 I have to tell you guys a story. A couple of weekends ago, somebody asked me to DJ New Year's Eve party. And I've never DJed before. So this guy was like, no, you got this, you got great taste of music, and I used to be a musician, so you can do this. So I was like, alright, so I go to DJ this party, it was New Year's Eve, there's like 400 people at this party, and I spent, because I'm an obsessive compulsive person, I spent like maybe four days like finding songs and building this library and putting together this playlist. They were just going to be so sick, yo. First it's going to be this thing, then there's this song, and it was going to be like, oh, and then I play this song, and it just had the whole thing worked out, and I ran through it like 40 times, and it was going to be so good. And then I got on stage in the main stage of the thing, and then people wanted to fight me because they hated the music. And I was like, oh, I guess, I guess like what I thought was going to be cool in my bedroom wasn't necessarily what was cool like in real life. So I hope that doesn't happen here. I made this in my bedroom as well. Same chair, so it might be cursed. I just want to start off by saying that my name is Carvel Wallace, and I don't belong in tech, and my goal, if I die happy, is that everyone in tech is someone who doesn't belong in tech. And it's because I believe that there really is no such thing as tech, and that's what I'm going to talk about tonight. But I also want to let you guys know that everything I'm going to say here tonight is something that I'm not entirely sure is true. I think it's true, but I couldn't be wrong. That's important to me because I'm the kind of person with a very low tolerance for BS, including my own of which I have a lot. And one of the ways in which I see BS propagated is that there's this basic belief that anyone who has a microphone is saying something important. And you can just hand a microphone to any jerk and then that person could be talking. And let's not think that just because I have a microphone I know what I'm talking about. For example, how many of you have ever seen the Tumblr, this is not an insight. Anyone aware of that? That's my favorite Tumblr of all time. This is that, you know how when you're in a conference and you're like networking and stuff and you're tweeting and someone's up there saying stuff and then you start tweeting stuff that they said and you're like, here's this awesome insight about tech that this person said. Well this is not an insight, it's a collection of tech quotes from Social Media Week in London where people tweet things that they feel are important. And for example, this one says, how do you find bloggers? Twitter and Instagram are the places to look. This is not an insight. This person is literally saying if you want to find bloggers look on the computer now. But that struck this moment at the time and this one says, ideas, imagination and digital strategy don't cost you anything. Get people talking about something you're doing. And so what they're saying is if you want to make a splash on social media, do something that people like. This is not an insight. This one says that by finding the leader, you can become the leader. This is not an insight, actually what's the name of the people that tweet this stuff? I don't want to do that to them because they were feeling it in that moment. But my point is that I just want you to know that just because of the people who said this stuff got paid to stand in front of someone with a microphone and treat it as an expert, I just want to say think of all the good stuff you can do because you're probably brighter than everyone who spoke at this thing. This actually is an insight. Theo Jensen who's one of my favorite people of all time said the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds. He was talking about art versus engineering, but to me that has to do with the walls between anything and everything. My whole life is about walls and that's what I want to talk about today, how to deal with walls, how to break them or more specifically how to unsee them in the first place. Anything I don't like, I just pretend like it doesn't exist. Pretty much my strategy. This is me. This is a picture of me in fourth grade. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself and why I don't belong in tech. I was born to a single teenage mother in the 1970s and we were poor and homeless for a long period of time and I struggled through life and I went to 11 different schools and we lived in a car and we got evicted and all this stuff happened and I didn't know what to do with my life until I was about 14 and I discovered theater and when I discovered theater I started hanging out with people who dressed in weird ways and here you see a picture of me involved in some ridiculous production in New York City when I was about 16, 17 years old and I guess I felt like there needed to be more of me because I'm like twice as big now as I was when that happened. But that just means there's more of me to love. I continued through my life but because I grew up poor with a lot of class consciousness, it was hard for me when I graduated from college to do something like being an artist and so I got a job and what my experience was is that if you're a black man this is in New York City and you have a degree it's going to be a man and you're a halfway decent human being it's only a matter of time before someone comes to you and says can you work with the youth and so I did I did that I went work with the youth and the first place I got a job at is this building right here it's the now defunct Spofford detention facility for wayward youth in the Bronx New York my first job out of college was to work with the young kids that were locked up and I was about three years older than them and I was terrible at it but the thing is I showed up to it every day and that actually counts because you can be terrible at something and then if you keep doing it every day unless you're a complete idiot you're going to get better and that's what happened to me I got better at it I got better at working with young people I got better at being an employee and mostly what I struggled with was how to get better at dealing with nonprofits this began a 15-year career of dealing with nonprofits and social organizations and I struggled through that in the meantime I try to figure out who I was as a person you know I got married at this big wedding and that happened and I had some kids and that happened and as you can see I didn't clean my bathtub that was something that didn't happen I didn't clean the bathtub though but this whole time that I was doing this I stayed working in nonprofits even though I had other stuff I wanted to do I was playing music I was writing other stuff but the only thing that I could really do for work was stay in these nonprofits because I had to pay the bills and and the whole time I was there I kept asking myself this one question which is what is the biggest problem we're facing and how can I fix it how can I be a part of it and it never felt to me like what we were doing in nonprofits was actually fixing a problem it felt like we had agreed on a strategy that was probably gonna work not so good but we're gonna keep doing it because that was just giving us money to do it and I couldn't wrap my head around why that was happening and so I did that for about 15 years and I ended up getting swept into tech because I live in the Bay Area and I knew someone that worked in tech and she knew I was like a writer and was good with words and had been like you know dealing with all kinds of people for years and so I got a job as a community manager at a startup and that was my first tech job and you know it's been a few years now and I'm like the only person I know who has a full career in youth nonprofit and a full career in tech at the same time and so people always ask me what's the difference between tech and nonprofit how do these two places compare and contrast and for me it's a very important question and I'll tell you the differences I'm gonna lay them out here the differences is absolutely nothing that is the difference between tech and nonprofit there's no difference whatsoever and that's an important thing see in nonprofit we believe that we're doing the good work and in tech we believe at least a nonprofit we believe that they were doing the terrible work and in tech we believe that we were doing the smart work and the people in our profit were doing the stupid work but the problem was we saw this division and in my experience there is no division or if there is we have to unsee it is incumbent upon us to unsee it and I'm gonna talk a little bit today about why I've noticed there are five beliefs that that are behind what people think is the separation between tech and nonprofit belief number one is that doing genuine social good is at odds with revenue doing genuine social good is at odds with revenue I'm not an economist but I believe that money is made in the following way I make something to solve a problem that you have you like what I make and it solves your problem and you're willing to give me money for it and the amount of money you give me for it is more than the amount of money I spend to make it that's it I think that's how money is made so so if you walk into any nonprofit any of the youth nonprofits that I've worked at three of them are within a one mile radius of this building that we're at if you walk into any of them and you say do you have a problem to any of the staff members will say yeah it's a do you want your young people to succeed and get better and go to school and be independent and be healed and feel good and they'll say yes and they'll say do you really want that like would you pay for that say yeah I would pay for that then you say well it's what you're doing now making it happen and everyone will go well we're doing the best we can but it's not really good enough that's the nonprofit mantra we're doing the best we can but it's not really good enough can you imagine walking into McDonald's corporate offices and being like hey you guys are you kind of selling a lot of hamburgers and then being like well we're doing the best we can but we're not really so no they're gonna be like yes we're selling so many hamburgers we sell like 400 million hamburgers the time you ask that question right now right but in tech and nonprofit we say we're doing the best we can but it's a hard fight it's not good enough and if you went to the same the corporate offices of that same nonprofit the administrators and you said look do you want to heal the kids do you want the youth to feel better do you want to solve this problem they'll say yes and say would you pay money for it say we're already paying money for it we've got the people and we're keeping the lights on and the HR people and we're doing this and you say is it working and once they put down the brochure and all their song and dance stuff they'll say to be honest with you we're doing the best we can but it's not good enough and so that to me says that there's a market opportunity there if you could actually solve a problem that people are emotional about they'll pay for it no one's even emotional about hamburgers actually I get emotional it's one of twice as big as I was but for the most part people don't get emotional about hamburgers and they'll pay money to have their hamburger problem solved so imagine how much money people pay if you could solve their social problems as a side note one of the reasons why nonprofit continues to deliver a product that doesn't work and still make the money doing it is that if you think of any product that you know about Kleenex iPhones Miracle Whip Instagram whatever one of the things that happens there is that the product is made in such a way that the people who use it like it if they don't like it they don't pay for it I'm not here to flag wait for capitalism however at the core in its purest sense this one particular thing about capitalism that says if you like it you'll pay for it if you don't you won't is actually kind of democratic and populist and so when the product solves your problem you'll pay money for it now if you're a young person and you don't like the employment program or you don't like the social services program or you don't like the food stamp program or you don't like that any program what can you do can you not pay for it no because you're not paying for it in the first place so the people who are paying for it are the government's and it's solving a government's problem the government has a problem which is that I need people to know that I did some awesome stuff during my administration your nonprofits like yeah I got an answer for you I can solve your problem right your foundation your your hundred million dollar foundation says I need my shareholders and my board members to feel like I'm doing something awesome with this money that's my problem your nonprofit says I got a solution for you we're designing solutions for those people because they're the payers but the young people are not the payers that is the fundamental problem with the way nonprofit is structured the user is not the payer so we continue to give the user a terrible product we have to change that that's why we have to put down the wall between nonprofit and tech belief number two is that social work is the only way to do something good I know that I'm short of time so I'm not going to go through all these examples you guys heard about Indiegogo Indiegogo can do a lot of things some of them are terrible but some of them are really good this is my favorite Indiegogo campaign in the last two years yeah this is my favorite one I mean this one raised what was it fifty thousand dollars to fight the anti-gay law in Singapore and 18 hours can you imagine raising that kind of money in 18 hours to do that you guys I believe the Twilio is a sponsor of this event if I'm not mistaken right so you guys know that Twilio does the text thing that's sort of set up an interface where you can text something in automatic response they apply it to human trafficking so if you are find yourself as a victim of either sexual or labor human trafficking that you can text and get immediate help without having to pick up a phone and call anyone which is important for your safety my favorite sort of do-good tech project of all time the Detroit water project is anyone ever heard one day someone was reading Atlantic magazine a woman by the name of Tiffany Ashton Bell was reading Atlantic magazine and they said oh look 8,000 Detroit residents about to get their water shut off because they can't afford it and so she built a website over the weekend on rails that allowed people who were who wanted to help by sending five or ten dollars and connected them with people whose water was about to get shut off they raised $300,000 in three days they helped 8,000 people keep their water on this site still continues right if you say the tech can't solve any problems or at least can't do anything halfway decent I percent to you this I wouldn't really be who I was if I didn't plug my own company which is by bossy and what we're trying to do and I don't know whoever do it God I hope if we want you can help us please talk to me we're trying to build an app that has elements of games and social media to assess social emotional health for schools and youth environments I want to take the process of making assessments and asking people young people how they feel and make you feel like a game we know that right now that all this data is being gathered by advertisers in social media about how young people are feeling and that's just going to advertisers but we need the people who really need it are the teachers and the youth workers we want them to have that so what about a product that's fun that's free that's that feels the interface feels lively where people can actually young people can have a sense of being able to communicate their feelings and that we can gather data about how the mood the social mood of like all these youth environments over the course of a week of a day of a month of a year and make better decisions and prove that what we're doing is or isn't working believe number three that tech people are full of shit only concerned with selling snake oil the VCs actually that one's kind of true but that's why we need you because people who sell snake oil the VCs are very useful because they're good at getting VC money and if anyone knows who's ever tried to make something happen you need money and in my first year of tech I worked at a company that raised more money for their app than every nonprofit I worked at for the entire 15 years combined that is insane that's not okay these people are good at raising money put yourself in the line of all that money flying around and have an impact on how it's used nay raise the money yourself and control how it's used where it goes don't leave this make oil salesmen all by themselves they're no better off alone than I am rule number four tech is a wealthy white boys club that can't actually help anyone in marginalized communities tech as a space is really good at something it's really good at developing and iterating on ways to solve problems for people social work and nonprofit is good at something it's good at making sure the problems that are solved are actually helpful to the most number of people in other words I know that dating and booking travel is really important but the amount of creative energy tech has put into solving those problems is wildly disproportionate to their social impact and it's wildly disproportionate to the social impact of other problems like violence racism poverty human trafficking if we could break that level of creativity and problem solving to those issues we might have something you know the app app crawler the website app crawler it's like a search engine for apps so I wanted to app crawler and I just wanted to see how many apps appear for travel and on this slide I showed the screenshot over this is these are there's over 500 that's the most they'll give you there's more than them so then I said well how many apps have been made about dating and they said well there's over 500 and I said that's awesome how many apps have been made that you have the tag equality and they were like oh 12 and I said okay okay well how many apps addressing poverty and they said 13 and then I said well how many apps addressing justice and they said 106 but then it turned out most of them had to do with the justice justice league and something really to a justice league game and if you exclude those it's like three and so I asked you what is a bigger problem dating travel or social equality and justice the reason it's like this is because people are really good at solving problems that they have and they're really bad at solving problems that they don't have here's the insight you can quote from me a problem is best solved by the people that have a problem is best solved and if we don't have the resources to do that we have to get the resources to do that that's why I believe in unseeing the wall between social work tech belief number five is that a career in tech requires that I know how to code I'm gonna tell you guys a story once upon a time a developer's partner sent her to the store with the following instructions get a loaf of bread and if they have eggs get a dozen too so developer came back with 13 gloves of bread you ever want a chance to catch up joke of course is that it's a get a loaf of bread if they have eggs get a dozen too but see the person didn't say get a dozen eggs they just say get a dozen so we heard the joke of course is that when we when we excel at using one part of our brain we become below average at using the others this is true individually thank you and collectively if we get really good at using the part of our brains that for example that make money you become poor using the part of our brains that act with kindness if we get good at using the part of our brains that work quickly we get poor using the part of our brains that represent impact and so this happens individually but collectively our collective brain I like to think of every person as part of one big brain cell and right now the people who need get 13 loaves of bread are like driving they're like running the ship and we need other people to come in there and be like no you only need the one loaf of bread eggs that way we'll have breakfast you'll notice that a long time ago maybe you didn't that a few slides ago I stopped saying the word tech because the promise of this talk is that there's no there's no such thing as tech I would propose that we call it work which is an activity involving mental and physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result what if there was no tech what if there was no nonprofit what if there was no sector for social good right what if there was just work then the focus would be on the ideas out of the people then anyone could feel like they could do anything then the best thinkers for each problem would feel that it was within their power to solve that problem they would not be gated off by an idea that the word is taking place in some other backyard that they don't have the key to we don't play on the same playground then maybe just maybe we stop separating ourselves by who we are we start coming together about what we're trying to do so my suggestion to us is let's get to work thanks a lot