 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online, their virtual. Then I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studios for theCUBE Virtual. We're remotely doing interviews during this COVID crisis. We have our quarantine crew. We're doing our best now for two and a half months getting those stories out. And today is AWS Summit, it's going to continue online. It never ends. It's asynchronous, but more important, let's get the great content. Our next guest, Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel. Great entrepreneur vision with real impact. And this is a story that is super important in my opinion because it's a tech story and it's a social impact story. And you don't have to do one or the other. You can do both these days. This is going to be great. Jimmy, thanks for spending the time with us today. Yeah, John, thanks for having me on the show. So I want to get into the broader entrepreneurship and social impact for us, an entrepreneurial thing, which I think is a total awesome opportunity, but you guys are using AWS for good, Propel, taking me to explain Propel, the company, the things you're working on and what you're passionate about. So at Propel, we're a tech company based in Brooklyn that builds software to help people navigate safety net programs like the food stamp program. There are about 40 million Americans who get their food stamp benefits on a debit card called an EBT card, which looks kind of like a debit card or a credit card you get from a bank. But when we spent time talking to people who use these cards to buy groceries, we actually found that it has kind of a weird quirk, which is that everyone who goes grocery shopping with an EBT card has to call the 1-800 number on the back of the card first, because that's how they can check the balance. And if you try to check out at the grocery store, you don't have enough left on your card, you get into this really embarrassing experience of having to decide do you want three apples or two and trying to figure out how to get your balance to be appropriate for the amount of food that you're trying to buy. And so we actually found that this pain point of needing to call the 1-800 number to go check your balance on your EBT card is a really common one that's felt by all 40 million of these Americans who use the food stamp program to put food in the table. So what we built a propel is really simple. It's a mobile banking app for the EBT card, the same way that you have a mobile banking app for your banking product, that we've created a digital free app that allows someone who gets their food stamp benefits on an EBT card to check their balance, to see their transaction history and more broadly actually to improve their overall financial health. And men's also the quality of life, knowing, confidence, whether they're, whatever they're going through, that's something they're going to feel about as well. Talk about the tech piece of it. Obviously this is an example of something that I've been really riffing on for many years now and just trying to get people's attention to is that cloud computing changes the game on social impact because the time to get to the value which is well talked about in entrepreneurial circles. I got funded, I got product market fit applies to anything. And this is really spawning a new generation of entrepreneurship. This is a real thing and Amazon does that. What's your experience with AWS in this area? Well, our experience over the last month and a half in the middle of the COVID crisis, I think is really driven home the value of AWS for our business, which is that, at the start of COVID we had about two million people who use the fresh EBT app on a monthly basis to manage their existing SNAP benefits. Unfortunately, as the economy has worsened and people's usage of safety net services has increased, so has our user base. And AWS is really key to us being able to scale our services to be able to help an extra million people start using the fresh EBT app essentially over the last few weeks. And so to your point about infrastructure and scale and technology, for us it's really been about, what are the best practices in the consumer tech world and how do we apply those to help people that are lower income and generally deal with experiences that are less good? You know, I talk about that, it's something that I've been really talking a lot about and maybe I'm a little bit older, but the younger entrepreneurs, they love to be agile and everything else. But what you're doing and what you've done is really have agility. But when you have these hard times, everyone uses the word pivot, which I hate that word pivot. It means to me like it didn't work out, I'm going to pivot to something else. But to me, I think what's available when you're using the cloud, like what your position you're in, you built an app for a use case, you had product market fit, this COVID crisis becomes a tailwind for you because actually your app helps people that are in need, but it also might give you the opportunity to do other things really fast, which means jump on an opportunity, not necessarily pivot. I mean, is that tacking pivot? What's the, it's kind of semantics, but it's a cultural mindset. And I want to get your thoughts Jimmy on how you see your business changing where you can actually take what you've built on the trajectory and the kinds of scale, the steep learnings, and then also take new territory down, whether it's a new service, helping people in need, because that's the mission. Now you have flexibility. Talk about how you think about that. And what are some of your opportunities that you see? Well, the reality is that financial life for people who are low income and using safety net services, changes rapidly. And there's no better example of this over the last few decades than the COVID crisis over the past few months. People who are using food stamp benefits have had really an unprecedented challenge over the last few months. It's been tough for everyone, but our survey data shows that for people who were getting food stamp benefits and working in early March, 86% of them have now lost some source of income or have had their hours cut. And so I think, you know, one of the things we're starting to hear from our users is just the unprecedented type of need that they're facing and that, you know, they are turning to apps like the FreshEBT app to help them to navigate this particular crisis, to answer questions like, what are the nutrition programs through the government that are available to me? How do I get a stimulus check? What about the unemployment program? And just what are the full set of safety net resources that are available to help someone like me to get back on my feet and to make it through this unprecedented financial hardship? So to your point about pivoting, you know, it's not necessarily, I don't think about pivoting. I think of it as like, as responding to the real changes in user need. Yeah, seizing opportunity on your position of your value proposition. Jimmy, talk about the company that your company launched, a new service, Project 100. What is that about? Can you take a minute to explain that? Project 100 is a partnership between Propel, Stanford Children and the Give Directly team, which is the other two are nonprofits that are focused on different aspects of serving people that are in financial need. And it is a partnership that we've created to raise a hundred million dollars to be able to make cash transfers to a hundred thousand people who use the Fresh EBT app in our in financial need. So Propel's role in this is that we, because our app helps people that are getting their food stamp benefits, we can certify that this is a person who's in financial need and uses essentially the status on the food stamp program as a proxy for this is a family who really needs help to get through this crisis. We've been fortunate to have a lot of donors who are very generous and interested in finding ways to support people that are going through these types of financial hardships. And so we've been fortunate to raise already about 70 million dollars through this program. But I think we still have a ways to go to reach this hundred million dollar goal where we really think that that is what is a material impact on helping low income Americans to weather this financial shock. Well, I really appreciate what you're doing and thanks for what you're doing. It's great. I think it's a great opportunity got great product market fit and you got a lot of horizontal opportunities to go after as you're just more successful. I also want to get your thoughts real quick on tech entrepreneurship. It's been very glamorous over the past couple of decades to be an entrepreneur, but ultimately it's about creating value. And I think you've seen with the cloud a lot of opportunities that aren't the traditional, you know, go public, build raise a bunch of money really either for profit or nonprofit really highly social impact situations. This is a growing field and you're doing it. Can you share what you're seeing and what advice you could give folks who are really thinking about having a mission driven opportunity? Well, I think that people solve the problems that they understand. And that traditionally tech entrepreneurs understand a very specific set of challenges because the demographics of tech entrepreneurs are a smaller set than the overall population in the United States, right? Tech entrepreneurs tend to be male. They tend to have a college education. They tend to live in cities like San Francisco or New York City and they tend to have a lot of money. But the reality is that's not the demographic of people who use technology in the United States. And so if people solve the problems that they understand who's going to solve the problems that people on food stamps understand if there are not a lot of people who are on food stamps that are starting their own software companies. And so I think the power of tools like Amazon web services and the cloud that allow people to be able to create new technology in a record amount of time and scale that is the ability to democratize who gets to build the technology that people use, right? It means both being able to help people who traditionally would not have the resources to start a new type of organization, to start a new one. But it also means being able to help companies like mine identify these types of challenges to learn about the needs that people who are low income have and be able to scale a product. Phenomenal mission propelled Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel. If you're designing a product or art or anything you got to know who you're designing it for and great point and people solve problems that they understand. Thank you for what you're doing. Congratulations and continued success. We'll keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the virtual cube. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, John. I'm John Furrier here in the cube for the cube virtual covers of AWS Summit Online a virtual conference that's gone away to virtual. So is the cube until further notice. We're going to do our part in our studio in Palo Alto, the studio in Boston, checking in with folks and getting the updates. We're all in this together. And I'm John Furrier for the cube. Thanks for watching.