 in the broader movement as a technologist myself. We work with public defense agencies and are developing software for them to be able to better manage the influx of body camera footage, interrogation videos, jail calls that the justice system is currently being swamped with. And our ultimate goal really is to be able to reduce pre-trial detention times and ensure better outcomes for low-income criminal defendants who are currently being underserved. So that's a little bit about us. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Yolkendi, if we can go to you next for a little bit about you and Forefront. Yes, thank you everyone. I'm so honored to be here. My name is Yolkendi Valdez and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Forefront. But not long ago, I was just a first generation college student low income from the Dominican Republic trying to navigate finding a job. I landed in business school and I thought I could reach the stars but then I realized that a lot of these systems around hiring weren't built for me. It was harder for me to land jobs and technology and consulting because I didn't have the existing social capital or that initial exposure to understand how to go about it. And then looking back and realizing the next generation of the workforce looks more like me called for urgency. So I met my co-founder in school and we started building solutions to try to build a more diverse and inclusive workforce ecosystem. And as of last year, with the help of the First Act Fund, finally figure out a way to scale that through technology. So now we're supporting students and young people with 24 seven career development. So a student can text one of our chatbots named Carmen sort of like Alexa or Siri before your career and you can get help with your resume, interview or get connected to mentors in your industry all over text message or online chatbot like the ones you use for customer service. Awesome, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit more. I'm sure we'll dive in a little bit deeper to some of the work that you've done. But Bindi, if we could go over to you next and for an introduction of you and Early Bird. Okay, hi everyone. Thank you, Chris for the introduction. I'm really glad to be here and I'm really glad that the work of Early Bird is being recognized on a national platform. So I'm the founder and chief technologist at Early Bird and we're a very early stage biotech company. Our goal is to develop and design these biomedical devices that allow early screening for breast cancer. So the reason that this idea came about is this year because of the pandemic I noticed this really big gap between people who were able to afford high quality healthcare versus those who aren't which is the majority of the world population. And I thought to myself as a researcher and as a engineer, how can I use my skills in this time where so much uncertainty is happening? How can I use the time I have and try and develop a solution? And I did a lot of research. I'm already a PhD student working with a team that is studying cancer. And so that sort of gave me the motivation to dig deeper into how breast cancer can be prevented and treated earlier. So this is how Early Bird came about. And then I talked to a group of friends and we decided that we wanted to write this proposal and send it into First Act Fund. And we decided that we actually, our goal is to deliver these devices in the near future to low and middle income countries so that we can provide accessible medical imaging technologies to them. And so really the inspiration was the pandemic. So it really spurred that thought process in me and this is why we really were very motivated to solve this problem. Yes, thank you so much for sharing a little bit more and it's such an important problem to be solving access to healthcare technologies, especially during a global pandemic like the one that we're all still living through here in the end of 2020. And last but not least, really excited to have Vanessa, Kastanine and Gil if we could have you, Vanessa, share a little bit more about your background and how you came to start Social Cypher. Yeah, thanks, Chris and I'm happy to. So I'm Vanessa, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Social Cypher and we are a social emotional learning platform that is game-based for neurodivergent youth. And I started Social Cypher because of my experiences being a neurodivergent person on the autism spectrum. So I was diagnosed autism when I was 14 due to a lot of these stereotypes of it, especially being a woman with autism. I actually went through lots of mental health issues. I hit my diagnosis for six years. I set that through a lot of anxiety and depression and low self-esteem just due to many of the stereotypes that existed. And after really gaining confidence and working through things and learning in my own way, which for me, social interaction is really about learning through things I loved. So music and movies and games. I started kind of gaining my confidence. I went to college, became sort of a neuroscience researcher and put that together with my personal experience. And in college kind of came up with that with Social Cypher. And three years later we're developing or actually we're about to launch our first game which is called Ava and it has a representative autistic protagonist. And that's kind of a lot of how we came to be. I just wanna make sure that autistic youth are supported in the way that I would have wanted at that age. Thank you, Vanessa. And thank you to all four of you for sharing a little bit more about your own inspirations for starting the organizations that you lead. I think one common thread that we see and that's very relevant to the convening of kind of PIT-UN is how you came to find your co-founders, how you came to find really that first couple of steps that you took as an entrepreneur in college. And I think thinking about, I like to think of college as really one of the best incubators that you can find. There's no other space where you can kind of fail as fast and have the infrastructure and the support networks. And so maybe if each of you could talk to, I think coming from four different universities how you're able to leverage specific resources and channels on your campuses. And maybe you'll, Kendi, we can start with you. Yeah, no, so for me, I'm originally from St. Louis, Missouri, the good old Midwest, but I ended up going to school right, going to school right outside of Boston, Babson College, which is actually known for entrepreneurship. And I only was, I would love you to hear about it because the high school that I went to, you have one-on-one personalized attention and I became obsessed with the idea of social entrepreneurship. So my college counselor said, hey, go check it out. So I couldn't agree with you more, Chris, that college was really the best playground for me because I always was the kid that would come up with the flyers whenever I really put the idea to action until I got to college and really got to work. And so it was really my first year of college where I met my co-founder. I went through the first semester where I just tried to do it with friends, obviously as you hear, it doesn't always work out with your friends, but then I got a mutual connection to someone that was coming in the second semester who ended up being my co-founder and then going to a private institution, there's usually I'm used to being the only Dominican kid in the room. So it wasn't hard to ultimately find each other. My co-founder is also a Dominican kid who grew up in Queens with a single mother and also have that story of being the only one in the room. So that first conversation was three hours and we turn it into a business. We haven't looked back since, so we continue to work through college and ultimately made the bold and vulnerable decision together to say no to $80,000 in consulting salaries right out of college and do this business. And we've been at it for three years now since our graduation in 2017. So we were in friends right away, but became friends to the business and I really had to be there and lean on each other and I couldn't have done it without my co-founder. Finding your people is such a theme and I think we'll probably come back to the notion of being an entrepreneur in school means one thing, but once you dive after graduation, that's a big leap that you took and that you and Oswell took. And I know all of you on this panel have taken and so we'll definitely come back to that and kind of helping folks in the audience think about is this idea something that is ready for prime time? But Dave, maybe if you want to talk about, I know you mentioned University of Chicago with some of the very specific relationships with the local community and how you came to leverage resources and expertise in Chicago. Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that I'll just emphasize is that there's really no better time to start working on an idea and to be as ambitious as possible than when you're in school. I think in my experience, I knew that I wanted to do something centered around criminal justice, but it was really tough because you have a million classes, deadlines, perhaps postgraduate opportunities that you're trying to balance at the same time. So I kind of made a very intentional decision to take an entrepreneurship course that my university was offering. And that's where I already knew my co-founder from before, but that's where we really started working on this idea. And the course itself, it doesn't necessarily give you the magic key to creating a scalable business, but it does give you structure and an environment which was really all both Leslie and I needed to take our step from our project from an idea to our initial prototype. So some of the specific resources that we relied on, we needed to come up with a contract to actually sell this software to public defense agencies. I did not know the first thing about the liability issues that would be involved. And so we just showed up at our local law school. And in conversations with some professors there who were more than happy to speak with us, we actually got like a 10 page contract that was drafted for free that we've continued to use to this day. So that's, you know, legal help can be really, really expensive when you're starting off as a young entrepreneur. And so using the resources you have on campus is always great. My university also had an Institute of Politics and, you know, they had never before supported, I guess like a startup in the same way they might have like one or two, but I kind of just went to them, staff members there with this idea. And, you know, they gave us a couple of thousand dollars and offered mentorship where they would sit down with us every day. And they ended up making connections to public defense agencies and parts of the country that, you know, I personally would have never had access to. And yeah, also my professor. So I had, I was taking a computational linguistics course and a lot of his research was actually focused on African-American vernacular and how to improve the recognition of a lot of machine learning algorithms on underrepresented dialects. And so we, you know, I just by showing up as at his office hours, I was able to get a lot of value for the business itself. So basically what I'll say is that there's just so many untapped resources on a university campus. And yeah, it's really just up to you to really utilize them. One last thing, you know, we're selling to public defense agencies and it might be like, it might seem weird. I had no idea, you know, how to get in touch with someone in the local city government. We just showed up. We literally just showed up and took things from there. And if you really want to make a business happen, I think we'll probably get into this a little bit more in the customer discovery aspect of things, but just show up and you'll be surprised at how receptive people tend to be. Definitely, just taking that first step, the first act fund we like to think is one way that we can empower you to show up and do the work. And so maybe Bindi over to you kind of reflecting on, I think your position is a little bit different. It's, I believe Vanessa, Dave, she, Yolkendi had their ideas and their genesis, perhaps earlier on in their academic and undergrad or during a master's program, you're doing a PhD. And can you maybe talk a little bit about how that has affected how you're approaching this with your colleagues? Yeah, definitely. So as you know, these guys, Dave, she, Vanessa, Yolkendi, they came up with their companies pre-pandemic. Mine sort of was born because of the pandemic. And as a PhD student, I'm constantly reading a lot of research papers, research articles. I'm a student in computational biology. So I'm constantly looking at a lot of new developments in that field. And this is how the idea for early breast cancer detection came to me just because I was reviewing some literature online. And then this past summer, me and a bunch of my friends who are now part of the team, we ended up losing our jobs and internships because of the pandemic. And we felt that we really wanted to tackle tackle an issue, a really significant problem. And this is why we joined forces. So I have been really, I would have been very active in participating in hackathons as an undergraduate student. And this is how I met my co-founders and the rest of my team members. So we've all been known to participate in hackathons. And this is where the idea of social entrepreneurship was first introduced to me through these hackathons. I attended a healthcare hack. And I saw the variety of ideas in healthcare. And this is sort of what motivated me. And I felt sort of confident that if I did submit this proposal, we can get chosen and we can actually get this started. And then once I joined forces, there's five other engineers working with me. We ended up talking to a couple of biomedical professors at our school. And then they were very willing to hear us out, listen to the technology we're trying to develop and help us with the research. For example, help us acquire hardware and medical equipment that is necessary to build our device. And on top of that, I did a lot of research as to what the school of business at my university is offering. So I had no idea that there were a lot of pipelines in place for student and entrepreneurs. So there's an organization called ReVenture at my campus and they basically help early stage female founders get started and get their business off the ground. And I had no idea that was open to somebody like me. So I just went and I just spoke to them. I exchanged a couple of emails with them, did some Zoom calls with them and they were very accommodating. So like they, if she said they were immediately helping us draft a contract and NDA, a lot of other things teaching us how to file for provisional patents, things like that. So the school has been very useful and just by participating in hackathons, that's how I came to find my group of team members. That's so inspiring to hear how you were able to carve your own path and when that opportunity that you had vanished and really taking advantage of one step at a time and building something up from scratch. And so Vanessa, I know we wanted to go to you as well to share a little bit more about some of the very specific things that maybe propelled you as a student coming into the work that you're doing now with Social Cipher. Yeah, happy to. So I think that while my two co-founders or two of my co-founders were probably the biggest sort of asset and helps to me when we were first getting started. So I had known them from, we were all coincidentally on the same freshman orientation trip before college even started. And then three years later at the end of our junior year, we sort of decided to come together. One of my co-founders, Anastasia, was actually working in the same neuroscience lab as I was. And then Amy, who was my CFO, we actually had done a bunch of different pitch events for things like the Holt Prize. And there was also this Intel Innovation competition. I went to Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. And so there were a lot of just sort of competitions opportunities to try to pitch and kind of hone those business skills. Because I mean, going into college, the only knowledge I had of entrepreneurship was like Shark Tank. And I really didn't know anything else about it. And I just did not think it was for me and that it was meant for me. But I think that in college that we do actually have a center for social entrepreneurship that I think started the year that I started social cipher. And that kind of got me into the idea of, oh, okay, there's a way I could do this for social good. Because I think that when I was first starting social cipher, I thought that it would, the only way that it would be an impactful venture is if it were just like a white paper, just pure research project and that's it. Because that's kind of the world that I was in. But no, there are ways to sort of blend science and industry and kind of bring those paths together. And so that was something big that I learned. Yeah, I'd say those were the sort of the biggest resources for me. Perfect, thanks so much. I wanna touch on one of the big themes of this conference which is really building new opportunities for technology students. I think the whole premise of public interest technology in a sense at least from the perspective of our team here at Coding it Forward is traditionally tech students feel like they have very narrow paths into what a career might look like. It's big tech, you'll can do you mention consulting, it's finance, it's these big industries that you're after a year attract a disproportionate percentage of not just kind of college students as a whole but technology students specifically. And each of you have paved your own path that you've kind of broken out of that paradigm after you graduated. And I know that's a big leap but how do you go from the comfort of a college campus where you feel supported in so many ways and shapes to kind of taking that step into the unknown when you know maybe you had an opportunity whether it was in finance or in tech or elsewhere where you wouldn't have any or much of that uncertainty. And so I don't know, you'll Kendi it sounds like you made that decision a couple of years ago when you graduated from Babson what was going through your mind when you did that? Yeah, I know, I wish it was a rational thought but it wasn't, it's what they say as cheesy as the sound, it's a fire, it's a fire, it's a moment that makes you wanna do something now. And for me, that moment was in July 6th of 2016, it was another murder of another black man at the hands of the police at this time out of Bound Rouge. I mentioned I'm from Ferguson where now it's infamously known for the murder of Michael Brown which is also close to my heart. And I had that happen again on my way to work and I was in tears for weeks in and out but no one at the office knew what I was experiencing. And then when I knew I cannot take another day of just going in into an environment that doesn't really get me. And then Michael found her in that of having similar experiences as the nation talked about folks that were undocumented as legal aliens and having that same feeling from the personal side and wanting to do something about it. And so for us, it was less of a choice. It was more of a duty that we felt that we had. In terms of that transition, we got lucky because there was an accelerator right after graduation that our college hosted. So the summer felt safe, it felt like we were still in school and we just used that comfort to build as many relationships as possible before going into the world as adults and then leveraging that existing network to take us to the next place in our business. It seems like Chris's power went out so maybe we can continue just answering the questions until he's back. Anyone like to go next? Yeah, let's go. How was it for the rest of you kind of transitioning from the environment to the real world per se? I can speak on that. I would say, yeah, so I graduated two years ago in 2018 and it was a very scary transition. For me, I had thought, yeah, as I mentioned previously that it would be a research or a passion project and that was all it would be. And I came from a single parent household, Mexican-American household and one where I was a first generation college student. So for me, I thought it was my responsibility to go get a researcher consulting job that would get me a steady high salary so that I could just go out and support my family. And so I had the idea and the thought that that would be it for me, that I would stop social cypher as soon as I graduated and get serious, right? But I was surprised because I still, like Yukendi was mentioning, like I felt something within me that it was very much my duty and my responsibility to keep going with this for all of the autistic youth that were feeling the same way that I was. And I was very conflicted. But I think what finally tipped it over, the edge was number one, I ended up having this very heartfelt talk with my mom where she was actually like, no, I think, yes, it may be, maybe you feel that it's your duty to do this, but at the same time, like this is you are young, you are onto something and this is something that is more than just you. It's bigger than us and you need to do it. And so I think it was through that family support and through the support of my coworkers and friends that helped keep me going. And I think that I also got very lucky. I got into an incubator right after college and so, or right after graduating. So that kind of saved me for the next six months and supported me and my co-founders to work on our venture so we could raise a little bit of funding through grants and fellowships, but scary. Definitely, definitely scary. I'm gonna just jump in, apologies, my power just went out. So you're not gonna be able to see me but I am dialing in on my phone. This is technology at work. But I think we'd love to pivot this conversation a little bit. I think in one of our previous conversations, we were touching on what entrepreneurship is kind of the basis of what it means to be a technologist and a lot of people coming into school, whether you're at a school that's known for entrepreneurship like Babson perhaps or a school that's maybe more in the ivory tower, that entrepreneurship can be what you see on Shark Tank. It's how do I make the Uber for dog walking? How do I make this or that? But each of you has come to really address a really specific issue and would love to hear how you came on that journey. Was it you're just kind of in the shower one day and the idea struck you? A couple of you have talked about how this is really a lived experience that prompted you to dive into this work. And so talk a little bit about how you maybe came to the specific problem and understand how you could add value. Dave, maybe if you could start. Yeah, definitely. I would say for me, there were many, many months where all I was doing was just reading about criminal justice, listening to podcasts about criminal justice, watching documentaries. And honestly, it got to a point where there was a lot of rage and a lot of frustration that was building inside just because over and over again, it seemed like the people who were in the positions to actually make a difference, for some reason they just didn't get it. And it was, yeah. So I just reached a point where it's just something that I knew I had to do. I think Michelle Alexander's book in particular is something that I say as being very influential for me personally. She wrote a couple of pages about the public defense system in America and just how entirely we've refused to invest in and resource public defenders with the resources that they need to adequately represent their clients. So that just stuck with me for a long time. And it was just kind of this idea at the back of my head. It was not a solution in any way, shape, or form. And I think that's one of the things that a lot of students in college might get wrong, that they need to have the perfect solution to the problems they care about. You might care about climate change, but it's gonna be really difficult for you to come up with the solution that's gonna make lives easier for hundreds of millions of people just through your lived individual experience. And so what me and Leslie did was, as I mentioned earlier, we just showed up at the public defender's office and it was scary because we didn't know like exactly what we were doing there. There were like guards who were like, are you here for a hearing? What's going on? They were very suspicious of us. But we just showed up and started having a conversation with someone whose contact we had randomly gotten. And in conversations with them, one thing that I'll say is being a college student is a huge asset. People don't doubt your intentions. They don't think you're trying to sell them anything. And I think we tried to make it very, very clear that we were just here to help. And so that's honestly how we got started. And a good way in is to say that you're gonna do all of your work for free because when you're starting off, the most important thing is to find a partner. To find a pilot partner who's gonna give you that user insight, who's gonna give you that feedback, who's gonna be a thought partner. But unfortunately, you're not gonna be able to charge anything at that point. It's gonna take a lot of groundwork, a lot of time. So that was really our journey. We found a supporter within Chicago's Public Defense Agency and really just took our journey from there. No, thank you so much for sharing. And diving deep on a particular topic and bridging, I think one of the key themes of public interest technology that we keep coming back to is how interdisciplinary it is. It's not just how do I make this 10% more efficient or how do I make this kind of less computationally complex but it's how do I bridge that in your case to criminal justice and Bindi your case to kind of biomedicine, Yolkendi to economic mobility and thinking about the interdisciplinary nature. I don't know if Bindi, Yolkendi, Vanessa, either any of you have any reflections on kind of problem scoping and how you came to where you are now? I definitely, I have some, I guess. So I think for me, it was more of an, I think because I am from, like many of us honestly, like I'm from the very community that I'm serving. And so a lot of the time, of course we're always interviewing users every step of the way and making sure we're co-developing because the autism spectrum is vast and the autistic experience is very different. But I think that a lot of when it came to understanding the problem, that was quite an evolution in itself because it took, for me, it actually took a lot of unlearning of stereotypes that I had been told of autism for years and things that I believed about myself. And it wasn't until I was constantly interviewing other autistic youth that I realized, oh, I actually have the wrong idea about where this product should head and what it should do. And I think in the beginning it was a lot, I believed that the problem was a lot about, oh, if autistic people had a better idea of how to better interact with neurotypical people then that's the solution. And I thought that it was about, in a way I thought it was about sort of like fixing my previous self when in reality it was never about that. It was never about this idea of fixing an autistic person to conform or to be a different way. It was actually much more of an energy about autistic people and neurodiverse folks being able to advocate for themselves, to be able to get the conditions and accommodations they need to be able to thrive. So less about that conformity and trying to change themselves. And rather about getting society to understand a little bit more about the neurodiverse population. So that's really what changed that product for, oh my gosh, for the better, because it really is about that social emotional learning in your own way that self-advocacy and embracing your identity. Yeah, I would add that had a similar experience as well the beginning in terms of like trying to fix just everything that was wrong for me and trying to fix it. And it was tough, right? Because you can't build a business around trying to be good at everything or try to reinvent the wheel in that way. So as always get grounding our team on what are our strengths, what are our superpowers? What are we meant to contribute? There's other companies, other potential collaborators that are out there also trying to solve the same problem. And the good thing about being in the social impact space is ideally it's less competitive nature we're all trying to hit the same goal. So it's about us trying to test different angles of many, many different solutions. So it's always I would just emphasize folks to just think about what you're good at but also what you love to do. I'm sure you wanna have the perfect solution but just support your friend that's building a similar company. We don't all have to do it ourselves. Having said that I do encourage folks to think about building equitable solutions. So for us we know with employment and economic mobility it is about health, it is about food, it is about education. It is about financial education, childcare, everything is intertwined in the world of employment and having a job and that journey to get there requires many interventions especially amidst COVID where we have a pandemic and a lot of people are getting laid off. It's given us an opportunity to be more intentional of our solution. So now we're having a more holistic program model that we're putting out where we know we want our students to get access to jobs but we know they also need access to wifi. They might not have it out in technology. They might need access to food because now they're not going to their school cafeteria. They might need access to emotional wellbeing therapy. How can we provide those wraparound support to get to that ultimate goal which is economic mobility? So you can still be intentional and be equitable but you don't have to do everything. There's this other organizations that you can partner with. Awesome, thanks so much Vanessa and Yolkendi. I do want to recognize where we are time wise we're about 15 minutes until the end of our time here. So I will encourage everyone if you're following along we've got four incredible panelists any questions about how they built their companies how they got to where they are anything that they've mentioned this far. I would encourage you to ask your questions either using the chat function or the Q and A either those buttons should be located at the bottom of your Zoom screen and we'll be sure to get to that after this next question for me. And so one of the themes around public interest technology and especially this university network that New America is leading is how do we bring more universities into the space? And I think over the course of this conversation a number of you have mentioned you benefited from the Center for Social Entrepreneurship on campus the Institute of Politics I know coding it forward when we launched we were incubated by an innovation lab by the Institute of Politics very similar to all of you and so we might have a few faculty deans administrators who are participating today are viewing the recording afterwards and I'd like to ask each of you what would you say to deans and administrators about how they could better support the work of public interest technologies but especially public interest social impact entrepreneurs on their campuses if you had 15 minutes would say your university president provost or dean what would you say? Bindi I don't know can we start with you? Sure, yes. So I think the first thing I would tell them is I would tell them about Pitch UN and the work Pitch UN is doing this was the first time I heard about Pitch UN and so making shedding light on the work this organization is doing would be great and sort of convincing the dean to collaborate with Pitch UN and other universities that are a part of this cohort. The other thing I would add is ensure that the pipelines that are already in place are easily identifiable by students so it should not be difficult for student entrepreneurs to be able to get the help they need. There should be as few obstacles as possible. So by that I mean if someone wants to start a business or a research project reduce the activation energy required to get started allow them to hit the ground running and help them out with funding, providing mentors, providing a workspace where they can design and build. So yeah, that is what I would add and on top of that I think one more thing I wanna add is as an international student myself there's limited resources available to international students. There's a lot of, I've seen a lot of Pitch competitions and a lot of online accelerators, incubators but they are not open to international students so this is something I would encourage the dean or provost to look into that. Internationals have a lot of ideas especially because of their diverse background. So put a policy in place where internationals also get the help that they need. That's a really important perspective. I think it's easy sometimes to get stuck in very US focused work and while we have a lot of issues that we are working through here as a nation, as a society recognizing that there's so much work to be done globally. And I think Bindi, your efforts with Early Bird are a really fantastic example of that. Dave, maybe if you could chime in if you had 15 minutes with the president of UChicago what would you say? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think so of course there's like the tangibles the logistical, the administrative stuff the funding, the legal support, things like that but I think overall one thing that I'll say is that in my experience a lot of undergraduate entrepreneurship is really focused around pitching an idea and scoping it out figuring out how it's gonna become a billion dollar business how their go to market channels and all of that when in fact at that early stage what young entrepreneurs need to be doing is just getting out and becoming the domain experts on the users, on the community that they wanna serve and hopefully working towards a prototype. And so I've seen a big detachment between the types of resources that are available towards getting your financials up and running and a very nice slide deck and everything versus the things that really make a difference and are gonna prepare people to actually make that leap once they graduate. And so yeah, resources on how to find a technical co-founder if they aren't computer science students themselves would be critical just opening their network up to community organizations that someone might not know exist but could be a great pilot use case for an individual and just giving that really tailored mentorship on how to go from an idea to an initial prototype to something that's actively delivering value. So I think that's kind of more of a philosophical approach but in my experience, I think that would be most useful. Yolkendi, how about you? Yeah, I mean, it's to bring more equity to the forefront, it still sucks that only we're still 30 black women getting VC funding over a million dollars. Latina women even lower numbers as a actual Latina. I don't know where I fit in. So just thinking through how to change the design because if you're preparing students for a real world but you're not doing anything to really reshape the world that they're entering we're really putting our students in a bad position, right? And when thinking about Generation Z, 48% are people of color. So if we're not thinking about how we're actually gonna help entrepreneurs from different backgrounds, we're leaving them at a very grand disservice. And then I spent a lot of time with our product helping young people that are getting into more traditional corporate jobs, get their social capital. Well, the same problem exists for entrepreneurs. It's still much more about who you know. So how we connecting students on with a healthy network of not just mentors but sponsors and champions that are gonna put their names and get them in front of the opportunities they need to advance their business. So I would say equity and then more social capital as we think about entrepreneurship curriculums. That's great. I think equity at the forefront equal opportunity. Sorry, yes. Hopefully you can hear me once again. My, now the internet is not working again. But sorry, Vanessa, I don't know if you had a chance if you had 15 minutes with president or dean of your university, what would you encourage them to prioritize? Yeah, so I agree with what everyone has said so far. I think to add to that just with tangible more or some more tangible examples too is just being able to, I think there are a lot of students myself included when I was in college that needed to work jobs to be able to provide the for themselves and such. And I think that, you know, pursuing another extracurricular like entrepreneurship even though you have a great idea and such it's difficult. And so providing opportunities to be able to do that for course credit or as a paid internship. So, you know, creating the opportunity to work on an entrepreneurship project as independent study, including on your coursework is a huge thing that could be helpful. I also think that having advisors, both alumni and faculty that can be, you know, put into some type of database or directory with, you know, availability that is there for specific expertise in industry in different industries is super helpful. And I think also for me, I, you know, I was a major to neuroscience and physics. I didn't have any type of business background or understanding of basic business principles. So having a basic startup business curriculum to learn from, going back to what Dave, she said about prioritizing, you know, talking to your users, becoming an industry expert and talk and solidly knowing your problem and solution and making that the priority. I also very much agree with human-centered design is very helpful for that. So having, you know, human-centered design sort of course or a basic business course also super helpful. For sure. So for presidents, deans, administrators who are listening and I think a lot of homework on your end from prioritizing equity, putting real resources behind it so students can spend their time getting course credit or not having to work a second job. And I think bridging that barrier between you as a university and kind of being siloed off from the rest of the real world or presumably the users and the audience of any public interest entrepreneurship are lying and making sure that that line is not one that is dividing but instead that you are encouraging students to bridge across. So with about five minutes left, we do have one question that came in from Katina. Thank you so much. And I think on a very related line and a fitting place to end our conversation here. If you had to change one thing about higher education as it relates to public interest technology opportunities maybe this is from your own perspective or what you've seen from folks in the community. What would that be? I don't know if anyone has anything that comes to mind first. Well, I think this was kind of said in the last question but each more about the history of the systemic issues we're dealing with if we're gonna be doing responsible technology technology for the public interest we need to really understand fundamentally what the issues are so then we can build better solutions that are actually sustainable and that are actually equitable. And I think right now, I think I took a critical race studies course not everyone has to take one yet. That way you can understand more about our justice system. Everybody should be taking more around health and mental health and learning and understanding the way our education system has been built and that has not been built for everyone to learn the way that they should. So I think even before getting to the business part we can do a lot of work on understanding the problem. So just really just equating what my panelists have shared already. Yeah, I'd like to go ahead Devshi. Just really briefly, it's exactly right. I think me personally, I grew up in the safest city in this country and in a place where I personally have not grown up with very many interactions with the police whatsoever. The fact that now I'm working on a solution in the justice system is entirely because it was so accessible for me to be able to take a human rights and sociological class on the history of policing. And having access to those types of conversations I think it's so important because one of the things that I often see is that the people who have the tools to really implement a lot of cool solutions and the people who have a very deep and nuanced understanding of the issues at hand for some reason, those conversations seem to be happening in very different rooms in very different environments. And so what Bill Kendi said, I just wanted to echo that a thousand percent. Yeah, I want to quickly add to that as well. So in the healthcare system, there's a lot of bias, especially for people of color minorities, if you're not from a wealthy background. And a lot of the medical technology that we see right now in the healthcare system has been developed for a very specific group of people and it does not serve the rest of the global community. So this is why I was inspired with our idea because I have seen based on statistics that a lot of people of color and minorities face worse patient outcomes. So universities and colleges should have classes where they provide these statistics and the history behind how other communities have suffered and how they're not being served by the healthcare system that's currently in place. Fantastic, thank you everyone. And I think that's a really important point to end this conversation on today's for us as public interest technologists, whether we're going to go into industry, you're gonna set your own path, much like the four women on this panel have, recognizing that technology does not exist in a vacuum and understanding the historical injustices and reckoning with those as frameworks that we all operate within and seeing opportunities in there perhaps to use technology to make a world of better, equitable and fairer place. So I wanna thank Vanessa, Bindi, Yolkendi and Dave Shea for your insightful comments today. Thank you everyone for navigating my two power outages that have occurred in the span of 20 minutes. But a really fantastic conversation would encourage folks to continue to stay in touch with the work of our incredible panelists. You can find them on Twitter, on LinkedIn and elsewhere, definitely really inspiring work. So thank you everyone so much and hope you have a fantastic rest of the conference and a wonderful weekend. Thank you, Cruz. Thank you all. Thanks. Thank you. Friends, if our next set of panelists would unmute themselves and also turn on their video, we'll get started with the next panel here very shortly.