Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna About this episode As a part of the 2021 How I Built This Summit (At Home) we have selected 10 Fellows, and we'd like to introduce you to them over the next couple weeks. In this episode: Pierre Paul, founder of a company called We Hear You that's developing a sign language translator that turns American Sign Language into audible speech and vice versa. Also, Toby Egbuna, co-founder of Chezie, a platform for job seekers aimed at creating career opportunities for people from under-represented groups.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Guy Raz? We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.
0:45 Guy Raz? But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes
1:30 Guy Raz? based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?
2:14 Guy Raz? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.
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5:23 Guy Raz? Hey, everyone. So as a lot of you know, every year during normal years, we do a How I Built This Summit, an in-real-life gathering that we've been doing in San Francisco. This year, we're going entirely virtual. But every year we've done the summit, we've invited a group of entrepreneurs to become How I Built This Fellows. These are dreamers and builders that may be in all different stages of their businesses and are looking to make connections or get mentorship or take their ideas to the next level. This year, we picked 10 fellows, and we're holding a pitch competition where the winner will get a $50,000 check from us, a grant. So over the next two weeks,
6:06 Guy Raz? we are going to introduce you to each of these fellows. One of the questions we ask when we're looking for fellows is, how is your idea going to make the world a better place? And the first two fellows we'd like for you to meet are focused on inclusion. For them, embracing the experiences of people who've been overlooked in the past isn't just something they think about, that is their central idea. First, we're going to hear from Pierre Paul. Pierre's company is called We Hear You. He's developing a sign language translator that turns American Sign Language into audible speech and vice versa. Pierre was born in Brazil and he was around five years old when he moved with his parents to the US.
6:51 Guy Raz? His family still watched a lot of Brazilian TV and they kept up Brazilian traditions around the house while Pierre was trying to learn a new language.
7:02 Speaker 01 So when I came to the US, I remember just struggling with my accent, struggling with understanding English and like teeter tottering between Portuguese and English. I'm this little kid who barely understood Portuguese, definitely didn't understand English. And I remember kids just not understanding what it means to be a foreigner with an accent, what it means to be a foreigner with broken English. And teachers were talking about potentially holding me back because my English wasn't up to par. And faced a lot of xenophobia, a lot of racism, a lot of negative backlash for being different. So when my parents stopped giving us as much of the Brazilian culture that we used to have in the house, it really bothered because I was like, I understand why they're doing this, they're caring about my academics and my progression.
7:48 Speaker 01 But I decided that if I was going to forget and unlearn Portuguese, to master English, I was going to master. I wanted to be able to have a voice, just understanding and crafting words in a way that ensured that anybody who had an exceptionality, whether it be something vocally or something physical, I wanted to be able to let them know that they are not wrong or they don't have a problem for being different than the status quo.
8:15 Guy Raz? And this idea of like mastering expression, especially verbal expression, has really been a theme in your life. Like I read that in high school, you were You were like one of the top public speakers in Ohio. Like this, you were like a speech and debate kid in high school?
8:30 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Speech and debate was kind of my claim to fame. I remember my school would send me to different tournaments around the US. Some notable ones, the Harvard Tournament, Bethel Park. And I was just able to compete on this national level. And I did end up being one of the top speakers in Ohio, one of the top speakers in the nation. And it gave me an opportunity to receive a speech scholarship to the top speech school at the time, Bradley University, and I was ecstatic.
8:56 Guy Raz? So you get to Bradley and on the speech scholarship. And I guess while you're there, while you were at Bradley, you worked on a project, I guess it's called the Capstone Project, maybe your final year project? Tell me about that.
9:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I'm at Bradley. I don't sleep very often, so late at night, my mind just runs wild. And I really concern myself with the problems that I see around me, the things happening in the world. And there was one night where I was just feeling complacent. I was feeling complacent where I was, and I was like, I don't like that. So one night I was scouring the internet, looking at different problems around the world and different things that don't have solutions. And one that hit me was the fact that individuals with hearing exceptionalities, whether it be their hard of hearing or they're deaf, have a hard time communicating at food establishments. And it was as simple as they tried to order food, whether writing it on a piece of paper or a napkin, and hand it to the associate and the associate is dismissive.
9:56 Speaker 01 Or the associate doesn't know American Sign Language and they're not able to have their freedom and autonomy to order in their natural language. And when I realized that was a problem, I was like, OK, come on. We have Google Translate for every single language. Like, what are we missing here? Why has this not been done? And so with that realization, I just...
10:18 Speaker 01 Couldn't not do anything about it. So as cliche as it sounds, I remember finally falling asleep and I had a dream about the specific sign language translator. And it's funny, I had a dream that I was in this McDonald's and I was using this device. And I woke up the next morning and I contacted my best friend, who's actually now the COO of We Hear You. And I'm like, hey, you will not believe what I'm thinking of.
10:40 Guy Raz? What did you, what did you tell them?
10:42 Speaker 01 So when I contacted Bethany, I was like, I had this dream that there's a sign language translator that we can create and it's gonna look like this and it's gonna act like this. And she asked one question. It's funny, this is why we named the company We Hear You. She asked, why do you keep doing what you do in the way that you do it? And I said, well, it's because I hear the struggles of the people around me. So when people ask us why, the answer is because we hear you. We hear what you're facing, we hear what you're going through. And that's what drives us.
11:10 Guy Raz? Basically, you come up with this idea. You're thinking there's Google Trends, like there are all these ways for people who speak different languages to communicate, but it's not easy for people who are deaf or, or hard of hearing to communicate with those who aren't. I mean, there's, and there's some examples. There is a, a famous pizzeria in San Francisco where all the employees are deaf and in Washington DC, there's Gallaudet University and um, there are cafes around there where all the employees are deaf, but, but it's still, this is a problem that needs to be solved, right? You can't just walk, walk into a store if you are hard of hearing or deaf and easily order if that person can't read lips. And it's challenging for the cross-communication. So you're thinking, how can I solve this problem?
11:52 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And so I started going to every single professor and every single professional who might have an expertise in this area. And I was told no, so many times. I was told, really great idea, can't be done. Really great idea, we don't know where to start. This can't be done. And I refused to give up. And I remember I'm on the last two people that I could possibly ask. And I tell him the idea. And he's like, I like it. Let's do it. And I remember being shocked. I was like, are you kidding? Are you like yanking my chain? Like, are we messing around here? Um, he was like, no, I love you. He's like, I'm super busy, but I have another professor who's gonna love to help you. We have some students who interned for NASA who've been looking for a passion project.
12:33 Guy Raz? Wow.
12:33 Speaker 01 And just like that, we got started. We did research and I'd already done copious amounts of research leading up to here. So I handed them this doc that's like a hundred pages and I'm like, this is what I know.
12:44 Guy Raz? Wow.
12:44 Speaker 01 These are the problems that I've seen in the past. These are the things that I want to be in the future. Let's get it started.
12:50 Guy Raz? All right. So now you started working on this and I know that in December of 2020, you were able to put out a proof of concept. This is, this is your company. It's called?
13:03 Speaker 01 We hear you.
13:04 Guy Raz? We hear you, which is great. So W H Y Y. Um, and how does it work?
13:10 Speaker 01 So 2020, we were able to release our first prototype, which was a sign language translator that could take finger spelling.
13:18 Guy Raz? Finger spelling is, briefly explain how that works.
13:21 Speaker 01 Yep. So there are different letters, A, B, C, D, every single.
13:26 Guy Raz? Letter has a shape with your, with your hand. Okay.
13:28 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So it took finger spelling and then it would string it together. Once the word was complete and then we added a spell check function. And we started in coffee shops because coffee shops are extremely popular. And it was just a great place with a lower vocabulary so that we could expand. So we started with L A R G E, large C O F F E E.
13:51 Guy Raz? And this is like an iPhone or like an iPad that was recording?
13:54 Speaker 01 So absolutely. So Android tablets, one of the things that we really wanted to make sure that our system was, we didn't want somebody to have to buy a complicated glove or a complicated camera. We wanted to work on any camera.
14:07 Guy Raz? Just an app that would be on, on any camera?
14:09 Speaker 01 Exactly. Yeah. So just software that we can put somewhere. And so we put it in the coffee shop and we received so much good, but so much bad feedback. And it was a lot of, this is great. Where's the full gesture capability?
14:23 Guy Raz? Full gesture capability, meaning somebody using American Sign Language.
14:28 Speaker 01 Exactly.
14:28 Guy Raz? That would then be automatically translated.
14:31 Speaker 01 Yep.
14:32 Guy Raz? By, by pointing your iPhone or your Android device at that person, it would come back to you in, in either text or in, in, in audio?
14:41 Speaker 01 Exactly. So essentially it'd be large coffee instead of spelling it out and then it verbalizes and then the backwards compatibility, you can talk into it and say, would you like cream and sugar? And it would sign back, would you like cream and sugar?
14:54 Guy Raz? Wow.
14:54 Speaker 01 We understood that finger spelling really doesn't fully encapsulate American sign language, but it's a good start.
15:00 Guy Raz? So in a perfect world, once your vision is fully realized.
15:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:06 Guy Raz? Tell me how you would love for this to work on a day-to-day basis. I go into a shop and the person taking my order is deaf and how would we interact?
15:18 Speaker 01 So in the perfect world, you walk into a shop and you see a tablet set up there. And so you walk up to the counter and you order whatever you want. I would like an Italian melt with a large coffee, cream and sugar, whatever fantastical things you would like. And our system picks it up. You don't even know that you're doing it because you're looking the associate in the eye and the system picks it up and then it signs back exactly what you said.
15:40 Guy Raz? Wow.
15:40 Speaker 01 And then they sign it back into the system, verbalize it for you, and that can be a fluid conversation. And then let's say you're meeting with somebody there who's a part of the deaf and hard of hearing community. You sit down, you prop your phone up facing them and you guys have that conversation the same way that you and I can talk right now. There's no barrier that's blocking that ability to say, hey, have a great day. How are you doing? And that's where I foresee, I see this being something that everybody has in their pocket.
16:07 Guy Raz? Pierre, it's just so remarkable. I mean, you didn't grow up around people who are deaf. You didn't have a direct connection to the deaf community, but you saw a challenge and you pursued it. And there was a reason why you pursued this challenge. And I have to imagine that it has something to do with a bigger philosophy that you have around inclusion?
16:30 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Diversity and inclusion should never be the afterthought of innovation. It should be the foundation.
16:37 Guy Raz? Yeah.
16:37 Speaker 01 It's always been a philosophy of mine because I came up to the United States and I was excluded so frequently. I was made to feel like I did not have a place to belong. And when you grow up with that as a kid, getting out of that mindset and then growing into a world and seeing that it still persists sometimes. It kind of sucks. I just put simply, it kind of sucks.
16:59 Guy Raz? Yeah.
17:00 Speaker 01 And so I just love helping people any way that I can. And so one thing that I've really been trying to make sure that I'm not doing, I don't want to come across as a hearing savior. Because the deaf community is far too strong and far too capable to need a hearing savior. All I am is an ally who is hoping to aid in a journey that has been long fought for. It's been something that you can read about. People have tried time and time again to create a sign language translator, but they do it from a hearing-centric perspective. And so it's just been a lot of consulting with the deaf community, a lot of tough conversations, a lot of no's, a lot of why use. And it's been a lot of why not?
17:42 Guy Raz? Pierre, if you win the pitch competition, how will you use the $50,000 grant?
17:50 Speaker 01 So if we are fortunate enough to win the pitch competition, a lot of that money is going to be allocated to finishing development of our sign language translator. And then also manufacturing the hands-free devices so that we can start putting that into production. So all of that money is just going to go towards furthering our goals so much more and just finding new ways to innovate. So it's just going to be furthering our development and making sure that our vision doesn't just stay inside of We Hear You. It then permeates to every part of society.
18:24 Guy Raz? That's Pierre Paul, founder and CEO of We Hear You. When we come back, we'll hear from another How I Built This Fellow and his big idea around inclusion. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Fellow's Edition from NPR.
18:54 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, fellows edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So Toby Agbuna and his sister Demaby are the founders of Chezy. It's a platform for job seekers that they hope will create career opportunities for people from underrepresented groups. They are first-generation Nigerian immigrants, and while the focus of their company is on inclusion, that's not exactly where Toby started.
19:21 Speaker 02 I knew I wanted to be in business as soon as I got to school. I was good at math, and the typical Nigerian tracks are lawyer, doctor, or businessperson. And I ruled out lawyers, because I don't like reading that much. And I hate science, so I ruled out being a doctor, and I chose business. So I knew I wanted to go into consulting. It just felt like a good way for me to try out a bunch of different things and then figure out where I wanted to ultimately take my career. And also, my dad wasn't consulting. So I graduated from UNC and moved to Boston to start working in management consulting. And I spent three years in Boston, and then actually moved to New York City, shifting a little bit more into people-oriented, diversity and inclusion kind of work.
20:04 Speaker 02 And then the pandemic hit, so I actually moved out of New York City, moved back home to North Carolina, and then now to Georgia.
20:09 Guy Raz? Like many people, and as you may know, if you've heard How I Built This, we've had several guests who went into consulting, but always with an eye on starting their own thing. And consulting's a great place to do that, because you learn about a bunch of different industries. It sounds like that was your plan, that you would go into consulting and absorb a lot of different industries and eventually figure out your own thing?
20:31 Speaker 02 That was exactly my plan. I thought that I would get here, get experience in retail and finance and all these other kind of industries, and that was not the case. I got put into utilities and power generation almost in the beginning, and it was just kind of difficult to get out, to establish my network there. And our projects are a year, a year and a half long, so that's how it ended up working. But I was really focused on finding a way to get back to UNC. So I got involved with the diversity recruiting team, because this was my opportunity to go back to campus every now and then and help other Black students get this job that I'd been so fortunate to get. And that's actually kind of how I got into diversity and inclusion work. I just kind of... Realized that I had a passion for like creating opportunities or just helping people
21:14 Speaker 02 realize the opportunities that were out there for them, especially people that look like me or people from other historically underrepresented groups. So that's kind of where the the interest came from.
21:22 Guy Raz? So did you start to think, huh, maybe there's some kind of business around this area that I can create? Was that where sort of the gears in your head started turning?
21:31 Speaker 02 No, that's that's not what I thought, actually. I thought that so typically people go into consulting and they work two to three years and then they go somewhere else, right? They go into what we call industry. So I was actually thinking, okay, I've done my two years. So I was really applying to a bunch of diversity and inclusion analysts, program manager, jobs like that. And this is three years ago before everything happened last summer. So like, you know, there were jobs out there, but companies weren't really serious about hiring for it.
21:56 Guy Raz? Yeah.
21:57 Speaker 02 And I remember I I found a job at Lyft. I didn't have anyone in my network that worked at Lyft. So I went on LinkedIn and I was just Google it, or I was just looking up people like people that work at Lyft in New York City. And I found myself looking to speak to black people because I figured that their experiences would be most similar to mine. And I also was kind of like, you know, trying to find like my community or like my my tribe of people in the office at the at Lyft before I decided to apply. And it was it was difficult because, you know, it was like, it was kind of laborious for me to go through LinkedIn every time like that and kind of figure to ultimately just kind of figure out what it's like to be black there. And I kind of took that sentiment to my sister and to say, you know, there's not really a way for you to know what it's like to be black, or, you know, in her case, a black woman, or gay, or disabled, or whatever at a company.
22:42 Speaker 02 And that was kind of the impetus for actually us wanting to start Chesley was that experience, at least for me, was that experience of literally wanting to get this information for myself at Lyft and not being able to.
22:53 Guy Raz? So, I mean, there there was and is Glassdoor, right? You can go to Glassdoor and you can kind of get a sense, depending on if your company is represented on Glassdoor, of what it might be like to work there. But you essentially were like, but there's nothing that that can tell me what the experience might be like for for me as a black man, or for an Asian woman, or for somebody who is a minority or marginalized. There there's nothing like that out there. And that was really this kind of, it sounds like a light, almost like a lightbulb moment.
23:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was. It was. Like, I mean, everyone uses Glassdoor, but I think Glassdoor is just very. It's very one size fits all.
23:34 Guy Raz? Yeah.
23:34 Speaker 02 You know, a lot of the reviews that they have are very hot or cold. It's very much like, I didn't get the job. This company sucks. Don't ever work here. Or it's like, it almost seems like the people were like paid to put a positive review. They're like so glowing. It's like this doesn't seem realistic.
23:47 Guy Raz? Yeah.
23:47 Speaker 02 Um, but the biggest thing is that, you know, you don't know who submitted the review. And therefore it's kind of hard to put yourselves in the shoes of that person. So we kind of really wanted to make our reviews, we call them stories. Our stories specific to the person that's trying to find this information. So we added, um, what we call portraits to them. So like, I can go on and find stories with portraits of black men, you know, 21 to 30, not disabled, et cetera, like, or even just, you know, any combination of those. And that the idea is that you're finding stories from people that identify similarly to you with our platform.
24:18 Guy Raz? So you come up with this idea and you call it Chesey. And tell me about the name.
24:22 Speaker 02 So we actually launched as Diversify.
24:25 Guy Raz? Uh huh.
24:25 Speaker 02 I don't even know how we came up with that name, but it was spelled D Y V E R S I F I. And then in January of this year, we kind of decided to rebrand to Chesey. So again, um, we're Nigerian, my sister and I are Nigerian. We're of the Ibo tribe, so Chesey is the Ibo word for reflect. And it kind of just symbolizes, you know, the idea of job seekers doing some self-reflection and figuring out what it is that I want out of a workplace, but also companies doing reflection to say like, are we serving our employees properly? What can we do to improve that sort of thing?
24:55 Guy Raz? So tell me where you are right now. What, what, I mean, can you go in and, and start to use it?
25:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, Chesey, we are, we are live. We, um, have about 1,400 stories from companies at some companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Facebook. We have around 1,200 people signed up for our platform, maybe around 1,250. I haven't checked today. And we actually just launched a new community feature. So if you recall the, the list story that I told you, part of me was trying to figure out what it's like to be black at a company, but also part of me was trying to kind of find other black people that I could connect with in my search.
25:30 Guy Raz? Yeah.
25:30 Speaker 02 And the idea behind this community feature is We want to give job seekers a way to interact with the people that are already at a company and kind of like get a feel for their culture and message them, talk to them directly. But also, we want to give companies a way to go past the post and pray kind of models, what I call it, of recruiting, where every company right now is trying to recruit diverse talent. But they're all just kind of like posting some jobs over here, some jobs over here, some jobs over here, and hoping that they get found. This is kind of a way for them to be more proactive about their recruiting and like putting their culture out there by making their internal communities of talent, diverse talent, more accessible to candidates.
26:08 Guy Raz? What if, I mean presumably, there are going to be some people who want to post anonymously. They may be at the company, but they don't want people to know who they are because maybe they had a difficult or challenging experience. Is that possible? Can you do that?
26:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, so all of our stories are anonymous. The only kind of identifying piece of it is you can choose to like display or provide as much information as you want in terms of your portrait. You just have to provide one portrait trait. So I could, you know, fill out black, male, 21 to 30, heterosexual, disabled, or not disabled, not a veteran, or I could just say black, right? And the idea behind that is, obviously, you know, if you work at a 200-person company and there's three black people, it's really easy to identify who it is that submitted this review or this story. So, yeah, we took that into consideration and made it, tried to make it as anonymous and kind of identity protecting as possible.
26:57 Guy Raz? Toby, we've interviewed Jeremy Stopelman, the founder of Yelp, on how I wrote this before. And as you probably know, one of the knocks on Yelp or even Glassdoor is that, you know, is that businesses say, well, we don't, you know, we don't know who's reviewing us and we can't verify, even if they've been to the restaurant, they might be a competitor. And so how do you, how are you able to make sure that the people doing the reviews are really who they say they are?
27:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, for these initial reviews that we've gotten, we've actually just called up people.
27:29 Guy Raz? Right.
27:30 Speaker 02 Literally. So we've done a lot of like, we call them story interviews. So I've spoken to people from those companies that I mentioned before, and I ask them a number of questions about their, you know, their experience with promotions and their relationship with their managers and diversity programs. What we found is that, one, you know, it's very easy to validate that someone works at a company because obviously they're posting anonymously, but with the conversations that we have are very one-on-one and intimate like we're having right now. But then, two, we get a very, a much more complete picture of their job experience. And I realize that when people hear about, think of like a glass door before minorities, they immediately think like, people are coming here to bash their companies. That's not the case. A lot of the stories that we've gathered are positive. And what we found is that they're like, small
28:13 Speaker 02 details that people wish were improved, right? They wish their manager would give them more space to speak up in a meeting. They wish that their company would be a little bit more intentional about the diversity programs that they're doing, like, things like that, that companies, that are actually like valuable insights for companies to know that, oh, we actually, we're doing an overall, a pretty good job, an okay job. There are just some smaller things about our employee experience that we need to improve upon.
28:33 Guy Raz? So in the future, it's, do you expect that all the content on Chezy will go through an editorial process? Like, your team will be doing interviews of people? Or do you think that people will be able to directly post from their, their computers?
28:47 Speaker 02 So people can go on, like, you could go on Guide and post about NPR if you wanted to tomorrow. Most of the stories that we gathered have been through this story interview process. And I realize that it isn't super scalable, but we, my sister and I have had conversations to say, like, what if this was scalable? We get a very complete picture of someone's experience here through these story interviews. And to me, 10,000 of these very complete, insightful stories is worth more than 100,000, it's bad, it's good, my manager sucked, reviews that you might see on other sites.
29:20 Guy Raz? Yeah, the curated content is going to be way more valuable than the user-generated content.
29:26 Speaker 02 Exactly. So we're actively thinking about how we can make this story interview process part of our business. Yes, that probably means that we have fewer stories than another review site, but we can guarantee you that the information that you find from the stories that we do have will be insightful and powerful and much more useful during your job search.
29:42 Guy Raz? I know that you have written about being a founder of a business. It's, I think you have an essay called "The Hardest Part About Being a Founder", which is a wonderful essay. Tell me, what's the hardest part about being a founder?
29:57 Speaker 02 The hardest part for me in this, you know, this year, year and a half that we've been on it has been the ambiguity. You know, we had an idea that we were going to be this classroom for minorities and we would just put this idea out there and it would take off. Like literally, I thought that we would hit publish the next day, you know, be one of those crazy success stories. We had 100,000 hits, all these stories. That did not happen. And I think that we've been at a consistent crossroads between, you know, like, do we create something that job seekers love? Or do we create something that can be very viable to businesses? Because it kind of seems like we almost have to choose, at least in this initial stage. Like, do we have companies that will help job seekers? We can't necessarily do both right away. And then we just had so many discussions about like, should we focus all in, like all on these stories? Should we offer like a consulting arm? Like, we just have no idea what we're doing.
30:41 Speaker 02 And I think the hardest part is that ambiguity of, what actually should I do? Right? And how do I kind of move forward? I am very much a planner. Like, I'm the person that maps out his itinerary for a trip and everything like that. So like, that's not super conducive with being a founder and being, or running a business where you don't know what you're doing. So a lot of it has just been, you know, having the conviction to say like, we're doing this. We're going to try it for three months. If it doesn't work, we learned something, we move on to the next thing.
31:06 Guy Raz? Toby, as part of your High Builtness Fellowship, you will be attending a bunch of workshops and you attended the welcome session hosted by me and Troy Carter. What was your takeaway from that? What was the thing that you walked away from that with?
31:21 Speaker 02 I mean, I think the, this entire time, it's been myself and my sister. And a lot of the conversation that we have with Troy was around like managing a team. You know, I haven't really, I'm the CEO. I wouldn't say that I've been managing my sister's work. She's CMO, she runs everything that you see about Chesee in news or, or social media or anything like that, she runs. So I haven't necessarily been managing her, but I'm actively thinking about now, like, you know, eventually, we're going to get a CTO on, we're going to get some, some product people on, we're going to get some designers. Like, we're going to have a team of people that I'm kind of going to be responsible for leading and pointing in the right direction. I think that was my biggest takeaway is just like, how to be a good leader? How to, Troy said something along the lines of like, you know, you want to get people in that can do a role and just take off.
32:03 Speaker 03 In terms of leaders, how can you hire the smartest people and just let them make their mistakes? How do you give them resources to mentors outside of the company or maybe inside of the company, but being able to help them level up as, you know, as well and giving them a path to it? But I just believe, you know, can you hire really smart people and just get out of their way?
32:28 Speaker 02 You know, I think we're a very mission-driven business, right? And I'm very excited to have a team of people that are equally invested in solving this problem that maybe and I started this company for.
32:36 Guy Raz? If, if you and your sister win this pitch competition, how, how do you think you would use the $50,000 grant?
32:44 Speaker 02 If we win the pitch competition, that's, that's the jump, you know, because we're still working full-time. We're still worth working at our, our full-time job. I think this would be the jump that we need to, to transition into full-time. You know, part of that money would go towards kind of sustaining ourselves and then part of it will also go towards web development. You know, I've been making it all myself, just learning how to code slash not code. That money would definitely go towards web development and building out a more solid web software product and just going full-time.
33:10 Guy Raz? That's Toby Agbuna, co-founder and CEO of Chezy. More stories from our How I Built This Fellows edition will be in your feed on Thursday. If you want to learn more about the fellows or get tickets to the How I Built This Summit, you can visit summit.npr.org. And to find out more about NPR's live events, go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rantin Arablui. Thanks also to Janet, Wu-Jung Lee, Gianna Capadona, Bruce Grant, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, El Mannion, Joanna Palavsky, John Isabella, Jessica Goldstein, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers.
33:55 Guy Raz? I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Fellows Edition from NPR.
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