Hispanic, odds are you don't know anybody that works there. And odds are you're not going to have that champion that kind of says…”

“I think raising your hand and just saying publicly, like we need assistance with a particular challenge is the way that you kind of get out your own way and you start to unlock other pipelines of talent.”

“If your company is two percent black or three percent, you know, Hispanic or Latino, you can't say that you can't find enough people who are people of color in non-technical roles, sales, consulting, finance, HR, you name it. And so if your organization is sti…”

“We don't choose companies to work with that don't believe in the value of diversity. So the only sell we make is why you should use Jopwell. So we never get into the conversations around why diversity is important to your organization because they understand i…”

“Like you have to give me an agenda of what the meeting's going to be on. I have particular blocks of time. You can, we can have meetings and I just have to be really protective over my time.”

“But as you hire your friends and for friends, friends, and that's how companies scale. So when we think about like the difficulties of how companies kind of get to where they are, where there's a lack of diversity, we experienced it from a very extreme other s…”